FIGHTING TITANS !!! EXTREME GAMEPLAY !!! SICK GRAPHICS !!! RADULAR CHARACTERS !!!

[Deathbringer]

Yeah, I was thinking more VS screen, than status screen.

[Sketchasaurus]

ah, like pre-battle portraits, and possibly a select screen. each player presses left/right to select species and up/down to select color/basic element perhaps?

[Lexou Duck]

okay i saw your big reply a while ago dont worry, i was just really in a rush
i loved it btw lots of great stuff

you didnt answer me in terms of jumping though ???

now yeah i didnt read any of what you guys posted since but the images i saw are pretty sweet, im gonna save the webpage and read it later

so for me programming is moving on nicely, i'm making the bullet attacks atm
i dont have a gif with me sorry and im writing this reply as fast as i can so yeah

about bullets, i think 4 frames for the travel and 4 for the explosion looks best
here's the sheet with each character's default bullet that i enhanced accordingly


i had a nice idea, that the heart would show the element modifier you got
here's the placeholder sheet i made in a quickie

in the end it'd be way better to actually have nice little icons, that could double as what the item looks like when it appears in the arena
speaking of which im thinking of different random ways to make the element modifiers appear (parachute, trap door, etc)
cause if you can see them coming, titans with faster movespeeds would dominate the battlefield, picking up all the elements

also, palette-changing algorithms are really slow, it'd be better to have the entire sheet with all the necessary colors rather than making it all grayscale
here's the fighter sheet i use to show you what i mean (actual alpha background color btw)

though im thinking of changing the library i use, or at least rewrite the way they animate sprites cause they do it in a really stupid way
also its quite unnecessary to reuse frames within the spritesheet (like the walking frame in middle its the same as the idle frame)
(you'll notice i changed draqueen's palette, too many orange characters atm)

i also think the final character roster should be 9 characters, 3 of each bullet behavior type, what do you think ?

can you tell me how many bullets onscreen at a time each titan is allowed ?

more importantly, how does the bullet charge animation go, do i make the titan blink white or something ??

okayyy i think that's about all i have to say for now keep it up guys

[Deathbringer]

Also, I'm looking through some of my concept art to see what other players and helpers I could toss in. But for now, I want to iron out how the current roster works and the core gameplay before piling stuff on, because I'm getting rather excited at what this is becoming.

Do you have artwork for the characters you've already done? I could use those to make portraits for them.

[Sketchasaurus]

I do have artwork for the ones I've made sprites for (though I don't have completed colored portrait images for Hawkindle or Draqueen/king or the bosses)

Players

Helpers

I also need to finish colored artwork of the bee helper.

[Deathbringer]

I kept having to restart this just to figure out how to map the pattern.

[puggsoy]

though im thinking of changing the library i use, or at least rewrite the way they animate sprites cause they do it in a really stupid way

I'm curious what you mean by this. I'm not saying you shouldn't, I'm just wondering what about it isn't good/convenient.

[Sketchasaurus]

I've been looking around for any inkling of color indexing being implemented in Haxeflixel and, as of now, I have been unable to find anything regarding it. Because for some specific circumstances, I would like to see if I could rapidly rotate palettes, and I imagine that cycling separate images for animations would be a pain, if not a bit consuming of space (though it's not a huge size difference, but still)

I also did a few touch-ups on Deathbringer's portraits:


I'll address your questions soon, Lexou, as soon as I do some more thinking and doodling.

[Deathbringer]

I should probably redo Knael's just to be consistent with the others.

[Lexou Duck]

I'm curious what you mean by this. I'm not saying you shouldn't, I'm just wondering what about it isn't good/convenient.

i decided not to in the end since i learned how to use it after all

there were 2 things bothering me most

the first was that when adding an animation to a sprite, the first argument is an array of ints giving the order of frames, and the second is called framerate (like giving it 2 means the animation runs at 0.5 seconds per image)
but i just did this today, i went and rewrote it so instead you type in a second array, of floats, in which you state the individual duration of each image in seconds
so yeah i changed up their code but it works now

the second problem was that the collision function strangely returned false in certain conditions, but i realised it was meant to check collisions between large groups of sprite, so they made it performance saving, hence some inaccuracies
i made my own (that takes in account the z coordinate as well) and it works perfect

so all in all no problems anymore pretty much
if you're interested in how i rewrote the FlxAnimation class, i could hand it to you after i clean it up a bit (something that didn't work then and still doesn't, and im looking to fix it is the finished variable, that should be set to true when an animation is finished playing - i need it to kill the bullet sprite after it's done exploding so yeah ill get back to y'all on that)



