NEW Year – NEW focus.

And a New Years Resolution: get a demo on Steam.

We’ve been stuck indoors with bone chilling temps outside, so its led to a lot of cabin fever, very little dev time and short tempers. Not to mention a case of shingles that left me sore and irritable. What kept me going was a nice big batch of home brewed ales and the promise that school would resume. It hasn’t helped that with this horrific weather, my hibernation reflex has kicked in, making my usual early mornings tougher than ever to face.

BUT – what dev time I have been granted has been spent figuring out things that DON’T work. Yay.

I’ve determined that my old way of animating my character is less problematic than using Anima 2D. Booper would keep moving (and animating) even when the player would stop pressing any input. A lot of times animation events wouldn’t trigger. And for unknown reasons, the speed would ramp up. Or stop. Yay.

I’ve also determined that whatever method I try to get footsteps / different surfaces I just cannot get the concept of quicksand to work on a game level. I’ve tried putting colliders on Booper’s feet, I’ve tried raycasting – neither seem to work. Yay.

So, I’m scrapping the level beyond the Socks Quest Castle in favor of a mechanic that does work – my ‘kaboing’ that is inside the caves. I had this flower-esque level I sculpted in Oculus Medium floating around, moved my Bad Plants to the various platforms and started adding ‘kaboings’ to them.

Here is a sample of gameplay – ignore the little cubes when he lands, those are placeholders for his landing spots, easy to see; easy to move:

One of the ‘mechanics’ people seemed to love at GDEX was the ‘whoa’ feeling from making a big jump off the giant steps leading to the clock and this (hopefully) will add more to that feeling.