As always, looks like I'm gonna be able to finish exactly 50% of the material I planned to do. Luckily, I'll probably be able to finish an important boss battle at the 50 percent mark instead of chopping the game off at an arbitrary place. But we'll see about that.
Among the latest additions are status aliments. Now you can become poisoned by falling into toxic waste in the Ship Graveyard. No big deal at first, but it'll sip away your life a heart piece per second until it drops to a single one (aka, then any damage from anything kills you). I made the Medspray heal it, though, since you have so many hearts at that point a single dose seems pretty useless.
Obviously poison is also healed when you save since savepoints are also healpoints and ammopoints. Another reason to save the game often.Another fun thing is the Ship Graveyard itself. It's a maze of color-coded blocks that can be in either of two positions, so the fun bit is to figure out how to toggle the switches so you can go where you wanna go. And to toggle them, you first need to find the keycards hidden around the place.
I also spent forever making the lower half of Batville. Unlike its same-named predecessor in Gun Princess 1, this Batville is a tropical island style city. It's much larger than the original Batville, it's currently 12 rooms, each smocked full with NPCs. You can get information, and buy accessories. (Tip: the Sushi Supplies shop sells fish you can equip. Give it a try! XD I found the idea hilarious so I had to use it)
What does equipping a fish accomplish?
This game is looking nice so far.I can already tell that there'll be some pretty fishy equipment choices in this game…
The same thing as other equipments. The bullet fish lowers ammo consumption, the goldfish increases money hoarding rate, the one month old leftovers fish scares away monsters that would normally chase you if you get too close. (Well, they won't chase you, at least)
Most equipment falls under one of these cathegories, though: - Increase stomp attack power. - Increase weapon attack power. - Increase defense. (Lose less hearts when hurt) - Increase max number of hearts.It's a pretty small number of variables to play around with. Should've thought about that before spending a week coding the equipment framework =/Submitted my game a while ago. The current ending is non-canonical, but it's more conclusive than the planned events would be. If I'd keep working on it… it'd end in the middle of nowhere. And I don't want that. Still, it's 1½-2 hours of fun if you're the developper, so it'll probably take some more time for other players.
I'll make the rest of the game… eventually. When I don't have a deadline =PThanks! I've learned a bunch of tiling knicknacks from Zelda II and NES Castlevania games, because they often needed tiles that looked good both as a single block and as a big surface (aka, the "box" shouldn't be visible when tiling it). But obviously I try to use a more expressive palette than those games. Most tilesets still just use 3 colors, though, excluding grass and skeleton decoration. I usually find a good grayish (not too strong) color, draws a box using that, then uses a warmer lighter color and a darker colder color to draw an actual shape on it. It really helps to have some mood music when drawing, too.
My human character style is mostly Cave Story inspired, at least for this game (since I want it to be similar to GP1, which was a shameful Cave Story ripoff). I can't come up with a game that inspires my enemy design, though. All enemies in GP2 so far are remakes of previous enemies from my previous games, I've just made them in a more consistent style. (Putting a lot of time on making non-pillow shading, because I've got a lot of complaints on that before)I really like NES and SNES games, because there was more focus on making good games (there were less games, and advertising had less power) with small teams (all software coded in-house, no buying external shader routines and blah blah and gluing them together) back then. But I actually don't play old games very regularily, I spend more time playing bad new games. From a game design perspective, it's quite good, because it's easier to learn how to avoid a flaw than it is to learn how to copy something good.EDIT: Come to think of it, the vertical lines in the Ship Graveyard tileset are pretty visible. Gotta update that.Sounds cool! I really liked your games so far.
In fact, a quick question on that matter : I would like to start both the first gun princess and final colombus, but i have no idea if they are in a state where they are a full game or not. Should i wait until you do further development on them, or can i dive in them right now? Judging by the fact that you are doing a second gun princess, i guess it's the later!In all cases, thanks for the games and have a good day!Feel free to dive into them even though they're deprecated. AFAIK both games should have a reachable ending, but some branches deadend.
GP1—I understand. Even if unfinished, if they're fun then i don't mind! And from what i heard in the past, these game were full of feature and had alot of rooms, so i guess they'll be quite hard to remake from scratch!
In all cases, thanks for the answer and good luck for the future!Thanks!
Main reason I never got them finished was probably by having TOO MANY features… and I kept adding in new ones on a whim. GP1 had like 40 weapons, and many were useless or glitchy. It even has a hidden, functional Portal Rifle (that only works horizontally) and a Wave Motion Gun. Both are unaccessible through normal gameplay, though.Too many features…then i guess it will be quite interesting to see what you had done! That overflow of feature you describe reminds me of another project that suffered a similar fate in a even more extreme way : Mushroom kingdom fusion. They put so much stuff in there, today they just want to close the project and can't even do that!
By the way, i played a little of kirbyvania, it is quite fun!Have a good day!