The Art of Dying - Platformer made in AGS (GAME IS RELEASED!)

[Crow]

I've added a YouTube BBCode and button. Enjoy.

[dkh]

Thanks Crow, you rock! The next video will talk about enemy variety and present a number of enemies that I have implemented, their role and how they affect the gameplay.

[Cyangmou]

How have you incorporated th ehit flash? with actual frames or just with programming?

I assume you still can et hit while you are dashing? You are ivincible during the jumping attack?

Is there even a need for the normal attacks if the dash is 3 times as strong as the normal combo (given that there is enough space from the level architecture)?

I am also missing the information on what happens if you ge thit. Get hit 1 time and you die? Maybe you should incprporate this next time too - it's unclear atm.

[dkh]

The flash is programming, no reason to waste memory on a simple white tint (which actually is not as simple to do as one might think in AGS as it doesn't support bright color tints - so I have to create a white square with correct dimensions, then grab the transparency mask from the original, untinted sprite and apply that to the white square).

You can not hit while dashing but dashing itself is an attack so there is no need to! But you can of course break out of the dash at any point by jumping, then you can do whatever you want to. Jump again and go right into a spin attack for example!

You are not ever invincible in the game. I was considering it for the spin attack but then that'd just make it EVEN better and more useful.

You make a good point with the normal attacks not being very useful. The spin and dash attacks are what you want to use 99% of the time. I thought about this and I'd rather have it be this way then somehow make these really fun and fluent moves worse in some way. The normal attacks are just in there because it'd be goofy not to be able to use a sword while running. Although there are some very rare cases in which the normal attack is useful (when you can't jump and can't slide because of lava/spikes being too close for example).

Right now, you get hit once and die. I've been thinking about putting in a health system but I honestly think a die-often-with-a-lot-checkpoints thing is more fitting. The game's called The Art of Dying for a reason after all!

More and more infos will be revealed. I plan to make the next video about enemy variety, then one about the editor etc.

[PypeBros]

Using a point-and-click adventure studio for a retro-looking platformer ... well, that's unexpected, but the result sure looks good and doesn't seem to have quirks in gameplay, so congrats   

I demonstrate the way I implemented movement, acceleration/deceleration on different surfaces (solid and slippery)

It's good you took some time on this. Imho, that's a key point to make a game feel professional opposed to kiddies programming experiments. I wonder whether you encountered the same kind of update animation only when virtual position of the character is n pixels away from current position as the one I used in my engine.

Did I correctly picked that you map dash as DOWN+L/R+JUMP ... do you have any reason to avoid DOWN+ATTACK ?

[dkh]

Using a point-and-click adventure studio for a retro-looking platformer ... well, that's unexpected, but the result sure looks good and doesn't seem to have quirks in gameplay, so congrats   

I demonstrate the way I implemented movement, acceleration/deceleration on different surfaces (solid and slippery)

It's good you took some time on this. Imho, that's a key point to make a game feel professional opposed to kiddies programming experiments. I wonder whether you encountered the same kind of update animation only when virtual position of the character is n pixels away from current position as the one I used in my engine.

Did I correctly picked that you map dash as DOWN+L/R+JUMP ... do you have any reason to avoid DOWN+ATTACK ?

Thanks PypeBros!

I didn't quite understand the problem(?) - my French isn't very good and the English explanations didn't really help me understand very much. But I had very little problems implementing the ice surfaces: I have a friction variable that is simply altered, depending on whether or not the player is currently on ice. And friction simply affects the speed of acceleration/deceleration. The animation of the player is played depending on the keys that are pressed and synced so they look good (animation speed vs movement speed) on standard, non-slippery surfaces. On ice they do look like 'moon-walking' while you're slowly picking up speed but that is, of course, the effect we're after, since the surface is so slippery and makes you 'moon-walk' in real life.

About the dash-move: you understood correctly, it's DOWN+L/R+JUMP. As to why I didn't do DOWN+ATTACK? Well, I feel adding in a direction key gives the player more control and speed - which, once again, is what I'm going for with this game, I DON'T want ANY kind of slow and 'rigid' controls, it's all about fast, manic and, hopefully, fun movement. So in the game, you don't have to face the right direction first, then hit DOWN+ATTACK, you can just hit DOWN+JUMP with L or R and immediately start dashing in that direction. Even when you're at full speed, running right, you can still immediately hit DOWN+L+JUMP and change your direction on the spot. This isn't physically accurate (much like double-jumping for example) but, to me, it's fun that way.

[dkh]

And here's a third video. This time focusing on how I design enemies. I also present a couple ones in greater detail:

Please take a look and let me know what you think! I'm planning to show off the level editor in the next video, so stay tuned for that!

[dkh]

In case someone is still interested, here's my fourth video that shows off the level editor that's included in the game. Please take a look:

As always, let me know what you think and if you could see yourself using this editor. Also, ask any questions you might have, I'm sure there's plenty of stuff I forgot to explain how it works in the video. If you have improvements on user friendliness (that are reasonable, AGS doesn't exactly make user-friendly tool development easy haha), please share them with me!

[A2J2TIWARI]

Great Video! I enjoyed it and even learned a lot of things! Thanks for sharing your knowledge about 'controls', I might implement something like that in my games.

Also, after watching the video, I feel like making a video for my FART game as well.

[dkh]

Thanks! I'm happy you liked my videos!

This whole dev diary thing was an experiment, really. It takes a LOT of time to do (and that's time you could be working on the game itself), but it's also really fun and allows you to create a bit of interest - that's the goal at least. It's a trade-off but if you feel like doing the same for your game, I'll be watching!