and sketchasaurus i'm pretty sure getting it to load the spritesheet once and change spritetiles is way faster than making it parse the array of pixel data and make it selectively change shit out in the midst of gameplay but who knows
(on the NES that shit worked in games like ninja gaiden cause instead of having each pixel be in 0xAARRGGBB format, they only had 1byte per pixel, and palettes were determined separately)

im kinda sad to see you didn't answer my questions yet seeing as im not sure when ill get internet access again but ok

i wanted to ask by the way, im given to understand you wanted element modifiers to be chosen before the battle ?
they're way better as an in-fight pickup imo
and rather than having them be limited in time or in amount of attacks, i think the best would be that you keep it until you pick up another one

also i read the special moves, good stuff except
i didn't understand you meant for kamekannon's, could you explain that a little more ?

second instead of having tropicaur be a rhinozar clone, i think it'd be better to have his special move be him stomping the ground making a medium sized shockwave around him
i mean hell the frames you drew are perfect for it and its original

and on the same page draqueen and draking special attacks should be different too, like they're already practically recolors of each other, let's insist on differences to make em each feel unique

okay then im out, again saving this webpage and reading what you guys said later

[Deathbringer]

also i read the special moves, good stuff except
i didn't understand you meant for kamekannon's, could you explain that a little more ?

I think he means something like this: http://youtu.be/UvR_5WZUX2c?t=8s

[Sketchasaurus]

you didnt answer me in terms of jumping though ???

I would like to include jumping in some way, and I imagine that each Titan's jump would have their own weight/behavior, so I would definitely include jumping in a character's movement parameters. I might have to add a jump pose to the spritesheets (or I may cheat and say use one of the walk sprites, which is most likely what I'm gonna go with)

about bullets, i think 4 frames for the travel and 4 for the explosion looks best
here's the sheet with each character's default bullet that i enhanced accordingly

I agree, there's a lot of stuff that I need to expand on in the FX sheet, and there are tons of ideas that need assets. I have no complaints.

i had a nice idea, that the heart would show the element modifier you got
here's the placeholder sheet i made in a quickie

in the end it'd be way better to actually have nice little icons, that could double as what the item looks like when it appears in the arena
speaking of which im thinking of different random ways to make the element modifiers appear (parachute, trap door, etc)
cause if you can see them coming, titans with faster movespeeds would dominate the battlefield, picking up all the elements

Yeah, I definitely like the idea. One thing that I need to draw is the bird sprites because that's one method of item drop that I wanted in the beginning. It certainly spices things up. I was even thinking that helpers would be granted as an item drop, too, with little icons that call them out onto the field. ha, maybe a speech bubble appears over a titan's head that uses the icon when they call out support.

also, palette-changing algorithms are really slow, it'd be better to have the entire sheet with all the necessary colors rather than making it all grayscale
here's the fighter sheet i use to show you what i mean (actual alpha background color btw)

though im thinking of changing the library i use, or at least rewrite the way they animate sprites cause they do it in a really stupid way
also its quite unnecessary to reuse frames within the spritesheet (like the walking frame in middle its the same as the idle frame)

Yeah, I suppose that I can optimize the sheets by cutting out the duplicates. I'll also make a slight adjustment to Draking/queen's walking sprites so that the mid position for all of the walk cycles is frame 0. This actually opens up a small bit more room for additional sprites.

(you'll notice i changed draqueen's palette, too many orange characters atm)

I did notice, and it's a lot better, definitely gonna keep that change. aha

i also think the final character roster should be 9 characters, 3 of each bullet behavior type, what do you think ?

9's a good number, I think. At the same time, I think it'd be cool to leave some space open to add more if we ever choose to.

can you tell me how many bullets onscreen at a time each titan is allowed ?

that's a tough one. I'd almost have to see and feel how the bullets behave in-game to get a better feel for how they should be.

more importantly, how does the bullet charge animation go, do i make the titan blink white or something ??

The effect that I was thinking for this was the reason why I always came back to palette cycling because I imagine it being very much like Megaman's charge buster where his colors cycle rapidly.

and sketchasaurus i'm pretty sure getting it to load the spritesheet once and change spritetiles is way faster than making it parse the array of pixel data and make it selectively change shit out in the midst of gameplay but who knows
(on the NES that shit worked in games like ninja gaiden cause instead of having each pixel be in 0xAARRGGBB format, they only had 1byte per pixel, and palettes were determined separately)

