Makes sense.
Anyways, just finished Iron #2 on the current demo. If it matters, he still has really simple patterns that make his fights trivial - both of which I learned quickly on my very first fight with him each time. Scorpio: The upwards fragment prevents the old pattern of standing by the wall and simply jumping above the missile as it explodes to avoid the fragments, while shooting him with missiles as he stands in one place. Now, I still stand by the wall, but hop forward over the missile, then hop back to the wall over the horizontal fragment, turn and shoot him again, repeat. It's the first fight, so not that big a deal... but on the Cancer fight, the pattern is even easier, and requires no jumping. He jumps and fires his missiles, so all I do is fire my missile near the top of his jump, so he lands on it, and run away from the wall just far enough to avoid the downward fragment from the lower missile. The upper missile fragments don't come anywhere near me in this pattern. Then I run back to the wall and shoot another missile at the top of his jump, so he lands on it. It's pretty easy to master quickly, and he won't move around as a result, making it easy to maintain and quickly finish him off.
/bug reports
Cancer 3D: Iron appears on the floor near the left exit as you scroll into the room. The cutscene then runs when you move into the room. After defeating him, when you leave and re-enter the room, he appears in his initial spot as the room scrolls, and then vanishes when the room finishes scrolling.
Cancer 6E: Inside the corridor, one of those piles of balls freaked out when I dodged it without destroying it - instead of swarming towards me, it danced around in a sort of oval pattern on the left side of the screen, where it launched from, and stayed there in place for a bit while I shot stuff on the right side, until I moved over and shot it and blew it up. Only time I've ever seen it bug out like that.
Also, with the shooter levels, I know you are working on some sort of scripting to improve them - just wanted to say, as is, there are oftentimes considerable pauses with no enemies on screen, I think because I've cleared them faster than you expect the player to, and there's only a set number that appear, in a certain order. Two of the easiest ways to kill enemies quickly, of course, are to anticipate them, and fire continuously off the top of the screen while moving around to nail any that appear at the top, and firing along the side when a group of them are appearing on the side of the screen.
If you edit your corridor scripting so the enemies spawned differently, it would throw a wrench in that strategy and make the corridors less trivial in spots. Have the corridor detect when you're close to the side of the screen when it's spawning side-appearing enemies, and always force them to the opposite side of the screen. For enemies, spawning at the top, have it exclude the column you're in, as well as the two columns on either side of you, as spawning locations, and spawn it somewhere else. Then, many of these enemies that can be killed off immediately with a little luck and skill would make it onscreen at least, and ramp up the difficulty/number of enemies onscreen. And consequently, probably reduce the frequency with which you can kill everything off and take a breather.
Zodiac bosses: I'm nowhere near fighting them again, about to get the Disintegrator Beam in Cancer. But I figured I'd share some of my feedback on earlier playthroughs, since you're tweaking them now.
Leo: He had a fairly easy pattern, that let me basically sit in place and shoot him, while taking little enough damage I only needed to sink one tank to beat him. I think he fires at you across the room or something (not the murderbeam, shots or something, not sure) along the floor? I clung to the far wall near the top of his sprite, dead even on the row, at the highest spot I could shoot across with my Sidearm and hit him. He'll fire the murderbeam at you when you take up this position, but once you drop back down and get in place, he'll apparently enter a loop where he ceases to use it, and only fires at you, then charges across the screen and hits the wall, sending a shockwave up it. If I remember correctly, his contact damage was far less than the shockwave, so by taking that position, he'd hit me and only do like -16HP I think, and my damage invulnerability would spare me the shockwave damage. He then retreats to the far side again and I can continue shooting him. At this point, I don't have to move again. I think he
might occasionally use the murderbeam after this point, not sure - I just jumped up above it to avoid it as best I could, then resumed my spot so his shockwaves wouldn't hurt me when he charges.
Capricorn: Easily my favorite boss. Has the perfect balance in pattern/random and difficulty to make him fun to fight and non-trivial to kill.
Taurus: Was really easy to kill. I think I fought him with the murderbeam. Didn't need a tank and barely took damage. Forget how I fought him. Waited until the end to defeat him.
Gemini: Trivial. I fought him at the get-all-11 point, at which point I was so suped up I didn't even bother trying to find a pattern. I just brute-forced him and my Sidearm took so much off his health he was dead in less than 20 seconds, I think. I think I only lost like a quarter of my health on him.
Libra: Another favorite. First time I just brute-forced him with 2-3 tanks; second playthrough I actually tried fighting him well and saving my tanks. I think I ended up using one anyways. Seems mostly well-balanced.
Virgo: I just brute-forced it. Used a tank or two. Don't really remember much, just kept shooting it and not caring much about dodging.
Cancer: I reported before, he has a bug where you can accidentally wall jump glitch through his ribs up into his head and get stuck, quickly getting you killed unfairly. It also wasn't really easy to infer that you had to keep "damaging" the eyes over and over in order to open his weakpoint - so I found it pretty frustrating. The fact that "hurting" them did not drop his life meter was confusing and led me to think they were just distractions. I dunno, probably fine, if you fix the head bug. Pretty challenging otherwise.
Pisces: I gave up on it, as I hadn't realized it only becomes vulnerable when you let it drain you, and then fire up. So at first it just kept quickly killing me off - I left it to the end. When I returned, it became trivially easy to kill off with my powered up Sidearm, after I figured out to let it attack me.
Aries: Killed me several times. Mostly brute-forced him, while trying to avoid getting hit.
Scorpio: Another favorite, though he'd benefit from some additional work. I guess. Since he moves around so much, sure, it's easy to hit him when he's slowly dropping back to the floor, but he doesn't really let you set up a pattern or stand still. One of the harder ones, if you fight him early on.
