Meri Deth

Some ideas that have been bubbling for a while.

The first was when I noticed my Meri Deth sprite looking more and more chibi, I wondered if I should have two modes of play. A “younger” Meri Deth with probably faster game play and less offensive abilities, and an “older” Meri Deth.

I might even add the Yoshi’s Island babies idea to older Meri Deth and have her collect more abilities when she carries the babies in her longer blood hair.

TWEEZAKWOWD!!!

Got the basics of the chainsaw. Just have to make the animations for it.

Been spending a torturous amount of time redoing Meri Deth’s hair and finally getting something passable.

Unfortunately its 60 sprites working in tandem.. Yikes, I’ll have to burn that down a little.

Also have to fix the visual glitch of changing directions. You’ll notice the hair can’t flip perfectly.

After scrapping the climbing mechanic, it still bugged me that default Meri Deth had no way to defend herself. The circular buzz saw felt a little too close to the body and maybe it was too easy to run into enemies.

For a bit I tried a simple air dash, like Megaman X, but immediately she bolted off the screen at break neck speeds, even at low ones it felt too fast? Meri Deth has a very chill walk pace and maybe I’m not ready to put a rocket in her pants yet. I had to quickly put it in the mechanics toy box.

Spent a crazy amount of time implementing a proper climb and it sort of works.

But I reeeeeally don’t like how it complicates things. Its just too damn glitchy.

It breaks easily with certain movements, and the controls are too sticky. I got Meri Deth to move along with moving walls, but she can still get confused when the wall slides away from her. Walls must be perfectly perpendicular and not clip into anything. Its a little annoying.

I really am better off scrapping this power and reserving its code for very specific transformations in controlled environments. Its nice, but you have to do a lot of patch work. And maybe its a bit too overkill. She already floats and jumps high. It was fun trying something like Knytt Stories but I dunno about here.

The only good way to climb a wall is to hump it like your life depends on it.

I call this one “I have spent the whole week drawing this and animating it in Spriter and I hate it so much I want to die why is everything so hard”

well that was a fun waste of time. Maybe I’ll try the more tradition frame approach. And by frames I mean the bare minimum I am known for.

This game is never going to get off the ground. I am going to die in a pile of my own concept art.

oh well. More experiments.

After switching to pixels I kinda figured out what was bugging me about the sprites before it and I noticed Meri Deth used to be hella tall. This made her feel gangly and it wasn’t really clear what her hitbox was. The compact form of pixel Meri Deth fixes this.

The past few weeks I was kinda ‘eeeeh’ and thinking about going back to drawn sprites but its just a lot of work. Spriter Pro is just a lot of setup work and the frame by frame crap I’ve done before that was worse.

I’ll have to figure out a way to sneak in my style into these pixels, I just haven’t thought of it yet.

On another note the play style is still a mystery to me.

I thought of a Mario head stomp and Sonic bounce but Meri Deth’s float quickly kills that idea. Won’t stop me from having bouncy springs and things.

Climbing walls is something else I’d like. I really like Knytt Stories so that’s something else I could do. The only problem is either having only certain areas to climb or have it all the time. If its all the time, there will have to be really obvious walls you can’t climb that look hazardous or slippery.

I think I would just take that cue from Knytt Stories and just have double jumps and floats and climbing be powers you get later on.

The transformations? Eh. I’m just going to keep them simple. I’ve given up on trying to spice them. Charging and all that nonsense.

Thinking about removing the toggle powers and just having a system where Meri Deth instantly transforms at certain predetermined spots and ‘cleanses’ herself to default at blood fountains.

I’m getting a little annoyed at this project and I’m at the verge of just putting it off for a year or so.

I just over complicate things and getting a little tired fidgeting with features.

Plus the way I set this up I should of just made new objects instead of recycling one for powers. A lot of stupid things like that is weird to work around.