What's new

I programmed some interesting new stuff lately, and did a lot of debugging.

- I worked on performance, creating a system of auto activation/desactivation used by every enemy. And I reworked the enemy AI to avoid unnecessary colliders usage (for example, on the situation showed on the GIF I posted last time, now two of the colliders are only activated for a frame, when needed).

- Charged attack is now possible in the game! You keep the attack button pressed, during this time a bar fills itself (while the stamina bar decreases), full after 2 or 3 seconds. When released, you perform a strong attack, with a damage multiplier.

- I did a lot of debugging of animation transitions, and some changes in the game's physics (most of the objects have less mass than before).

Here is the animator for the player object. Pretty nightmarish.

- You can now pause the game.

- I knew it was going to be like this, so I shouldn't complain... But the swimming part is really hard to program, if I want it in a perfect way, covering every possibility (I want the swim ability to be unlocked during the game...), feeling natural & debugged... I'm still working on it.

Oxygen bar is one thing done.

I hope I can release a good demo of Cape Bleue, soon! Thank you for following this blog.

Spider

Here is the last thing I made, a spider, walking like a boss. Currently working on the whole animset for this character. 

Combo

I worked mainly on platformer mechanics these last weeks: grip on ledges, zipline, ladders, etc. Everything works fine so far, and the game begins to be enjoyable on this side.

However, all the fight mechanics and scripts haven't changed for a long time (in this post I showed my process to make the main character's attack animation), and they need a lot of work.That's what I'm on these days.

I started to make new attack animations. These first 3 animations below are meant to be a combo. 

Crouch attack

This attack is triggered when the player attacks while blocking. It pushes enemies and can break their guard, or pushes objects violently... In my dreams. For now it's  coded like a normal attack, with more bugs.

The animation I used before this update. I plan to use it if UP is pressed when attack is triggered.

Jumping attack

Animating is hard! These are far from perfect but they are usable while programming. 

I still have a lot of work on this (mostly on the way the character will move on X axis while attacking, and better timings on enemies' stun so it really has the effect of a combo), but I'm happy to be already able to show in-game karate action:

(click for full size)

boar running & karateka

I'm currently reworking some graphics and adding a few new elements. Here are some of the WIP new stuff.

The boar, an enemy without IA : he just runs from one side of the screen to the other. The player will have to jump over or slash it.

A karateka, friendly NPC who unlocks player's abilities in exchange for gold.

treasure chest opening

Very small post today, because I'm currently working on the user interface & doing boring stuff like debugging. But I did some pixel art too, mainly a re-work on the backgrounds, and some small elements like the chest below.

So, here is a chest opening animation I did a few days ago. I hope it looks like the kind of chest the player will strongly want to open. I still have to add some particles to make it more rewarding or something like that.

Player attack animation

My first try on the player attack animation has been a failure : it was too long to trigger the actual attack after player's input, and broke the gameplay.

So I cut out most of the frames and had this :

It's really ugly, but fast : 3 frames. Useful to test gameplay and stuff. With this I was finally able to work on a (modest) fighting engine in Unity.

Later, I replaced it by a new animation, almost as fast to trigger actual attack (attack collider is enabled on third frame), and better looking.

I still have huge amount of work on this : it would be nice to have 2 or 3 attacks in a combo, a special (charged) attack... and a jump attack wouldn't hurt, too. All this work is sometimes overwhelming.

But let's enjoy today's victory : I'm happy to see it in action & cut heads with a decent animation.