899 replies to this topic

[C-Dawg]

I've done that.  Well, not that exactly.  The way you describe it is actually much more fair to the player.  Just keep completing Corridors if you want to see what I mean,

[newstarshipsmell]

All that controller-hurling and it turns out that Gemini miniboss is really easy if you just get onto the center block right away... LOL. Though I was trying to shoot him with super missiles and his trajectories were mostly too close to my position to hit him. I would've aim at the other blocks and shot in front of him to catch him in the 2nd blast, but you know... that would've involved pressing left, or right. Anyways, he has no life meter - is that deliberate? An indicator of how close you are to killing him would be nice...

 

I think I've mostly figured out why I've had such a hard time with your wall clinging. The code doesn't seem to care if you're already holding down L when you contact the wall; it seems it just assumes L depressed means you're trying to jump, so disallow cling (rather than, say, ignoring L depressed upon contacting the wall, and allowing cling until L is released/depressed again.) I thought about it, and realized that I've always played platformers with variable-height jumps, dependent upon controller input duration, by basically holding down the jump button during the entire jump, rather than releasing it at the top of the jump, as a lazy way of always maximizing my jump height - and since most games (or at least in my case, all other games I can recall playing) don't somehow penalize you otherwise for doing this, I guess I never really noticed it. I mean, if Jump down upon landing doesn't make you jump again or do something else, sometimes I'll just hold it down past landing until I want to jump again, at which point I quickly release and depress it again. Since it would seem you coded your WCB assuming a non-idiotic style of play unlike mine, I'm constantly jumping against walls and failing to grab them when I expect to, and having to untrain myself from holding the fucking button down after cresting my jumps.

 

Also, because you can end up slightly inside the blocks, especially if you're on the descending arc of a jump and contact a block on the top corner, I've noticed that being inside the block slightly causes your cling to not work even if you have L released/D towards wall depressed, so you end up just sliding down the side. So you have to learn to pay close attention to whether you've moved slightly inside it, and if so, to immediately move away from the wall and then back against it to latch on, which is a bit counter-intuitive and frustrating.

 

Anyways, no real suggestions/criticism there - I think now that I understand it, I can live with it and quit falling so many times. That route was also frustrating since for most of it, having the ability to cling forces you to unlearn a few moves to avoid unwanted clings and optimize your path, and doesn't really give you any shortcuts thanks to them, so they come off like a frustrating interference more than anything else. Once I learned how to actually use them properly, the last leg of that route became considerably easier, since you don't have to waste time with the subscreen/grappling to cross them. Just wanted to let you know why I complained so hard before so you didn't think there was something horribly wrong with them not apparent to you. I was just playing stupidly.

[C-Dawg]

Well, part of the quest design - particularly once we're done with Draft 1 and it's actually in Beta - is to make the controls intuitive.  So there should be some happy medium where things work for the player without excessive hand-holding the game or resort to a manual to explain the arcana of the play style.

 

Cancer mode done, hurrah.  I actually had a secondary attack that isn't working for whatever reason, but since dodging a constant barrage of 4x4 charge shots is plenty hard enough, I think I'll just let that one go.  I'm going to go back and address as many of your comments as I can tonight, for a change of pace, and if I get enough done I'll upload a new one.  Maybe take a look at this bizarre bug people keep reporting on the very first boss not dying.

 

I have a question.  How powerful is the Sidearm getting?  I've been adding upgrades here and there kind of willy-nilly, and I'm concerned that it eventually outclasses even Super Missiles.  Do you find the Missiles more damaging?

 

The actual measurement is this: each Sidearm upgrade gives you +1 power, and the Rapid Fire Sidearm automatically boosts that by 5.  (Which I might remove, actually).  The Super Missles currently deal 50 damage per explosion, and you can catch enemies in two explosions if you are lucky.  Do you notice a difference?

Edited by C-Dawg, 11 January 2015 - 11:08 PM.

[newstarshipsmell]

I dunno, since I haven't bothered to keep track of how many upgrades of each type I've acquired. But it cleared out enemies in Virgo pretty quickly/easily. Capricorn looks like it'll be a different story since a bunch of the enemies are impervious to the sidearm shots... and I'm still running around with just the Aries Saber. So I may have to go get the Gemini and/or Taurus weapons if this level proves super-annoying with the Saber.

