Adding creatures & level chunks
Shay Pierce
just to make it available for posterity here on the Google Group:
For those who have time to keep working on it: it shouldn't be too
hard to get other creatures in if you look at the "BounceCreature"
class and how it works. Once you make a new creature, you can get it
to show up in the "level chunks" that the game is made up of; again it
should be easy to copy some of the classes in the "levelChunks" folder
and make new ones... though you'll have to be sure to add your new
level chunk classes to the list of available chunk classes in the
LevelGenerator.as file. (You can test faster by making the chunk
you're working on the only one in that list, so it always shows up -
but remember to restore the full list or the levels will be pretty
repetitive!!)
------------------------
Unfortunately I have some other projects to tend to and can't commit
to working on T.V. much more, at least not for the next week or so...
but I think that adding more creatures and some more interesting
levels is the direction to go. After that I would try some power-ups -
a jetpack (or maybe just a device that teleports you up a few hundred
feet), maybe an umbrella... Phil and I talked about having a power-up
that would act kinda like the cape in Super Mario World...? Or maybe
the power-up in SMW that fills you up with helium so you can float
around for a while?
I'd definitely be interested in seeing the result of polishing it up a
bit, then putting it on Facebook with a "friends leaderboard"
integrated.
Good luck to whoever keeps working on it, and I'll try to find some
time to go in and add a few things myself if I have a chance! (I
suppose we could even spend the next FlxJam just trying to "finish"
it, though it might be better to move onto something fresh by then...
in which case, all the more reason to finish this one up now!)
Shay
Norman
feel. That was a nice job, BTW, on making the game easier. More
features and enemies are cool, but they won't really mean anything if
the game doesn't play well.
Unfortunately, I'm pretty busy myself, so Terminal Velocity might've
reached its own... terminal velocity Saturday. >.>
Dmitri Wolf
Doug Daniels
You can play the latest version here:
http://austin-flixel-jam.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/TerminalVelocity/release/TerminalVelocity.html
~ doug daniels
Shay Pierce
Shay
Dmitri Wolf
Really congrats, though, that's way addictive and fun Woot!
On Jan 25, 11:12 pm, Shay Pierce <iqpie...@gmail.com> wrote:
> You can play one of the most recent playables onhttp://autopoetica.org/
>
> Shay
Shay Pierce
Another problem is that you currently "run out of" balloons. They're spawned wherever they're spawned throughout the world below you, and they immediately start floating up. By the time you've gone halfway down, you've probably already had all the balloons float past you, and no new ones will spawn. Between that and the lack of background, the second half of the game is kind of a bummer - even before the part where you unavoidably die a horrible death on pointy spikes. :)
Shay
Dmitri Wolf
Great. Another addictive game to sap all my time and VITAL LIFE ENERGY! Ack!
I hate you guys.
I'm going home.
Shay Pierce
Shay
Phil Knoll
shoddily thrown together game. People were going out of their way to
say, "hey, nice job on that".
One coworker of mine got:
> 2400! (The score was something like 2465, but I can't remember the
exact number.)
After watching my friend trying to beat the high score, and doing a
perfect job on it, getting the best score the map would allow, I
realized one of the game's bigger weaknesses is its lack of user-
ability-to-control-level-progression -- you're basically at the mercy
of the level and no amount of skill can enable you to continue getting
points infinitely. I realize this fits our initial description of the
"falling to your death", but it does make things finite. Probably good
for them to be "less" finite..
On Jan 26, 12:54 am, Shay Pierce <iqpie...@gmail.com> wrote:
> All right, after saying twice that I had little time for this project... I
> just committed a couple of little changes. :) There was a particular level
> chunk that was very broken and always produced a little uninteresting
> cluster of obstacles on the right side. I made it a more interesting chunk
> that has a little mini-game in it - two balloons that can both be hit, but
> it's tricky to do without bouncing up and hitting your head on some spikes
> above them.
>
> Shay
>
> On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 11:45 PM, Dmitri Wolf <pinonw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > 1457!