Gotcha, I'm going to look into finding more info on implementing it, but it's a very specific feature that isn't a huge priority. one reason why I bring palette cycling like this up is because I imagine when charging attacks, a character's palette would cycle, sometimes with inverted colors (the lighter color of kamekannon's shell would be swapped with his base orange, as an example) But even as I say this, I realize that if there are predefined offsets for different color schemes, then you could have a line of code that cycles through the offsets during a charge animation independent of a character's regular movement, so while you're charging, the animation remains intact but the colors are rapidly rotating. same effect could be used when taking damage.

i wanted to ask by the way, im given to understand you wanted element modifiers to be chosen before the battle ?
they're way better as an in-fight pickup imo
and rather than having them be limited in time or in amount of attacks, i think the best would be that you keep it until you pick up another one

I think that both could be used in some degree, perhaps that would even be how you acquire them for the single-player campaign (which would make the drops a lot rarer in that mode) But for multi-player, being able to try out the elemental weapons and switch-out and squabble over them could be a fun mechanic.
One reason why I went with the idea of selecting elements before the battle was because it's essentially choosing weapons that suit your play-style. But scrambling to pick up the drop before other players does add more depth to combat, it spices things up and adds potential turning points so that one player with a specific weapon can't continuously dominate unimpeded.

This actually just made me think of a collect-athon battle mode where it could play like coin-battle in Smash Bros. and/or be similar to the Dragoon item where the first to collect the three pieces of said item are able to pull off a devastating attack.

One concern that I have is if two (or more) players are using the same species of Titan and they pick up a different modifier and their colors change, they could potentially lose sight of their Titan and get confused. One solution I'm currently thinking of for that would be to give each player in 4P mode a different colored shadow to sort of rectify that, but that could also present a problem because there's a chance that the shadows would blend into the backgrounds, the characters, all of that; but that's an idea.

also i read the special moves, good stuff except
i didn't understand you meant for kamekannon's, could you explain that a little more?

Deathbringer covered that pretty well. though unlike that game, special moves wouldn't be able to be pulled off that frequently. there would be a lot more cooldown between special moves.

second instead of having tropicaur be a rhinozar clone, i think it'd be better to have his special move be him stomping the ground making a medium sized shockwave around him
i mean hell the frames you drew are perfect for it and its original

That makes sense, I can even see it being modified by equipment where the stomping causes fruit to fall randomly from the top of the screen. It also makes sense to change Tropicaur's special instead of Rhinozar because out of the two, you'd expect the one with Rhino in the name to have some sort of charge attack.

and on the same page draqueen and draking special attacks should be different too, like they're already practically recolors of each other, let's insist on differences to make em each feel unique

Yeah, I agree. They're similar but different mainly because they're the same species but sexually dimorphic: they're essentially peacocks, but dragons. But yeah, from a gameplay perspective, they should have distinct differences.

[Sketchasaurus]

CHARACTER SPRITE UPDATE(Aug. 27, 2014)
I'm going to make this its own post but here are the revisions to the base player sheet. (it's all in grayscale because that's the way I'm working, but you already knew that)

The top line uses the hex labels that I'll be using to refer to animations if needed. And for now, the sprites that are in those positions are "locked down"
Here are also the helpers that I have so far, one of which is a cameo from one of my other projects.

Helpers have less animations to worry about, but the animations rely more on their behavior, too (except for their hit pose because that behavior is the same: get hit and run away, except for the skeleton/zombie, which is knocked back and destroyed)
I might divide the helper sheet into more character columns (depending on how many there are) so that it's not a thin and long image.

PLAYER SPRITE POSES:
0/1-Idle
2- Bullet
3- Melee
4/5- Walk (animation order: 4,0,5,0(loop))
6/7- Melee special
8- Dizzy/stunned (flip horizontally loop)
9- Hit
A- ?
B- KO'D
C- ?
D- ?
E- ?
F- Victory (animation: 1,F (loop))

HELPER SPRITE POSES:
0/1- Movement (usually, they hop into frame)
2- attack/ability
3- hit

I also need to put more boss sprites together.

[Deathbringer]

Redid Knael's portrait.

[puggsoy]

if you're interested in how i rewrote the FlxAnimation class, i could hand it to you after i clean it up a bit (something that didn't work then and still doesn't, and im looking to fix it is the finished variable, that should be set to true when an animation is finished playing - i need it to kill the bullet sprite after it's done exploding so yeah ill get back to y'all on that)

This would be interesting to see yeah, maybe I can make you a version that simply extends it so that you don't have to mess with Flixel's code directly (and then you can update it without it overwriting your changes).

I still don't understand why you need each frame at a different duration though, games almost never do this and I don't think it's necessary for this? Obviously it's not my game so I'm not saying you shouldn't, but it's unusual to design a game with this in mind.