I haven't really been bothering to use missiles on anything besides walls, since they move so slowly. They'd be more practical if you got a missile launcher upgrade (i.e. Bow 2) at some point, but then I don't know if that would make a lot of the boss fights even easier.

 

Capricorn 61: Magnet effect makes it incredibly difficult/tedious to hop up into the gap on the right side. After many dozens of tries, I was only able to leave the room twice, once by landing on the edge of the jar top and walking against the force, and once by accidentally exploiting the slide-along-bottom-of-ceiling bug.

Capricorn 71: The upper-right path is missing water overlay and conveyor effect.

Capricorn 64: The room flashes the 5C coords for the switch's target door behind the purple 4E for Dr. Mo's lab. I can still read them, but it looks ugly, and I imagine not all cases would be legible. Can the target door coords flash on top of the plot coords instead? Or maybe have them alternate?
Also, the door leads to another no-grav/4-bat empty cave.

Beginning Corridor Boss: Just read that review on the demo - and now that I think about it, I think when I first played it and had that same problem, I did the same thing. I didn't realize you could destroy the side domes on the boss, and just kept concentrating on shooting it in the middle until it died, at which point I ended up stuck. But I recall that on subsequent attempts, I realized the side parts were destructible, and purely for completion's sake, deliberately destroyed all of them before concentrating on attacking the center. So that may be what's causing that bug.

 

Capricorn 30: Something buggy with the right border/magnet effect in this room. It's difficult to go right into room 31, as you can't simply walk right while standing on top of the jar. I had to jump up and then slid out along the top row - think I may have had to dash to manage it. When I fell and hit the blades, I jumped and latched onto the side of the jar, and when I jumped up holding right, I only jumped vertically past the top of the jar and remained on my latching wall sprite.

Also, maybe you should modify these rooms with magnets and cave doors in them, like this one and room 72 - just move the door upwards one tile and put a solid block underneath it, leaving the exit warp where it is, so when you come out, you just get pulled against the block next to you, instead of back into the cave, which is annoying.

Capricorn 55/65: It looks like you may have forgotten to add some background tiles for the secret path in the lower-right/upper-right corners of these screens.

 

Capricorn 62: Horizontal waterflows lack conveyors.

Edited by newstarshipsmell, 12 January 2015 - 12:54 PM.

[C-Dawg]

I got a few pages' worth of your comments corrected last night, but I want to make a few more tweaks before uploading them.  I really want to figure out what's wrong with the first boss and squash it for good, and I probably need to re-code the plant boss in Virgo because I can't get it to work for the life of me.  I get the same strange effect you are describing, even though it is set up identically to how it is in Scorpio.

 

See, early on when I made custom bosses they had several pieces.  One piece for movement, another that tracked the boss ghost enemy and it's hp for a hp bar and custom triggers, etc.  Later on I started making each boss it's own simple FFC Script that did everything itself.  One of the things i have yet to do is go back and re-code the early bosses using this newer, cleaner implementation.  I might as well start with the one that doesn't freaking work.

 

None of that explains the first boss, though.  He's a single FFC combo.  The yellow orbs are not really part of the boss.  I mean, they are, but all they do is spit out rotating bullets that seek the player (which isn't currently working either, I notice).  They should have no relation to the boss's own hit points.  When the boss finds itself with less than 100 hit points, what is supposed to happen is that it goes into a death animation.  It should not be possible for the player to get it below 100 in a single shot, so there shouldn't be a way to skip the death procedure.  Something screwy is happening that still skips this step, though.  

 

I did fix the missiles so they explode when they hit a solid combo on the top or left of the screen, though!

Edited by C-Dawg, 12 January 2015 - 11:10 AM.

