Well, hey again!
It's been quite awhile since the last update. I originally wanted to do some sort of post weekly, but due to chronic procrastination, that didn't happen. I'll try to post more though.
I have a lot more stuff to talk about this time around, both good and bad news, so strap in, grab a snack *and a glass of orange juice* because HERE. WE. GOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
(I am so sorry if you got that reference)
The Taunt
Remember in the last update, where at the end I had this image?
Well, when I made this, I was really proud of it. Like REAAALY proud of it. "It looks so cool!" I thought, "There's no way I can just use this in one piece of art in a post nobody's gonna see after the game comes out! I gotta put this in somehow!".
The dimensions of the sprites are identical to the in game ones, besides some minor differences that i'll get into later. I thought about how I could add these poses to the game, and eventually settled on a simple taunt you can do.
When you press the Z button on your keyboard(or whatever you use to dash, you can set your controls to whatever; more on that later) you'll perform a little taunt!
So, you might be asking yourself: "What in the actual hell is thing even used for, it's completely useless!" and in any normal circumstance you'd be right... But since only a few you you reading these will actually go on to play the game, and most players won't come back to these, i'll let you in on a little secret....
You see, Like many of you a couple months ago, I was indulging many hours of my time into a little indie game called Pizza Tower, and in that game, there is also a taunt that seems completely and utterly useless at first. But if you taunt on enemies just before they properly hit you, you'll counter them. The exact same thing happens in my game, and with a little practice, can be used to deflect enemies away from you. Cool huh?
Though, now that you, the chad reader, have obtained this information, I better not see ANY OF YOU tell the filthy normies about this, or else I'll demote you back into being a loser.
Anyways I gotta move on now soooooooo
Removed regular mode
Uh-oh. This is the "Bad News" That I mentioned approximately one testament ago.
So If you'd been following this game since the beginning(y'know let me know how long you've been following the TAG series or just me in general, oldest one gets fanart - why not?!) then you'd know that I planned there to be multiple modes besides a classic mode; and while I'm still planning on a story mode (hell, I've started work on it, just don't have enough stuff to show off right now) i'm sad to say that regular mode has been scrapped.
So, why was it scrapped? For starters, it was too difficult to program. Regular mode is basically a mode where you're "it" and need to tag the other taggers and not be "it" by the time the 30 second timer goes out. The other taggers can also tag each other, which would cause some intense tomfoolery.
The way the taggers were programmed was a huge issue. They don't have an AI or anything, they just go in a static loop that changes whenever the time is high enough into a 'phase 2'. I wanted to program a System that made the taggers run away when they were in near someone that was "it", and to target the non "it" characters when they were. To keep it brief, That proved to be too difficult, so it got nuked.
It's unfortunate, but to make up/ replace it, I've replaced Regular Mode with:
Difficulty modes!
So alongside Classic Mode and Regular Mode, I added EXTREME Mode. It's a more difficult, faster, and more EXTREME than the other modes, wasn't originally a difficulty thing. When Regular Mode got executed, I had to quickly add something in to replace it, and then while brainstorming , an idea hit me.
A mode for losers!
So with that, easy mode was added into the game, and EXTREME mode was rebranded as the highest difficulty instead of a optional challenge mode.
Might change it to just "hard mode" because Easy > Normal > EXTREME seems quite excessive.
Re sprites and other stories
Around this time, I also had to change some things about the in-game sprites. You see, when I was making the Taunt art(the art that would later go on to inspire the taunts as I mentioned earlier), I made Pokio and Ted's eye lengths and body shapes slightly different. So to prevent the characters from shrinking and EXTREME eye dilation every time a taunt occurs, I just changed their sprites a tiny bit to fit the taunt frames.
The Ability of choice
No, this isn't some super cool choice related feature. I just finished implementing the settings.
You can do some basic things, like adjusting volume, toggling SFX and other shenanigans, but the main thing I want to focus on and basically the only reason this even exists is the ability to change your controls into anything you want.
Now this might sound like nothing to you, but to me I'm proud on how I've implemented it. you see the Control buttons are stored in a list, and the code is set up in a way that if you press the button that's equal to whatever letter you put on that list, like for example if you put the letter "A" on the first bullet point of the list if you press "A" again you'll go up.
(yes I know I spelled "controls" wrong shut up)
This was a game changer for me. No longer do I have to deal with people whining about WASD support or whatever because they can just change it themselves. It's very convenient, light on code, and doesn't need a engine or anything, so If you wanna the ability to change your control layout on your Scratch game without going in and editing all that code, just add this and make your life way easier.
End
Phew.... that was a lot. Hopefully that made up for the 3 week period where I went AFK for. As I said in a previous post, The Daniels Planet update is also coming out, and I also have some juicy info that i'll be sharing then.
So, as always..
See you next time!
(i'd use that same image again like last time, but I used it earlier in this post, and I don't wanna seem repetitive, so uhh here's this early story mode screenshot okay now skedaddle)
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