#tytans2

Oi, you there!  Yea, you!  Lemme talk at you for abit.

As you can see above, I added the Arc ability.  Now, you may be thinking “Why, Streus, that’s just a lazy teleport!”, and you’d be right.  Well, it can’t teleport over walls, so it’s not completely lazy.  It also damages enemies caught between the start and end points; so that’s nifty.  Arc isn’t completely done yet, though.  I’d like to add some VFX between the start and endpoints, and I need to tweak the collision detection a little, but it’s all good.

On the UI front, I spent a whole 10 minutes updating the UI for ability charges so that it wasn’t just a number overlaid on the ability icon

And I gave the health bar a simple little low health animation.

And the energy heat bar got a little gradient that I may or may not keep.

Hold up.  Heat?

Yup.  Most of this past week was focused on redesigning the energy/mana pool system into something that fit Tytans II better.  Heat is what I came up with.  Instead of passively building energy to spend on abilities, players will start with an empty pool of heat that will build as they use abilities.  Heat will decay passively, but players can also discharge heat by using their basic attack.  Exceeding the heat limit incurs...some kind of penalty.  I’m still mulling over what exactly the penalty should be, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be going with some kind of damage infliction.  Could be straight damage equal to the exceeded amount (heat - heatMax); could be a damage over time status effect with the same value; could be a movement penalty.  The possibilities are endless.  Mostly endless.  Pretty endless.  More endless than not.

Other things will probably demand my attention this coming week, so next week’s post shouldn’t be anything too substantial.

Happiest of Mondays, everyone!  Good holidays?  Good.  Let’s get into it.

Like I said last Monday, I took this week off, but I still spent a little time thinking about what I’d like to get into this week.  Part of that was just implementing Charge, Trap, and Arc (which I started on today; Charge can be seen above), and part was redesigning some clunkier parts of Tytans II.

This post ended up actually being pretty lengthy, so if you want details...

I don’t feel like writing this post, but I’m doing it anyway!  Uh, I mean...  Happy Monday, everybody!

Prometheus got even more work this week.  I fixed up my distribution algorithm (it was quite buggy) and I settled on attack patterns (two displayed above) for him.  He and his minions are pretty much complete; however, I can’ t help but feel like they’re lacking something.  I’ll probably revisit him after I’ve done one or two more bosses, but for now I’m giving him the back burner treatment because I’m just so goddamn tired of working on the same fight.

I’m just going to add in his ability drops and call it a day 2-3 weeks.  At least I’m happy with the icons for his dropped abilities.

Charge, Arc, and Trap, respectively.

I’ll try to get some work done on those abilities and get started on Helios this week, but I really can’t promise much.

Happy Monday, everybody!

This is going to be a long post, in which I’ll cover difficulty, re-balancing, AI, algorithms, geometry, and I’ll say the word “tacos” once.

Ready?  Let’s dive in!

Happy Monday, uh....people!  Damn.  I had a good start, and I instantly ruined it.  Whatever.  Let’s get into the stuff.

Above is actually the last thing I worked on this week.  Simply put, they’re little homing, healing bullets.  Really, though, they required I buff up my bullet system a bit to handle “damage <= 0″ cases.  Not a lot of buff.  Just a little.  These homing health bullets will be used in the next next boss fight I’m working on, the first of the T2 bosses, Prometheus.  I set up this whole shoot-health-pickups-to-release-their-health thing as a way to test the bullet.  I may or may not keep the feature (it’s cool, but a bit imbalanced).

Before I started on this, I set up a new hierarchy for “Control Scripts”.  Enemy control scripts and the player control script required very similar functionality, so I stuck them under the same parent class and started fleshing out support methods.  Doing so broke pausing a bit, but not majorly, so I’m letting it slide for the time being.  “I’ll get to it.”

I also added a stacking status effect subclass with support for sequential and concurrent decay (basically, when the duration ends, either remove one stack, or all of them).  I’m not super happy with it yet, but then again, I don’t need it yet, so I’m giving it the same treatment as pausing.