>
> > Great. Another addictive game to sap all my time and VITAL LIFE ENERGY!
> > Ack!
>
> > I hate you guys.
> > I'm going home.
>
> > On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 11:28 PM, Shay Pierce <iqpie...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> I've gotten about 1550 a couple of times tonight. :) There is a little bit
> >> of skill to deciding what platforms to hit and when, and sometimes in
> >> hitting those bounces without bouncing yourself up into the spikes above. I
> >> think it's most interesting by far when some balloons float in and you have
> >> to try to figure out how to take advantage of them before they float away -
> >> that's why I think more creatures/"moving obstacles" would make the biggest
> >> impact on raising the interest level.
>
> >> Another problem is that you currently "run out of" balloons. They're
> >> spawned wherever they're spawned throughout the world below you, and they
> >> immediately start floating up. By the time you've gone halfway down, you've
> >> probably already had all the balloons float past you, and no new ones will
> >> spawn. Between that and the lack of background, the second half of the game
> >> is kind of a bummer - even before the part where you unavoidably die a
> >> horrible death on pointy spikes. :)
>
> >> Shay
>
Shay Pierce
exact thing a couple of nights ago after my last check-in... that in
many great games, including our inspirations Canabalt and Doodle Jump,
just continually throw obstacles at you, and it is always possible to
overcome these obstacles... but they get harder and harder as time
goes on, to the point that, when you make ONE mistake, you will lose.
But the key is that, even then, it was YOU who made that mistake. And
you know perfectly well that you wouldn't have lost if you hadn't made
it... and this makes you say to yourself "I know what I can do better!
If I had just done X instead of Y, I could have kept going!" And you
have an irresistable urge to try again... and apply the new lesson
that you learned from your mistake. (I've become a big believer in
Raph Koster's theory that "fun" is almost synonymous with "learning.")
So I think I see a way to improve the game, and guess what? It even
integrates the whole "controlling your speed" mechanic that Phil (and
Justin I think) were enthusiastic about.
Basically we make it so that there's no ground, and it's about
infinite freefall - but you can still die by hitting the "spikey"
obstacles... but again, only because of your own mistake.
Then we just ramp up the difficulty - make it so that as time passes,
your maximum velocity (which is easy to set, when I messed with the
physics on Saturday night I set it to something like 80) becomes
faster and faster. It still reaches a maximum cap, but even at that
hardest level of difficulty it's possible to survive indefinitely if
you don't make any mistakes.
We could also change the level editor so that the various "chunks"
that it uses are flagged with different difficulty levels; at the
start, the obstacles are all easy and very forgiving, while later on
they're very tricky and challenging to get through. This and/or the
speed rules changes would give us the ramp-up in difficulty that we're
looking for.
So what about bouncing? It would still be valuable just as a way to
control your speed. We could also have bounces contribute to a point
score - at the end of the game we add your "survival time" to that
point total.
Here's an idea that kinda ties all this together: you start the game
with, say, 3 little parachutes on your character. At some point (a
timer? Or when you get hurt? Or when you fail to control your speed
and fall too fast for too long?) you lose a parachute, and your
acceleration and max. velocity are increased. This continues as you
lose all 3 parachutes.
One more thought: in games like this that start easy and then get
harder and harder, I usually get to the point where I wish I could
skip ahead past the easy parts. (Flight Control on the iPhone is an
example here; they give you a fast-forward button.) One way to solve
this would just be to offer a "One Parachute" hard mode that skips
ahead to when you have only 1 parachute left and the game gets really
hard. Another way might be something like what Tetris does: you can
start at any level, and at some point you just go up to the next level
of difficulty... so you can start at whatever difficulty level you like.
Well a lot of ideas there, I think it's an interesting direction that
I'd love to try! Almost makes me want to propose that we spend the
next Game Jam just doing T.V. 2.0!
Shay
Phil Knoll
Parachutes are a fun idea.
Fun to see you're still working on it.
We'll have to get together sometime and continue ^o^/
If the same group shows up to the next FlxJam, T.V. (The Game) would
be something to consider.
> ...
>
> read more »