[newstarshipsmell]

Capricorn 6C: This room is impossible for me, so far, and about as much fun as the "scramble rooms" from Lufia 2. Expect they don't have buggy suction forces pulling you to your death... sigh. The X-Ray Scope is useless, too, for seeing where to go, which is frustrating, since the hint about it mentions using it to pass mazes in the further reaches of the last areas... I am not sure which way I'm supposed to go - I briefly made it partly inside the block on the 2nd from top row, 3rd from right, but was immediately sucked back out of it and have not been able to work my way back into it again. I've noted that the Grappler beam fires almost entirely across one of the bottom rows (either the one with the octopus or the one below it) but every time I try to get into the right side of that row, past the gap below, I am unable to work my way into it and either get sucked into the blades and die, or fall into the room below. Not sure I can pass this room. Any tips?

Edited by newstarshipsmell, 12 January 2015 - 12:56 PM.

[C-Dawg]

I'm not home at the moment, but I'll check that room when I am.  I did fix the fan / magnet code last night.  Or at least, I think I did.  It should't pull you into walls anymore.  I'm not sure if that helps this particular room.

[newstarshipsmell]

Okay, sounds good. I guess I may as well go get those three Zodiac weapons I skipped while I wait for a new demo.

Also, the sidearm rapid fire - except for the slow-moving bullets (which only happen while it's draining energy, not after you've drained it and the rate of fire drops) all the shots begin two tiles away from you, skipping the tile between, which makes it crap for shooting enemies right up against you. It becomes particularly frustrating in the underwater rooms in Capricorn with the spinning suction blades and fish swarming you, since you have to jump up/fire down to hit the fish, and that generally knocks you into the blades if you're anywhere near the center of the screen. Mind you, I'm still playing with the Aries Saber, so maybe they wouldn't be as hard to hit if I had another sword weapon, but I just figured I'd mention it in case you hadn't intended for the rapid fire upgrade to cause the sidearm to shoot past the first tile along your firing line.

The Pisces Zodiac Weapon pickup script also triggers before you reach the field in the center of the screen.

 

The Cancer Zodiac Weapon room does the same thing.

 

^ So this always seems to happen in the rooms where you approach the field from the right side, and never when you come in from the left.

 

Cancer Charge: If you are charging it and fire the sidearm, the sidearm will continue firing after releasing its button, until you release the Cancer Charge button.

Once the second sprite for its shot begins growing, you cannot shoot missiles or super missiles through it. Doesn't seem to interfere with any other items.

If you charge it up and cross screens, releasing the button during the transition, it will be off when you enter the next room, but when you press/hold the button again, will resume charging from the same point when you crossed screens, rather than starting over.

 

Suggestion: If you can't figure out the first boss death glitch, you could, in the meantime, add something that skips the first corridor and starts you at the beginning point of Aquarius (perhaps holding Down as the game starts?) and mention in the demo description how to skip it. That way people can still play it, and report whether or not it's still bugged, but without frustrating those that want to reach the main game (since they can try the first corridor, and if it locks up on them, simply restart and skip it.) Then when you've fixed it, just remove the bit that allows skipping it.

Edited by newstarshipsmell, 13 January 2015 - 12:13 AM.

[C-Dawg]

I uploaded a new version with about four pages' worth of your bug reports fixed.  

 

Two bugs that continue to annoy are the initial-boss-not-dying bug and the strange case of Virgo.  The rematch against the spinning cactus thing is proving to be a real pain in the ass.  

 

The issue you see with some weapons staying stationary through screen changes is an artifact of how FFCs work.  I suppose it is possible to check when the player leaves the screen and deactivate them, like I do with the Iron script, so I'll probably implement that at some point.

 

Oh, and Taurus Mode is now done on final boss.  Only Virgo remains, then I can start linking the end up with the regular game.

Edited by C-Dawg, 13 January 2015 - 01:21 AM.

[newstarshipsmell]

Cancer Charge: Doesn't work when standing on the left-most column. Pressing and holding the button causes the shot to briefly appear and disappear when aiming left, up or down; when aiming right, it immediately fires, from the tile to your right, and goes straight up. Works fine on the right side of the room. ETA: When standing on the top row (or if the top row is solid, but you jump up and jam yourself partially inside it) it fizzes out when fired up, left and right. When fired down, it fires immediately (i.e. you cannot charge it) and the shot remains stationary on the tile below you. Untested on bottom row, but since it works on the right column, I'm guessing it works down there too. I can only think of two places (both in Aquarius) with platforms allowing you to stand on the bottom row anyways, so it's kind of moot.