And, like I said, I’ve been working on Prometheus.  Design-wise he’s pretty much complete.  There are a few things I decided to figure out during implementation, which is crawling along.  Prometheus is a much more complex boss than Themis, and I’m going to have to spend a larger chunk of time on AI compared to Themis.  It’ll be worth it though.  I’m very much looking forward to seeing how Prometheus turns out.

Prometheus himself may not be in the next update, but there’ll be plenty of support content to show off by next Monday.

What I worked on this week can’t really be easily shown with pictures, unless I posted straight up code.  Then again, not even the code is interesting in and of itself.  Anyway, that’s why you’re getting this flag.

I spent this week a) refactoring, b) thinking over balance and changes to make, or not make, in order to rebalance, and c) adding functionality to existing systems for later content.

The refactoring was mainly centered around the bullet system.  In a prior post I mentioned that the bullet system, specifically when it came to different behaviors for different bullet types, was “limited and clunky” (a vast understatement).  Well, I finally got around to fixing that.  The original system could be summed up with “switch-cases and an enum”.  The new one does reasonable stuff.  With child classes n’ stuff.

A little refactoring went into the ability system as well, but only as facilitation for new functionality: charges.  Basically, now an ability can accrue charges that can be used in lieu of resetting the cooldown of the ability.  I still need to test the new system a little, but so far it seems solid.  I also need to add UI support for displaying charges.

And then there was all the balance stuff.  I’ve come to the conclusion that the Defender just needs some value tweaking (I’m not sure where yet.  Probably in multiple places), and the Obliterator needs a revamped primary fire.  Right now the Obliterator’s primary is just a basic shot with a x2 damage multiplier which applies knockback to the player.  It’s not fun to use, and it’s extremely weak in comparison to the other two classes’ primaries.  I’m mulling over a few new versions.  Some include applying buffs for remaining in place; some include applying buffs for firing infrequently,  With the new charge-able ability system, I have quite a few more options.

This coming week I’d like to focus on that as well as adding stacking to status effects (a special case, not a general rule), adding a new child class to Ability called MinionAbility, and perhaps tackling/preparing to tackle an actual “control script” framework for my Entity system.

(acknowledgment of late post)

Oh, hey, who’s that?  Is that Themis?  Well, yea, obviously.  Just look at that health bar, it’s got her name and everything.

Yep, Themis is the first boss of Tytans II.  Yes, the name is that of the Greek titan Themis of divine law, order, and all that.  The two share nothing beyond a name and the theme of law and balance.  Themis, the boss, is mostly finished, as are the features unique to bosses (the boss health bar, door opening/closing on fight beginning/ending, etc).  Her movement still needs work (she needs to change her strafe direction when she hits a wall), and I’m still messing around with her abilities and patterns to make the fight fun and challenging, but not too challenging.

For details...

Remember what I said about hoping to get a playtesting version ready for today?  Well, that didn’t pan out.  I poured a bunch of dev hours into Tytans II this week, but not nearly enough to push out the first boss today.  That said, I’m definitely close to being ready.

I started off the week by getting player death/respawning working (pictured above).  Not a difficult feature, but certainly a very important one.

Speaking of important, I also got a basic tutorial into the game.  It’s nothing special; it’s just a walkthrough of the controls and an explanation of the “inventory” n’ such.  Then it punts you off into the game.  

That’s it for major features.  Everything else I worked on is related to the first boss, and I don’t want to talk about her until she’s completed.

Well, no, I did add Berzerk, which is a status effect (applied by an ability) that increases damage dealt and taken the lower your health.  There’re Shock and Slow status effects now as well.  That’s about it though.

Yup.  Considering how much work I did, I don’t really have much to talk about.  

Anyway, next post I’ll have all the first boss content to go over, as well as the playtest build.  I might even preview the second boss.