I have made huge progress in the past few weeks. Previously I could speed run the demo in under 5 minutes. Now I’ve yet to get through it in under 10 minutes even when skipping as much as possible. I think for a first time player it would take 20-30 minutes. So, yeah, there’s much more to the game. I still have another large area that I want to build before MAGFest that has some water to play around in. The demo build on itch has been updated!
New features…
- Lasers
- Conveyor Belts
- Mini Boss fight!
- Completely re-tweaked physics and re-balanced everything
- Added more to the level and polished existing areas
- Flying enemies
- Several more varieties of rolling enemies
- Low health enemies have random chance of going haywire
- Missile launcher player weapon, homes in and can be controlled manually
- Tiles that drop when touched and rebuild after a few seconds
- Limited player’s weapon range, forces you to get closer to enemies
- Improved hit/miss effects
- Procedural tile randomization
- Enemies and the player flash white when hit
- Lots of polish on everything
View post on imgur.com
View post on imgur.com
View post on imgur.com
The procedural tile randomization is also really cool. I wanted something to help with repeating patterns of tiles without needing to do the level design work to add variation. I also don’t want to do the art work to create a ton of different variations. This kind of look is iconic to the Metroid series and it just really helps break up the repeating patterns.
So I set up a simple algorithm to add some randomization. It searches for these blue rock tiles that are surround by that same tile. The it randomly swaps it for 3 other tiles and applies some rotation and mirroring to further mix it up. It is super simple but I may use some more complex algorithms in the future. This kind of thing will be a big help on both the art and level design side.
Procedural Tile Randomization
I just got back from MAGFest and it was truly awesome as always! I’m working on another post about showing my game Piroot in the Indie Showcase, but I wanted to first talk about my experience running MAGJam, a 2 hour table top game jam at MAGFest.
