25th April 2017

In our new series, I look back at this week's game, through the eyes of the players!!

As comments are left on this week's game, this post will be expanded, so be sure to leave plenty of comments.

RSK Games

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The new platformer engine works pixel perfect in the "Gee Liz" game. You can land and stand on the edge of the platform with one leg out and not fall down. This comes in handy to avoid running into the enemy when the enemy is placed near the ledge.

It's not quite pixel-perfect, and is in fact very much a case of "player's width + grid position", but I did at least attempt to make things as good as I could.
I generally make most of my platform games follow a rule of "Width and a bit" to account for that, and also tend to give the player about 4 frames of "can still jump" whenever they run off a ledge.
That allows the player to do those last-minute jumps that are occasionally necessary.

Liz running animation is good, liked the wrists waving during the animation.

Given that I wimped out on creating a much nicer looking Witch character, I think she turned out rather nice.
Same goes for the enemy sprites. When I started, I thought "Yeah, I could animate some nice enemies!" but in the end I was far too lazy.. .. and/or played too much Zelda again!

Found the blue enemies to be easier to run into and lose life.

Yeah, I probably shouldn've narrowed the Blue-guy's collision a little. Meh, live and learn!!

The double star animation after losing life is so well done that initially I thought that I gained some power after touching the blue enemy, later after I died I realized that is not the case.

Originally I was going to put up a blue circular shield for the player, but then noticed the star sprite, and wondered how well that might look, instead.
It doesn't look too bad!

Like the "Samurai Plat" game the lowest platform is without any enemies and stars.

Yeah, I'm starting to like the idea of making the beginning of games be sparse, empty, and death free. It seems to give players enough time to get used to the controls, without making an actual horrible boring "Tutorial!"
Additionally, the lava doesn't properly start to move until you're about 2 or 3 platforms up.

I didn't find the sign board at some turns.

Due to the gradiented sloping tiles, there are occasions when the sign would float off the ground. I opted to hide this, by lazily hiding the sign!!
By the time they start to vanish, the player should be comfortable with the game to know when to turn around.
(*I hope!)

Didn't like the Swish reload as it was hampering the speed run kind of gameplay. Ability to shoot more than one enemy at a time helps but when there are four enemies in a row, swish reload slows down the progress.

The delay was a last minute addition.
Without it, it's far too easy to spam the Swish button and jump around without a care.
For a moment, I considered making the Stars replenish the Swish, and have it be a battle between collecting and fighting.
Maybe I should've tried that..?

Overall a good platformer game.

Yeah, as an experiment in gradiented sloping tilemaps, I think it turned out ok. Next will be to make a more substantial game using the same techniques!! But we'll save that for another time.

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Player Thoughts

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