Getting Up

Yesterday I got the new wall hop move worked out. Now when you jump straight up against a wall you do a bonus little hop at the top of the jump. It gives maybe an extra 30% or so. It’s not much, but after running through the game with it on, it really works though. It doesn’t break anything or make any of the puzzles odd, but it does make certain parts easier. It also seems to make the gameplay feel a little looser, a little less constrained, so I’m very happy with it.
It’s set up so that at the top of the jump, if you did a straight jump, to hop and update the hop variable and the jump variable, so at the top of the second little jump, you still stick to the wall like a good little thief. Like I said, I’m quite happy with it.
While I was in there I realized that you couldn’t Dash off of a wall. I mean, I would think that you should be able to push the Dash button while sticking and it should do something, right? So I went ahead and added that. The Dash from the wall isn’t really much and not really enough to build a decent puzzle with, but it is something that would be expected and hey, I may figure something out to do with it.

– I also fixed an odd bug that made enemies and The Thief hit really hard. It turns out that the main game loop was running the functions for the combat collision twice. So that’s better now.

-While I was thinking about the new wall hop (and the reason it isn’t orange yet) I realized that I should be able to do it from a hanging ledge. In other words, I should be able to jump to a ledge and then do an upwards wall hop to a different ledge above me. Then, maybe do it again. It seemed to easy at first, but it could open up the puzzles so much. I wouldn’t need to put ledges everywhere, I could have vertical surfaces and could use more space for the puzzles themselves. So, I’m going to add another function to the hanging ledges. If you jump, you’ll do a wall hop upwards from the ledge. Probably with slightly more oomph than the regular hop. If you press away from the wall and jump you’ll do the regular jump that it does now. I’ll do that today and then get into designing and building the damn cliff level again.

– I’m still playing Mirror’s Edge, probably because I hate myself. It’s devolved into the ultimate trial and error game. I can run it, but everything has to be perfect and work just so. I die a lot. Then I try something different, and I die some more. For some reason the designers felt it was important to force me to fight, in first person, with my hands, against enemies with fuggin machine guns. What the deuce?
I get it, you worked hard on a combat system, so have I. But you know, I’m not planning on forcing any fights on the player and not giving them the ability to not suck. Hey, DICE, don’t do that. The best enemies I’ve encountered so far, in the entire game are a group of evil runners that can do all the stuff I can do, but you know, evil. You know how to beat them? Run. That’s the coolest part of the game so far. Getting machine gunned like one of Elliot Ness’ goons for the 25th time, not so much.

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