I mean, I think this month was productive.
KKCR, at least, now has its own explosion effect! This is used for a new enemy, but it will be used throughout the game, as explosions are pretty dang useful.
But before I get into a lot of the visual stuff I've been doing, there was a huge update to states in the game, which was extremely.. good. However, I do not know a lot about this, so core (programmer) decided to step in and explain it himself.
-------WARNING: LOTS OF TECHNOSPEAK. I DONT WRITE THINGS THAT OFTEN. Let's talk about states. In the dawn of time, a state was very simple, just a number that decides how something should act. When you changed its state, it simply just started doing something else, with no preparation inbetween. We are no longer in the dawn of time, however, and KKCR is looking to be somewhat of a big game, so the states had to be turned into state MACHINES. Now, these states are much more complex. Instead of simply doing something else when the state changed, now it finished whatever it was doing in the previous state, then prepared for the next state, and THEN started doing something else. To the casual viewer, this won't look like anything super special, but to the technical eye, and the game developer, this turns what was once a weird and underbaked process into something that can be as dynamic as possible.
The gobbledygook above shows one of the cool things we can do with a customizable state machine. "state_idle" is the base idle state for this object, "process" is the function that state runs every frame, and the "function" is what we're telling "state_idle" to do instead of what it was initialized with. Everything else is largely unimportant.Another thing, the state machine can do ANYTHING its told to do, as long as that thing is somewhere in the game's code! We're already making some use of this feature, so trust me it's REALLY powerful.-core
-------Miraculously, this only broke like a couple things that were basically fixed immediately.
On the side of level design, Matsumoto has finally entered playtesting, after a while of just sitting on her. Oops.
She was also way too difficult for the first boss. Double oops.
Oh well. This is why we have playtesters in the first place. Some tweaks here and there should definitely fix that right up.
New level being worked on, in Autumn Hill High. A haunted high school brimming with ghosts! My intention for the level is to be pretty metroid-like.
This enemy is the Poltergeist, an enemy that will, uh, hopefully make people remember that the grab is actually really powerful. AHH has a few of these, actually. A lot of the poltergeist's animations are done completely in engine, also.
It won't get hit by your melee attacks, and I am planning on using it in arenas, so that will force those running through the levels to interact with it.
I don't know if this even counts as a form, I guess the Prairie Schooner is basically Cherrypost's "form" so this should count? Hoping to make some fun puzzles with this.
You may notice the level looks pretty barren. That's because, this time, I decided to jump right into level design without creating a lot of the tiles + cleanables beforehand, I want to see how it fairs in comparison. So far, I feel no different, but I've only made a few rooms so far..
Should be all for this month! Hoping for next month to have a public video devlog, but I'm waiting on some visual polish for Cherrypost before showing that. Thank you!
-Fuzzy