Even the little things can make a big difference to how a game plays. In this particular case, altering one number that is set to a variable on a single line of code changes the gameplay style of the entire game in a rather noticeable way.
Of course, as should be obvious by the title of this blog post, I am referring to the point in my code where I set the gravity for all player characters. I’ve been of the opinion for a while now that the aerial movement in my builds of Turtles all the Way have been too floaty. It was as if the characters had no weight to them, since even the weakest jumpers like Magnet could just huge distances unassisted. Inversely, characters with a high jumping stat, such as all of Ruyo’s forms, became unwieldy due to the length of their jumps.
So I started messing around with the gravity, and now the player characters are subject to 66% heavier gravity than before. Now the weak jumps are actually weak and need the assistance of other mechanics to make long distances work in the air, and Ruyo’s jumps aren’t as stupid. But they still feel stupid, so I felt as if I needed to remedy that too.
That is, until I realized that I already gave him the ability to cut off his own jumps. Instead of flight, some of Ruyo’s forms can summon an invisible platform that disappears automatically after jumping again or getting far enough away from it. While his other forms have no flight equivalent at all, and thus have nothing to interrupt his jumps, the ones that have this ability immediately stop in place when the platform is summoned, cutting off any jumping that may have been taking place, which makes Ruyo’s jumping more skill-based than pure stupidity. I found that I needed to change exactly nothing to get everything working properly after I’d increased the gravity.
Now, something I should note in terms of how far I’ve gotten in working on the game is that I could easily just cheat on the A.I. and make it look like it’s working well instead of making it actually work well. By which I mean using tricks such as making it so enemies have to stay close to their spawn points to avoid the issue with their running into walls, having your A.I. partners teleport to you if get too far away from them, etc. These are things that would get the game’s code done quicker, and are things that are well within my skill level. In fact, I’m probably going to go for it and just do that.
The problem is that everything artistic is still eluding me. Even if I were to do those things and get the code done today, I’d still need the visuals for the game, and I can’t provide them unless people don’t mind the game looking terrible. Personally, I want the game to look decent – like, if Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped was a 1 and Sonic Generations was a 10, a 2.5 would do it for me. The thing is that me doing everything on my own would produce a -4, if a 0 was Minecraft.
I’ve asked a friend of mine if he could make a place-holder logo for the game when his hand’s better (he broke it from punching a wall in anger), but before anyone asks me why I don’t just get him to do all of the art for the game, he has problems drawing most of the sort of stuff I’d need. Well, that’s just how it goes.
So yeah, I could literally finish the game’s code within the week, but I won’t because of the lack of art and music. Just thought I’d bring everyone up to speed.
I Am Only Myself 