Another slow month, spent time working on thesis for the first half and been doing some commissions. Spent time getting some extra game mechanics/features started.
Poppin and Jupa start off with a basic punching glove attack that shoots out and hits enemies. Along the way you can find extra gadget cards that specifically swap out the glove attack. Most of the differ in their distance, speed going out, retraction speed, and power. Some will have special characteristics, such as causing status effects, or shooting out a projectile instead.
The bulk of my time has been on adding in status effects, starting with the player characters. Poison is pretty standard, you take damage every few seconds until it goes away. It won’t kill but stops at 1 hitpoint. Drinking/eating will cure it out of their systems right away.
Other effects involve being stunned, frozen, or petrified. They mostly differ in how long the state lasts. You’re able to break out of it faster by mashing left and right.
But, you can also switch to the partner and use the gadget box to break them out faster. The bomb might be the quickest, but it can lead to knockback and being stunned further.
I’m planning to work on the animation for this still; some attacks on certain ground will smash them underneath. Like poison they’ll slowly take damage, but at a much faster rate. Again, one could mash to break themselves out, but switching to your partner to pull the other out is the fastest.
Finally there’s being shrunk down. It might seem fun to sneak into tiny places, but during this state you can’t use the gadget box at all.
That’s it for this month, I’m hoping April will be a lot more productive. I need to apply status effects to enemies, fix all the errors with these, finish up the glove alternates, and then add in some extra “Tools” for the gadget box. Another really important one is rethinking the partner’s following code. It’s been “functional” for demoing but there’s still a ton of cases where they just get stuck or doing something awkward.
Thanks for following progress on Poppin & Jupa: Pocket Adventure!
