Okay, so, a couple of you already know this, but I'm working on a new game right now. It's called
Hag Magnate. That doesn't mean Nether Mind is dead. Abe's still chipping away at that periodically, but I was getting pretty tired of working on it and I feel at liberty to expand my horizons somewhat.
There have been a lot of simplifications that were made in Nether Mind that came at a cumulative high cost. And while that didn't bother me at first, it's been building up inside me the more I worked on that game. I don't want to hate the thing I'm working on, especially as this is mostly a hobby for me, so I felt like it was time to move on. At least for now.
So, Hag Magnate is only a super early prototype. Mostly, I've only worked on the behavior of the player character and some ancillary elements, but it's started out pretty great. I don't have the full narrative fleshed out yet, but I'm trying to find a happy medium between medieval and Victorian fantasy, all with Lovecraftian undertones. It's a little bit outside of time, and also there are monsters from another dimension that will both fit fantasy tropes and also leave room for the more absurd. Whether I can pull it all together or not remains to be seen, but I have high hopes!
The first big thing that was bothering me (re: Nether Mind) was that enemies didn't have health bars, and nor did the player. This design choice was made with good intentions, but the consequences were dire. Basically, the thought was that health bars are abstract things and don't make sense. Why does that huge boss die after you attack its toe a hundred times? Why do creatures behave identically at 100hp and 1hp? So the idea was to make distinct states instead of outright HP. Probably the best example of that is the ax tree enemy (below). But different damage states take a lot of effort to create and animate, and the permutations get crazy if you have all sorts of attackable regions on larger enemies, so what this tended to mean was enemies only take one hit to die. This in turn meant that the only design directive for enemies could be "make it hard to approach", rather than "make it hard to sustain an approach" or similar. Even worse, we weren't even consistent in that regardeach of the game's bosses actually do have a healthbar, unlike normal enemies.
http://fat.gfycat.com/DearestAngryCleanerwrasse.webm
It also meant that things can't be too difficult. (Well, it should have meant that. Anyone who's played one of the demos can probably tell you it's still too difficult). Taking damage is bad, but dying in a single hit is worse, and it's hard to balance a game when there's no shades of gray. So one of the first orders of business was adding healthbars back into the game.
http://zippy.gfycat.com/PersonalDistortedGuineapig.webm
You can also see an energy meter (stamina/mana) on the HUD. I think stamina management is a really great idea in games where it makes sense. But it didn't really make sense for Nether Mind. Partly because it was too punishing for the platforming sections of the game (thanks to bad balancing), and partly because none of the combat would otherwise benefit from spamming the attack button, which is the primary phenomenon that stamina management attempts to stymie.
The other problem when you lose health bars is that all hits count for the same amount of damage. So you can't have weapon A does X damage and weapon B does Y damage. This, combined with a limited (at the time) understanding of Spine and item attachments, lead to the design decision of only one weapon being in the game. It felt fine at the time, but it's been bothering me more and more as I play other games where you have a multitude of play styles and weapon opportunities; and also as I realized the model games which I was thinking of where you don't have a bevy of weapons (Donkey Kong Country, Crash Bandicoot) also don't have particularly deep combat to begin with.
http://fat.gfycat.com/InsecurePleasedDeinonychus.webm
The other big thing is uneven terrain. Assuming that every walkable surface will be flat is so much easier in terms of design and animation. So that's what we did! No ramps, no slopes, no real rotating platforms, no arced bridges, no swaying or seesawing precipices, just all flat all day. One of the major hurdles with angled surfaces is getting the feet to line up with the floor. It's pretty immersion breaking to see feet floating off of or sunk a good distance into any given surface, so the easy solution is to nip that in the bud and not do it at all. But it turns out there's a good solution (for modeled animations) in inverse kinematics, or IK.
You can already see it on the platform above, with Gisele's feet keeping in place on the platform as it swivels back and forth. The base animations each are made as if the ground is level, but instead of positioning each articulation of the bones I have the legs each target a separate foot bone, and then the proper angles are computed in runtime. What this means is that my code can find the feet bones in the model and dynamically adjust them to match the tangent angle of the floor (which gets saved during collision checks). It even works well when the player is in motion, running up or down slopes.
http://zippy.gfycat.com/NearMiserableAmericanbittern.webm
And it's not that I never knew IK existed. Hell, Ocarina of Time was doing it for Link back on the N64, and basically every AAA game from the previous and current console generation uses it. I just didn't know how to use it in this manner until recently.
That's it for now. Hopefully I'll have more consistent (if smaller) updates going forward.
