Falling is in now, with Physics! Installed it, got it working and fired it up. When I loaded the Jump Program, whipped out the sword, smacked around the Knight and dropped him off like he was hot. The new Physics(!) kicked in, grabbed the enemy in it’s iron Mathemagical grip and he fell to the ground and, it killed him.
I know the term “LOL” has been played out at this point, but I actually did. Right out loud even. Granted, falling down and suffering from what appears to be severe injury is hardly something that would create mirth, but it did in this case. But, since the doing damage function has been removed for testing reasons, it feels good to give some hell to the pixel minions of the game.
All in all, the system works. So that’s cool. The player can ambush enemies, knock them off or into unfortunate things and the player can quickly get back to all the running and/or jumping.
-From a gameplay perspective the blocking system works in a way, but it’s not hard. I’m thinking I’ll install a system that auto-blocks player attacks based on the enemy type. To this end, the Block Stun when the player gets blocked correctly…and no. I won’t. Half of the “blocks” in the game are counters, and that would be cheap like an SNK game. No, I’ll think of something different.
-Finally, the title. Plop is pretty, um, onomonopeic. The second has to do with something similar. The Thief is pretty fragile. He can’t fall too far without suffering damage or, let’s say, death. 3 stories or so is the upper limit of what his little British bones can handle. It’s also probably the upper limit of what a Traceur could deal with. Compared to enemies, The Thief is Kal-El. They drop 12 feet, and that’s the end of them. 6 feet and they feel all hurt. It’s one of the advantages the player has.
-Next up is the Throw Controller. I need to build a table with 151 frames in a a row and 6 rows. It shouldn’t take long so…done. Now let’s build a functions that draws that when a throw would happen. There we go. It’s all ready to go. I also got a bit in there so at the end, the character is in the Thrown state. So the animations should blend together and look really stunning. What I’ll do is change the final position of the character at the end of the animation, so they’ll have a similar thing happen at the end, but it’ll start at a different place and appear really organic. It’s like in my 3DS Max class, you don’t always have to do it correctly, it just has to look right. Generally in these kinds of things, you can fake it.
-Yeah, I said it. The Thief’s British. When he speaks I think he should sound like this guy.