 

ETA2: Actually, its behavior is even stranger than that. It seems to remember the last direction you shot it. Standing on, or partially on, the left column or the top row, causes shots fired along the row or column to fizzle out, and shots fired into the room to immediately change direction to the last direction it was fired. Related to the other bug with it posted below, I suppose? So if you jam yourself into the ceiling between the top and next row below it, you can fire it left/right and watch it change direction, but if you're on the top row, standing on blocks on the next row below, firing left/right will cause it to fizzle out.

 

Pisces 21/02: I think I've seen this happen in other spots - I just know it happens here, and frequently, since this goddamned route to Capricorn takes me so many attempts to traverse. That giant crustacean enemy that bounces around? If you enter the screen from the left and stand on the left-most tile there, he'll almost always bounce over to the left column and then suddenly die. Not that I'm complaining. It makes getting to Capricorn marginally less trying of my patience. (He respawns normally when he dies this way, just like when you kill him.)

 

Also, Woot! I've finally completed an entire area - Cancer - excepting the giant venting thing I assume is the warp gate that I can't actually reach yet.

 

Cancer Charge: Even more fun with the Cancer Charge. If you charge it up to the second shot and fire it, you can then face another direction and fire again, and the first shot will change course to match the current direction you're facing when firing. You can change its direction as many times as you like until it hits something or goes offscreen.

Also, it seems to apply stun damage sometimes, but only when striking an enemy right next to you, at its lowest charge. Is this intentional?

Edited by newstarshipsmell, 13 January 2015 - 04:57 AM.

[C-Dawg]

In Pisces 22, what you're seeing is the Edgeguard function at work.  Basically, I took the script I use for enemies in the corridors and implanted it in the labyrinth in some places to spice up the variety of enemies I can use without much work.  These enemies run on FFCs and sometimes zip around pretty quickly, so I make sure to check before they would leave the screen and reset them.  If I don't, the FFC might leave the screen and then it'll reset the Script to 0 and stop functioning.  What I COULD do is tweak the movement pattern of the Shellder to ensure it never gets that close to the edge.

 

Also, if you think the route to Capricorn is hard now, you should have seen it before.  It is currently much, much easier than I originally designed it.  Originally the outcrop with the coral below the passage to the door on the right side of the screen wasn't even there.  I added it when I found that even I was only making it one out of every 20 attempts, and I realized the player has to go back and forth in that section a lot.  

 

Consider it training for Capricorn.

[newstarshipsmell]

Well, I can see where I'm supposed to go now, in Capricorn 6C, but as ShadowTiger said before, it's impossible to jump out of the little hole on the right side and move right. I tried for nearly ten minutes last night, spastically spamming the controls in the hopes I might at least ceiling-slide through it, with no luck. So I can't go any further at this point, I don't think. Unless there is some other trick to passing it. ETA: 61 works fine now, with that extra bubble block on top of the magnet. 30 still acts weird - it's not really hard to get out, but from how the magnet force works, you can't dash out standing on the jar, and if you jump, you'll latch onto the empty side of the screen, and have to jump up to the top row of the screen border passage and dash in order to reach the edge and scroll the screen.

Edited by newstarshipsmell, 13 January 2015 - 11:30 AM.

[C-Dawg]

Hm.  I'll take a look at that room.  It's not part of the main, plot-necessary direction through the Zone, so it's not one I hit frequently on my own play through.  I'll make sure it's possible, thanks for reporting!

[newstarshipsmell]

Lolwhut!? I thought that was the direction I had to go to proceed next. *sighs* *prepares to go bomb walls everywhere* *hopes the bombable wall isn't in one of the rooms with those damned gut bugs*

[C-Dawg]

Hey, don't blame me.  I put two clues for each of the plot-necessary bomb-able walls.  There should be one clue in Virgo and one clue in Capricorn, both pointing you to two critical "bomb the wall here" areas to reach Dr. Mo's hideout.

 

I will say this much; the place you need to go is very close to where you are.  Probably don't even have to get out of the liquid to find it.  

 

Or not.

Edited by C-Dawg, 13 January 2015 - 12:00 PM.