Game
Rock/Opera
11 years ago

Dev Log: smoke trails & dash flash!


Hi

I’m @arrogantgamer , and I’m going to call myself the “gameplay programmer”. @nomoon does all the important coding, like making controllers, sound, and networked multiplayer work right. I do stuff like make Rock jump… and shoot! Jump n’ shoot.

One of our goals in building Rock/Opera was to have it match Megaman X as closely as possible. Most recently I added a system for adding tiny decorations. I like to program “good”, but also fast, so in this case I made a little constructor that creates sort of generic “decoration” constructors. Yes, a constructor constructor. That’s how I roll. Rock is controlled by a big finite state-machine, and the FSM is in charge of adding these decorations. For example, as long as Rock is in the “dashing” state, the FSM is creating these little smoke trails. So, when Rock slides down a wall, or dashes through the air, she leaves a rad trail of smoke. Similarly, when she dashes, she makes sparks.

The decorations are in charge of their own lifecycles: so smoke, for example, just fades away after a few frames. The spark trail is a little more compllicated: if you dust off your ZSNES and run Megaman X at a low framerate, you’ll see that X’s dash-sparks are a four frame animation that aborts as soon as he stops dashing. So in our case, the decoration is aware of whether Rock is still dashing, and destroys itself if she isn’t. You can barely see this in the video I’ve provided, but it’s there.

The interesting thing for me, with these decorations, is that they are versatile enough to allow for all kinds of other neat play. The particle effect when Rock charges up her shot will probably be a decoration too. I’m currently refactoring the FSM so that we will be able to include multiple weapons (by creating an arsenal of FSMs and swapping them out), and because the decorations are tied to the FSMs we could add all kinds of other neat stuff later on. I’m kind of planning to use the Rock/Opera code base to make a metroidvania later on as a kind of biography of the life of a good friend. This friend, James, is an ageless wizard, so the game will probably need a lot of crazy decorations!

Here’s a video, demonstrating these tertiary animations. No art yet, just flashy dashing!

Thanks,

z.



0 comments

Loading...

Next up

This Satuday we invite to watch another #speedpainting of our artist Daniel Faiad.

How great is this scene of #Pecaminosa?

#ScreenShotSaturday | #IndieDev | #DigitalArt

"Our work is never over" they said.

The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark is out TODAY! 🖱️Advanced pointing, clicking action 🖨️Very funny words! Loads of them! 👻6 sarcastic, spectral cases to solve

A Shiny Mega Gengar 🌟 For @ManutkArt 's #ThreeColorsChallenge!

An infected room from the second part of Cybel ! Are you up for some cleansing?

If you have more of an acquired taste, the restaurants in Niravasi have you covered! Maybe skip the salad bar, though.

I did this on my 3DS ^^ #Kirby

THANK YOU FOR 400 FOLLOWERS!!!

Here is a drawing a I made FOR ALL OF YOU

LOVE YOU GUYS❤

An old abandoned potion-shop once belonging to a unknown people of magic and wonders -- that is tucked away from the world. Only to be found by the most daring of adventures setting out to find these remnants of a once great civilization, lost to time.

Sonic Red Ridge Update! Everything you see here will surely change by the time i'm done with it, but i'm happy with how it's shaping up so far :D