Today I've advanced with a few rooms in the mine tileset. The minecarts were on fire in State-2, but now they're carrying globs of poison. It still means you have to be wary of them although they can be used to reach higher areas. The first visit to State-4 is quite quick so I should be done with it - and ready for Ensign E's boss fight - quite soon. Probably a week would do it.
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Time spent on the project so far: 348 hours
Two new rooms were created and there's a small cutscene in one of them where Ensign E collects a bunch of InfoPacks and leaves the room via Ghosting technology. Not much else to talk about so let's talk about the characters in 100RTBD! Although they are all CyberRobots from the Hex Galaxy, they all have their personalities! They also have a dark past but the player will have to figure that out by himself. So here is a short bio for all the members of the Security Seven, ordered by rank!
Admiral A is the leader of the S7 but its is also their youngest member, A is there for its team and will stop at nothing to protect them and help them. General G is rough, gruff and it never pulls any punches, in battle or otherwise. Colonel C has the strongest perception of all the group and it never misses anything important, C is s also very level-headed. Ensign E is also the engineer of the S7. They wanted to call it Engineer E but it joked that Ensign sounded more military. E's a fun robot. Defender D is always the first to go in dangerous places because of the barrier it uses to protect itself and others. D is very selfless but a bit near-sighted. Brigadier B is a paranoid humorless explosive experts who would rather never have to deal with anything bad in its life. FirstClass F thinks it's the coolest in the world. F is a famous gambler and although it holds the lowest rank in the S7, nobody would argue that its abilities in the field aren't useful.
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Time spent on the project so far: 347 hours
Screenshot after the jump: Meet the team!
I've changed the way status ailments work now on enemies. More specifically the calculation that is done in order to see if you manage to get them affected by an ailment. As such, enemies are now easier to take down. I've also upped their damage output in higher states. As it was, they still dealt the same damage no matter if it was an octobit, an octopyrobit or an octoretrobit, now they have multipliers, like they do with life and armor. Poisoned enemies deal less damage, so this kinda balances itself out!
Fifteen updates until I release Playable Version 2!
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Time spent on the project so far: 346 hours
Not much done today, I've made two new rooms, one with a mini boss and the other with a chest and an infopack. The chest will contain a gun part. I'm not sure which one yet. I've also tweaked the minimap tiles a bit because they didn't look particularly great to me. I'm still not happy with the result so I'll probably go at it some more tomorrow.
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Time spent on the project so far: 345 hours
State-4's status effect is poison. I've decided against poison making the character take damage over time since fire already does that and I have so few status effects than having them overlap doesn't feel like the best idea to me. Instead, poison lowers all of your offensive-related stats. gun fire speed, piercing, critical hit chance, damage. It's also harder to get poisoned than to get afflicted by other ailments.
In State-4, enemies drip bubbles of poison and poison flows around in rooms in various patterns, so the player will have to be careful to avoid taking unnecessary damage while exploring!
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Time spent on the project so far: 343 hours
Screenshot after the jump: Acid rain
According to my design docs, State-4 is going to be pretty straightforward. You'll have to backtrack a bit between locked doors and various paths at crossroads but there won't be any breaking down or restoring. That is, if I'm reading my design docs right. State-4 is acid land, enemies deal poison damage and leave puddles of damaging acid wherever they go. Clouds of gas and flowing bubbles are also pretty common there. Fun times for all!
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Time spent on the project so far: 339 hours
Only nineteen entries before I release a new playable version of 100RTBD! This time I'll try harder to have it played by people, I'll buy blinking banner ads on geocities and angelfire if I need to! The fight against Defender D is over, he blocks with his shield, shoots up and down and moves around. After you defeat him, you get the barrier skill and an infopack that will bring you to poison world.
The barrier skill blocks all attacks for a few seconds, allowing you to move right through enemies. It has a long-ish cooldown and it doesn't last very long, but that's because right now I think it would be too powerful otherwise. Testing will tell!
Currently working on: The barrier skill, State-4
Time spent on the project so far: 337 hours
Screenshot after the jump: Barrier skill
Here's the fight against Defender D! He jumps around and shoots at you with his spinning gun, he also activates a shield thorough the fight. It's not completely done yet - should be okay tomorrow. Then onward with the beginning of State-4! State-4 is poison land, oh joy.
Currently working on: Boss fight with Defender D
Time spent on the project so far: 335 hours
Screenshot after the jump: Defender D fight
And now I'm properly working on the fight against Defender D - after having to fix the glaring omission that there are no restoration altars for you to go back to state-3 after you get the 29th infopack. Defender D shouldn't be too bad to program, he jumps on top of ice pillars, shoots at you occasionally and he has a barrier that blocks attacks. Probably tomorrow I'll be done with that guy! I feel like the hardest part of the fight to code is the jumping on pillars part.
Currently working on: Boss fight with Defender D
Time spent on the project so far: 333 hours
On my next game, I'll make sure to use unity's physics engine, if it's appropriate. Right now in 100RTBD I'm using a bit of both. Some of my game objects use rigidbodies and the engine calculates gravity, pull, friction, all of these things. Some of my objects are just moved around by translation commands and they're not impacted by anything else. It's a bit of a hassle to mix both of these things.
My TeraBit enemies, for instance, behaved quite weirdly if I just did their movement myself. They would jump up and then slam down, but they would clip through walls, stand on air, things like that. Adding a rigidbody made them unable to go through solid objects and the gravity pulled them down when they were above pits, but it took a bit of messing around.
