I've been implementing the mechanics behind spikes and various other death-zones.


There exist both generic spike objects that are always fatal and directional spike objects that are only fatal if touched with a non-positive velocity in the direction the spikes are facing.



I revamped the corner correction mechanic so that you cannot be corrected into spikes. I also made upwards corner correction more lenient -- previously, in contrast to other directions, upwards corner correction required one to be moving slowly upwards or not at all -- the vertical component of velocity needed to be between -1.5 and 0. Now, it just needs to be greater than -1.5, but with the added condition that one cannot be corner corrected upwards too soon after leaving the ground. The reason for this is that otherwise, it becomes possible to walk off a platform and then immediately walk back onto it which is kinda janky and uncomfortable.


I was worried that, even without explicitly being corner corrected, it would still be possible to get snapped onto a platform you shouldn't be if you just happened to be within the right 2-pixel margin above a block. However, taking a closer look at my code, I don't think that's mathematically possible unless one's vertical speed is slow anyway.


That caused a bizarre bug where you'd sometimes get stuck in the ground for no reason, but I fixed that as well.


There will need to be a third version of the autotiler specifically for handling spike tiles, but I haven't made that yet.

Cool feature number three: autotiling!


There are two versions of it at the moment, although I'll likely need a couple more by the end.

This is that secret project thing I mentioned. I have a real name in mind but I won't reveal it until I'm sure I'll have something to show for it. No promises yet, it might still all come to nothing.
 
The plan is for a metroidvania type platformer with fancy advanced movement. I was going to write a long document about all the things that inspired me and how I arrived at my super brilliant design decisions, but instead, for now, I'll dedicate this thread to what I've actually accomplished so far.
 
Originally, Sypher was going to be involved with this, but given that he's not in the picture anymore it'll be just me again. Although, I want to get a few trusted people together to look over things to make sure what I'm doing isn't awful.
 
A lot of ideas been carried over from a tech demo I made in 2019 and then cancelled, which I called Legends' Perdition. I got pretty far, though.
 
The basic platforming physics is all there and I'm quite happy with it. I wanted smooth comfy platforming physics that still kind of resembles the style I used for Legend of Grey Moon and the Solar Shadows, but updated with all the modern conveniences for the smoothest and most comfy platforming experience. So, I added coyote frames, input buffers and corner correction, and so far it all works great.
 
I originally wanted to add moving blocks, however, that turned out to be monstrously difficult so I decided it wasn't worth the trouble.
 
I also reduced the base walking speed and jump height so that things don't get ridiculous once the movement gets upgraded. One of the reasons why Legends' Perdition failed was that the character was too agile, which clashed badly with the contained, single-screen rooms of my other platformers. So, I'll have bigger, scrolling rooms this time. Like Misery of Magic, the game window will be 853x480, but unlike it, it will make use of all the extra space to show you more of the room. Misery of Magic has 640x480 rooms and uses the extra space for the sidebar, and for whatever reason in Legends' Perdition I copied the sidebar thing because I'm a dumbass I guess.
 
To accommodate the bigger rooms, I created an upgraded "grid system", which is what I call the code that connects the rooms to each other. LoGM, SS2 and Misery of Magic all have very similar systems where all the rooms are part of a grid and each room's position within that grid is encoded in its internal name. This is very convenient because, when one goes out of bounds, the game can automatically figure out the name of what room should come next so all I need to do to put a room in the right place is to give it the right name. With the Legends' Perdition demo, I upgraded it a bit and and made it so that rooms didn't necessarily need to be all the same size, although they were still limited in how they could be connected together. 

However, I've totally overhauled the grid system for this new project. The game now automatically builds a list of where all the rooms are on the grid and how big they are. When the player leaves a room, it combines the position of the player character within the old room with the position of the old room within the grid to calculate a "global position" of the character, then checks that global position against the list of rooms to see if it's inside any of them. If it finds one, it can then use the global position to figure out exactly where to place the player within the new room.
 
It's nearly as convenient as the old system and lets me connect rooms to each other however the hell I want!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1UPp1qVHMQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prYRiIElMGo

Figured I might as well make a thread for this, now that I've made an improved version of it. Version 1.1 is named "hardtype" because I thought Gun's hardtype paths sounded cool, and because it's harder than 1.0 which I am henceforth calling "badtype". I'll leave both of them up if anyone's interested.

