Once I made the gust ability function, I decided it was time to make some enemies that are a little more interesting that the little floating shades. I thought about what I wanted, and definitely had some influence from enemies in games like Commander Keen, Terraria, and a few other platformers of the like. I started out with a simple turret. No movement, just a simple reaction to the player getting near. Even though it might not have been necessary, I made the turret have full physics. Since it's been a while since I made things like the heavy block, or even the player himself, it actually took me a while to wrap my head around the code. Luckily with some referencing of older code, I was able to crud myself through until I finally had the turret behaving how I wanted. Since I was taking a while on the code, the graphics started out pretty entertaining:
I'll show a clip in a minute that had me and my sister laughing out loud. Having little mr angry plant in the fairly polished world was definitely worth the laughs. Anyways, the shooting and functionality of the turret worked out fairly well, and even proved to be somewhat challenging to face.
Next I decided to add a bouncing enemy. My first thought was the slimes on Terraria, and the mechanics seemed fairly simple. They did turn out to be simple... but very buggy. Boy oh boy did I have some unexpected results.
Man... some of it made sense when I realized where I had gone wrong on the code, but some of those jumps just cracked me up. No idea at all where it came from. Even though it did cause me some frustration, it taught me some really good lessons on debugging and looking for problems where you wouldn't suspect them to be. Whether it was forgetting to put a negative sign on a variable, or forgetting to add friction to the floor, it was really satisfying to be able to find the bugs and fix them. Once the mechanics worked out, I decided to make the art with a creature I simply call "Hopper". It got me really excited to start fleshing out this world and making more creatures!
As I got the enemies going, ideas started rolling in and I felt like I could realistically incorporate them! So besides the new enemies I also got a few more mechanics to work. Since there are actual threats in the game now and I was getting hurt (and sometimes even killed), I decided to add a health drop from the enemies. The art is a little strange, looks like a little blob of blood, but I feel like it fits for now. It makes it feel more playable to have enemies drop "hearts" though.
The big mechanic changes I had was first with the ice barrage. Since I didn't want it to be just a variation of a straight shooting missile, I decided to add a chill effect. This came together very quickly, and I could see it become quite useful in actual game play. I really want the spells in this game to feel useful; not just a button masher of what looks coolest when you shoot. With that idea in mind, I decided to add a mechanic to gust. Up until now gust has been purely strategic, just for pushing back a charging enemy, pushing it off a cliff, etc. But as I saw some enemies getting blown back fairly hard sometimes, I realized that I could add in a cool effect. I made gust do damage if it's going fast enough, and rams the enemy into a wall. It is so satisfying to sit and charge up the spell (which now slows you down while you channel) and then burst an enemy straight into the wall! Things like this are making the game already fun for me, so I am just very excited to keep this game rolling!! Here's the first Gameplay video! I feel like I can actually call it that at this point. Enjoy!
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