Which one's better? Using Unity's physics or calculating everything yourself? Could I do enemies that walk on walls using the basic stuff? This is mostly why I tried to do physics myself with simple translations!
Currently working on: Boss fight with Defender D
Time spent on the project so far: 331 hours
I had to fix some challenges that you can attempt way earlier in the game because they were broken by your ability to double jump. I have nothing against players being able to complete challenges more easily as they get stronger but being able to double-jump on a ledge and skip 100% of the actual challenge is a bit broken, so I added some blocks that become solid when you start the challenge.
I'm also making a new enemy type, it's the Terabit. These guys jump high and try to charge at you!
Currently working on: Creating rooms that you can explore after you got the double-jump
Time spent on the project so far: 327 hours
There are some prefabs that keep getting messed up between different versions of the entity, so when I try to use them in other occasions they have to be fixed in many ways. Rigidbodies that shouldn't be there, BoxColliders that aren't triggers, things like that. It's especially true for my redux boss fights you can do at 4-1 in all states. The problem with them is mostly that my bosses have some hardcoded positional data.
Such as "to do such attack, move to X,Y, then do something". It works fine on the original map since the data fits, but when I try to place the boss in another spot to do the same attacks, it doesn't work well. So I have to take everywhere that uses hardcoded data and just add relative data (relative to where the boss spawns) instead. I'll have to keep that in mind for the other 4 members of the Security Seven!
I'll also probably figure out a way to not have to copy the 4-1 room to all the states since the room itself contains multiple rooms with all bosses. Maybe instead of that I should just make one room that changes layout and moves bosses in/out instead of making them all by hand? Sounds too much like procedural generation!
Currently working on: Fixing boss fights
Time spent on the project so far: 325 hours
Screenshot after the jump: Colonel C redux
A bit of detailed inside baseball today! How to build a new room from scratch, the way I do it!
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Time spent on the project so far: 323 hours
Screenshot after the jump: The result
Today I've been working on the different extra rooms you can unlock after getting the double-jump upgrade. Most of them are pretty inconsequential but some have extra gear or items in them, so they take a bit more time to make. I've also noticed that I forgot a door with a 15 on it somewhere, you can normally open it halfway through Stage-2. Luckily for me, it's not a big thing to forget because it's also pretty inconsequential.
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Time spent on the project so far: 321 hours
I had pretty bad performance issues with the bomb dodge challenge, the framerate dropped drastically whenever bombs were thrown and it just got worse if I had more than one bomb dropped at the same time. A little bit of inside baseball here, but I figured out it was because these bombs generated some NullReferenceExceptions which Unity loses some frames dealing with. I added the appropriate checks and now the bombs flow seamlessly.
After completing the bomb dodge challenge, you get the Grenade Launcher gun part that gives a chance to use the Bomb skill whenever you shoot. In order to give all weapons a more-or-less same chance to shoot the bombs, I had to multiply my odds with the fire speed of the weapon. Testing that was quite fun!
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Time spent on the project so far: 319 hours
Screenshot after the jump: Fast weapon testing
I had an idea while creating the design docs where some challenge rooms would be 'duels' with the other members of the security seven. I thought it was a neat idea, the duels would be simple things where you wouldn't fight them exactly, but maybe dodge their attacks and try to hit them more than they hit you. But then I noticed in my design doc that there were only 5 duels in all the game and three of them were against the same character, so I decided to scrap the idea. Maybe if I had spread it out evenly among all the characters it would have stayed, but I think it's a bit silly to create a different class of challenges only for these dudes. So I'm going to rework the duels as normal challenges!
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Time spent on the project so far: 316 hours
Now that Defender D is saved and the 29th InfoPack given, I made the special shortcut breakdown pit so you can move on as quickly as you want. I still have to go by the whole accessible map so far and create the rooms where you could double-jump into. I've also added the first 2x2 gun part - the item finder. Gun parts that take more space are usually more useful, but it's a balance act.
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Time spent on the project so far: 315 hours
The other members of the Security Seven are still moving around, mostly fighting you and causing nothing but trouble. Sometimes they'll help - if you help them - like Defender D, stuck in that ice cage on State-3. He'll give you an InfoPack if you free him and let him get out of there. Ain't he a nice guy! (Don't mind that you'll have to fight him soon after that!)
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Time spent on the project so far: 314 hours
Screenshot after the jump: Defender D in ice
After two fights against giant bosses, the player now has 28 InfoPacks and the game informs him that there is another one to gather in State-1. The player can just warp using a shortcut, but as for myself I'll take the scenic route, making sure the double-jump doesn't break anything and adding the special rooms you couldn't get into without double-jumping along the way. I think I have the Commander C simulation fight to add as well?
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Time spent on the project so far: 313 hours
Screenshot after the jump: Too big to be true
I'm all for backtracking and exploration once you have unlocked new abilities, but the critical path of the game shouldn't require tons of backtracking in order to complete it. As the game was, once you got the 28th InfoPack and the Double Jump ability, you would go back to the bottom of the map in order to breakdown into State-11 and then go back all the way up to get the 29th InfoPack, and then you'd go back to State-3 to continue. That's not too long of a trek, and there are hidden things here and there that you'll be able to collect if you take the long way around. For people who prefer to go straight to the next story beat, I've decided to add a one-way breakdown pit to get back to State-1 super quickly.
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Time spent on the project so far: 311 hours
Screenshots after the jump: Double jump and new breakdown