Aquarius: has a pretty simple pattern - but it's also easy to mess up and get clobbered quickly. Probably trivially easy if you come back later to kill hit.
The problem with the Zodiac weapons is, well... they look cool and all, and show off what you can do with scripting, but mostly seem to serve little utility or purpose. You aren't
required to obtain any of them to pass any areas, and most of them aren't really helpful at making otherwise difficult/impossible enemies possible to defeat/pass. Out of all of them, I usually just pick up the Sting early on, and then get the Saber and stick with that until I can get the Laser or the Wave. Of course, the Wave's the best out of all of them, and actually useful.
I'm not even clear on whether any of them give you any damage-dealing advantage against other particular Zodiac bosses (a la Mega Man) or if they all deal set damage. The fact you have to backtrack to go swap weapons to try a different one makes me hope that that isn't even an option, and they just deal consistent damage. I have yet to actually fight the final boss, so I'm hoping that his attack patterns and vulnerabilities make actually using the Zodiac Changer worthwhile, since otherwise, it's another flashy but fairly useless item. It's also kind of frustrating that you have to equip the ZC as an item, and use it onscreen to cycle through the individual weapons - I was hoping that it was a passive item you'd simply acquire and unlock some sort of subscreen functionality that lets you pick the ZW from a list, either displaying all of them, or designating certain buttons, e.g. L/R, to cycling through them in the sword spot.
Once you pick up the Rapidfire Sidearm, it turns your Sidearm into a friggin energy drain, which limits your ability to dash in boss fights to dodge attacks, so at that point, you end up wanting to rely more on your Zodiac weapon to attack. This detracts somewhat from the lack-of-utility complaint, but only due to a frustrating deficiency with the Rapidfire, which in a way, is
downgrading the Sidearm. After all, it's now spamming a ridiculous number of bullets, most of which won't actually hit anything, making it pretty flashy and useless, as well as an energy drain.
Due to the limited modding options you have with the TLOZ enemies, I don't think it's really worth fretting over the weapons' utility (or general lack thereof) since making them more useful/more required would basically require rewriting the game in something besides ZC. It's just kind of frustrating that they end up being more plot-completion requirements than utility/exploration/enemy-fighting enahncements. And that means that aside from the better weapons, the player has no real reason to tackle most of them until the collect-all-11 stage, at which point some of the earlier ones have become trivially easy to defeat. This prompted my earlier suggestion that you somehow tie their damage dealt to your max HP/armor upgrades/etc., and tie their damage received to your Sidearm Power/weapon inventory/etc., so you can balance it a bit and make them harder if you wait until later to defeat them. It would require a fair bit of testing/tweaking to make sure you don't make them too easy or too impossible at any stage, but ought to be doable. What I liked most about that, though, was the possibility to make them
relatively easier the earlier you defeat them - thus somewhat rewarding the player who goes after them early, rather than waiting until they
have to beat them all. This can be justified/explained in-game as these experimental lifeforms continuing to develop as the plot advances, becoming stronger and more of a threat to the player.
The rest of the (non-Zodiac) bosses are all, for the most part, required to advance, so they don't need any sort of custom tweaking like this, as the player will always be generally around the same level of powerups when beating them. (The Explosive Missile and Stomp Boots bosses being examples of exceptions, but whatever. If they aren't required to advance the plot or beat the game, they don't really matter if they become easier later on, since that balances the extra difficulty of going without their prizes longer in the game.)
I have some ideas for improving the Sidearm, but it would require a fair bit of coding and slightly repurposing the Energy and Speed upgrades. If you're fine with how it's working now, I won't bother to type it all out, but if you're not satisfied with it and willing to tinker with it some more, I'll explain my ideas in more detail. In brief: have it work more like the starting beam in Metroid, where its range is limited, with extensions to distance, and reduce its rate of fire, with upgrades reducing the delay between shots. Modifying the rapidfire so it caps its RoF and doesn't drain your meter like it does now - which might not even be necessary if the previous suggestion is implemented correctly. Not sure. This would alter the play through the earlier areas, while basically allowing it to be powered up to a state similar to what it currently reaches. It would make some trivial enemy challenges less trivial, but would need care to ensure it doesn't turn any early bosses impossible.
/bug reports
Cancer 3A/4A: F6 trap. Fall down here and you're stuck in the room below:
Cancer 28: There's no boss here. I just walked in and picked up the D. Beam. Came back after leaving and still no boss.
Scorpio 63: The sandblocks do not become destructible until after you've blown up the stack of bombable blocks. The bombable blocks stay destroyed, of course, but it's
possible a player could obtain the Explosives without using them here, come back later with the Disintegration Beam, and think they cannot dig through this sand, if they
also wall-glitch jump up and over the big block and drop to the left, without bombing, and try to dig. LOL.
Suggest you redesign it so there is a larger cluster of bombable blocks, spread out so they cover the entire top of the sand, so the player
must bomb them in order to reach the sand and dig.
Scorpio 61: Okay, I said that I tested this room out and that it's okay with the new sandfall mechanics, but I was wrong. Sort of. I guess when I tried it, I got a lucky jump and/or exploited the second wall jump bug, without realizing it.
You must be aligned
pixel-perfectly along the third column when you jump up from 71 below, or you will be affected by the sandfall mechanics due to the sandfall combos on either side of the walkable grey blocks, preventing you from jumping high enough to move left/right on top of the blocks on the bottom row on either side of the hole.
Recommend editing it like this, to remove the sandfall mechanics from that jump so it isn't so hard:
Edited by newstarshipsmell, 06 February 2015 - 07:25 PM.
