Okay then. The hop is done and the different wall versions are done now too. Now you can jump from a wall, scramble up said wall and have an option to do either when you’re on a ledge. I’m a little staggered by how much this opens up the movement a little bit. Things that, before, would have taken some extra work to even function work a lot better now. Now the player can focus purely on the puzzle at hand, not the small details that make it up. It enhances the flow without destroying the core gameplay. Instead, it makes it more accessible, so I’m happy with it.
To compensate a little for the new moves, I’ve made an adjustment to the kill distance that The Thief has to fall before something bad happens. It’s a minor change, but he seems a little more fragile now. I’d done stuff that should have killed him and he walked away without a scratch. That’s not the point. A 4 story fall should be lethal. I’ve also nixed a hack that I’ve been using. An Aerial Dash move previously stopped the fall pain from happening, now it doesn’t. Basically if you fell, you could hit the dash at the last moment and survive. I mean, The Thief is good but he isn’t that good. You can still avoid quite a bit with the double jump, but the hack is no more. I’d found that I could sequence break using the dash bug and get into trouble my falling into someplace I shouldn’t be, and having no way to get back, since it was designed to be a one way switch.
Finally, I re-added the ability to kill an enemy. So I can once again kill them until they die from it. I think the technical term is stab. So that’s something.
– The next bit of magic that I’m going to summon forth is control with a gamepad. I think, in some small way I’ll have an overwhelming sense of coolness when I get that to work. The game so far has lived in my computer and I consider it to be a computer game. I don’t have any kind of special place in my heart for a computer game, since I’ve built a few (or started a few anyway) previously. However, with a gamepad in my hand and pressing buttons and getting a result, then, in my mind at least, it’s an honest to goodness video game. The difference? I grew up playing video games, and hearing about computer games. Yes, I know it’s a stupid difference, and really, they’re all computer games, but doing it with a control pad is different. It’s like the difference between writing a blog and writing an article. They both writing but an article seems, more, substantial somehow. That’s the next place to go.
…when I get that controller. Since it’s still a few days away at the least, I’m getting back into the damn cliffs level, again. So, yeah, new strip down the old and build another. Why? Because I have to. I will rebuild the damn thing a dozen times if I have to because I want it to be good. Not just good enough, but good. So, yeah, smaller and heavily scripted. I will make fun happen there, and then I will create fun again. It’s what I do god dammit.