1.1.1/"Hardtype" download: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cHt7PrLdGbc8uEsvvgghi_3RdL0akYCQ/view?usp=sharing

1.0.0/"Badtype" download: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BnU1NS-jBD-OopsT8sLkQy84-c85iE8N/view?usp=sharing

Changes and improvements:

-- Overhaul of attack pattern generation! The goal was to make attack patterns less boring and samey and more likely to be lie in the chasm between "trivially easy" and "total bullshit". This entailed a multitude of changes:

---- The first change to attack pattern generation was to rip out 3 of the 14 original subpatterns, because they were crappy, and add 6 new ones in their place for a total of 17.

---- A couple of the subpatterns were buggy and created unintentionally dumb and broken patterns -- those have been fixed.

---- There was also a bug where extremely low difficulty variations of certain subpatterns could rarely crash the game. Things started to go wonky when the game's pattern difficulty variable fell below -3.75 and crashes started to happen at about -4.54. Now, all the patterns keep working fine all the way down to at least -8.82, which is the lowest difficulty the game uses.

---- Patterns can appear in a whole continuum of speeds rather than just three speeds. Furthermore, one in ten subpatterns randomly get a big speed boost because **** you.

---- Attack patterns consisting of two subpatterns instead of one are far more common and begin appearing right from world 1. It is also now possible for attack patterns later on to contain three subpatterns, which begins to be possible around world 5 ish.

---- Subpatterns belonging to the same attack no longer share any of the key variables that keep track of what's going on, which makes them a bit more interesting.

---- Replaced the "size parameter" with a new layer of variation underneath subpatterns. Internally they're called "btypes" and I like to call them "micropatterns". Short version is, whenever a subpattern would previously call forth a bullet and consult its size parameter to tell it what kind of bullet, it will now consult its btype and call forth a micropattern of one to three bullets. If it's a large bullet or multiple bullets, then the subpattern's base difficulty is lowered to compensate.

---- At high levels, the game now strongly prefers to use attacks with multiple subpatterns and fancy micropatterns at low difficulty rather than single subpatterns at high difficulty. This helps keep things interesting and greatly reduces the risk that an attack pattern will become impossible because its subpattern's difficulty has been cranked to the sky -- I suspect this will happen at difficulty 30-50 ish, but 1.0 will occasionally throw out undodgeable nonsense at much lower difficulty than that.

-- Fixed a few minor bugs with level generation which could lead to slightly janky levels, although this wasn't really that serious to begin with.

-- Game is harder -- it starts out at a similar difficulty but escalates much more quickly. I reached world 15 in 1.0, I doubt anyone's ever reaching world 15 in 1.1. The increase in difficulty between different stages of the same world is also now much more noticeable.

-- Starting in world 4, unusual-coloured blocks will occasionally release dark spirit thingies, which kick around the screen like the key does for the remainder of the stage, but, unlike the key, are deadly to touch. I don't find them particularly threatening, but they're there I guess.

-- Also starting in world 4, there's a chance that the white X blocks will be replaced by a much smaller number of new black X blocks, which are extremely durable.

-- Text on the title screen now randomly picks from a list of possible text lines. I wanted to be cute hahah

Things I didn't change or improve:

-- At one point I was planning on adding a scoring system, but I couldn't think of a way to make it interesting and distinct from "get as far as possible".

-- Blocks with keys in them are sometimes indistinguishable from the blocks around them -- tough, deal with it.

-- I couldn't be bothered to add sound effects either.

Just cleared 9 Hours 9 People 9 Doors and... got the ending where everyone died. Including June and Junpei.

Zero probably did it. I know I took door 3, and the one before that, I think, was 4? (It went to a kitchen with Santa and Lotus and June.)

Either way, is it truly the end?

Can't be, else it wouldn't have other endings. :p

Just a bit gory, though...

A part of me expected one of the deaths, but... I'll try with the other endings when I feel like it.

Playing Pokemon Sunday Version now, with its Light-type (weak to AND effective against Dark). My team's too weak for the second Gym, haha... that Umbreon (Lv18?) wiped my entire team out (they're Lv17, minimum).
So: training time. (The Exp. Share helps, though.)

Very nice! ^w^ I think the idea behind Pokemon is very cool and I've played a few versions and fangames of it, but often I just end up losing interest after a while.

I've been playing a lot of Sunblaze lately :3