#metasuper

Turns out that yea, my movement code is garbage and I'm only 1 video into the tutorial. Granted I'm still gonna change stuff for my needs but I had no idea how to use Unity's grid.

Anywho, on the topic of my code needing to die: I'm designing Metasuper around character death.

I noticed that even though Fire Emblem and X-COM have permadeath, both have reset problems.

Fire Emblem for the past few decades has been built around characters NOT dying. Plenty of supports and fun stuff for surviving and almost nothing for letting characters stay dead.

X-COM's problem is how the soldiers being randomly generated make it harder to care about their deaths (until you snowball into a canyon but that's a different problem)

If character death is meaningless in these genre leaders, then how is Metasuper going to be different?

Heroic sacrifices. When a hero hits zero HP, something big will happen that could turn the tide of battle. Massive stat boosts, massive heals, massive map-wide damage. Emphasize the characters by having them leave with a bang.

This is one of the reasons I'm theming around superheroes. Other reasons are how often they come back from the dead (I said it had "character death" not "permadeath"), and one kind of replacement unit that I'll keep secret for next post ;)

Been a while so here's all the character, enemy, and NPC pixel art I made, ready for color pallets. I tweaked some of them, and even replaced one, but I'm happy with how most of them turned out.

Here's some pixel art for the characters on the map. You can mostly ignore the colors, I'll use code to change them for different characters. There's gonna be a lot of artwork anyways, might as well let myself reuse stuff.

But if the characters all look different, how will the player tell their units from the villains? Simple: I'll recolor the outline.

Emergent Storytelling: stories grown as you play. These stories are wonderful, and I'm designing Metasuper around these.

But how? I don't have the resources for Dwarf Fortress or Rimworld, and already locked in a chapter-based structure. That funky definition gives you a clue, "grown."

You can't build an emergent story like a house. You need to plant seeds, give them good soil, and get the player water them.

Happy Easter to the Coyote Pond! I have a dev log for you!

Here's the biggest reason I have superhero theming. Super Pets!

Not as many kinds of pet as kinds of hero (for now) but when I decide on some color schemes these adorable little things will act as flier, combat, speedster, and healer replacements. Or maybe they'll take slots anyways for animal lovers.

You might notice the blue outlines that weren't on the other sprites I made. Turns out there's a reason nobody changes outline color, so I added a halo so there's no problem.

Pretty simple to modify a color swapper shader from a tutorial to make it work with multiple colors. Not every color though: the skin, cyan, and magenta I was using didn't work so I pushed them all the way and now they're fine. That tutorial was so simple I'm wondering if I'm overcomplicating my system code so I'll be checking one of those out.