Candescence

DAH BOOTH. Just note that the new demo has some awkward issues here and there, and trying to fix them has been utterly infuriating. I've only just updated the web player version with the last missing content, the desktop version will come a bit later. Most of these issues stem from the save system, try and avoid using it if you can, it's not that difficult to avoid dying anyway. But, yeah, enjoy! I hope I didn't break the game too badly with the changes.

Well, so I tested the Ranamon animations in-game, and... Well, shrunk down to the size it's supposed to be, it just looks like ass, to the point where she's practically unrecognizable. Well, that's awkward. And I don't have the time to try and experiment with pixel art, so... I decided to "cheat". Rather than a direct fight against Ranamon herself, she bails right before you enter her boss room (because Myotismon ordered her to, as he's genre-savvy enough to know when things are going south), and leaves you to fight two drones shaped like her hands while she mocks you with a gigantic hologram of herself. The hands themselves move into various positions to attack, such as rotating in a fixed position in a circle around you while firing projectiles (requiring you to watch where you're moving to evade), or aiming at you from above and firing downwards while moving from side to side after firing. Zoe/Kazemon is trapped at the top of the arena, and you can free her to make her a co-op/AI partner before the fight ends, but you have to manipulate the arms to hit the teleporters to turn them on in order to reach her. Still trying to work out an optimal setup for the camera, I might be inclined to just not have it fixed to any particular position, unlike other boss fights, since the arena is so big. Yeah, not nearly what I was originally planning to do with this one, but that's what happens when you're constrained by a lack of art assets.

I'm just gonna leave this here.

Happens sometimes with images on Dropbox. Just grab the link from the post, it should display properly in a separate tab. Edit: And now I can't find decent references of Ranamon's legs and feet at the angle at I want. FFFFFFFFFFFFF-

Alright, Heroic Battle Spirit's new demo has its basic layout done, along with some visuals and one of its main level gimmicks, though it doesn't look that great right now, still need to find a background to use for it. Also, something I'm trying to work on for the main boss fight. Since the boss I have in mind has literally nothing I can use in terms of sprites or animations, and nobody's helping me with art, I decided to cheat and use Inkscape to trace various references to create parts I can use to animate in Spriter. Say hello to Ranamon, fellas. This took hours, and it was tedious as hell. See, this is why I don't do art. This has no right to look even remotely decent, even if it sorta does. And I'll probably have to do it AGAIN if I want to do Calamaramon for the same boss fight, though, thinking about it, that might actually be too early, it might be more interesting to save that for a rematch in another stage. Considering the time I have to finish the stage, that's probably for the best.

Well, SAGE is coming up, so I'm renewing the call for help, I mainly need sprites for the miniboss and main boss for the new level I'm making for the new demo (and maybe some other stuff if there's time). It would really be great if I could get some help with that.

Finally gotten back to working on Heroic Battle Spirit, and before I work on my new level, I finally decided to properly fix the map system and overhaul it so I can be much more flexible with the level design. Most Metroidvania designs tend to be rigidly structured into specific rooms, considering what I'm going for with this game, I wanted to be able to make layouts that could look much less artificial, as well as dynamically display things such as items, enemies and obstacles, and provide players with other means of being able to plan their route, such as displaying jump-thru platforms.

Eh, sure. I think this is it, though it hasn't changed much, and is fairly basic.

C2 doesn't use per-pixel, it uses collision polygons, which makes sense, for sake of performance and physics. You don't get complex collisions anymore, but for most things, that's rarely necessary anyway. C2 also has custom movement, though it doesn't work quite like the Classic version, and you can't do selective collisions on a per-player basis anyway (for collision layers). It honestly might be easier to write up a custom plugin in javascript using other movement behaviours as a basis. The platform behaviour would be a good base, maybe integrate the bits from the bullet behaviour that allow it to bounce to find angles, among other things.

Actually, that's because of the exact same issues you described in the Classic version. And even then, C2 has had some impressive optimization improvements, I actually tried the incomplete engine on a whim and it ran at 60 on my four-year-old laptop, which has been running somewhat sluggishly. Still needs a complete rewrite, though, the function system wasn't meant for constant collision detections and the physics are janky in certain circumstances, even if the relatively new collision cells feature might have a factor in the improvements, it's difficult to tell.

The main problem is that only MMF2 and Game Maker have proper working Sonic engines for them. Construct 2 would be much more used by fangamers if there was actually a working Sonic engine for it. Same with Unity, really. But few people actually have the knowledge and experience to do it, and Dami's dropped off the map while in the middle of working on the Egg Engine. It's something of a chicken-and-egg problem, unfortunately. It's why I've avoided doing Sonic-related fangaming development lately, Sonic engines are great, but they are a massive headache to make, especially if you're using a framework that's incompatible with a good chunk of the physics guide.

'Planning'? There's already a C2 plugin on the forums made by the Spriter dev himself, and it supports most of the new features. Deformation is something that'll be more difficult to implement in existing engines, and deformation is sort of a 'beta' feature, but still. Bones are more flexible than that, actually, you can move bones and parts independently of each other and stuff, if you need to. And you can move certain bones in the hierarchy without moving others, which is helpful.

Well, I've been trying to create a placeholder animation thing for human characters in Spriter, using the existing platformer essentials animations as a base and drawing the parts in Inkscape to create this featureless 'green man' with more realistic proportions compared to the platformer parts (once again using said parts as a base, while redrawing them to conform to the new proportions) - I'd use the default parts, but I'm not terribly fond of their proportions, even the smaller head isn't small enough. The end result ended up breaking the existing animations, so I might as well start from scratch. Oh, and the character I made has a proper animated neck, too. The idea was sorta to create a 'Tron' like character with minimal features. And then I tried to animate the parts. The idle animation seemed to work reasonably well. The walk animation... Eh... Ya see, this is why I'd much prefer having a proper animation person to work with, haha. Even the parts don't look terribly good! Edit: Tried again, with some help from a guy over at NeoGAF who provided some advice for walk cycles, and I got this, which looks so much better:

Alright, time for a SAGE post-mortem. Well, that could've gone worse, I suppose. It WAS a non-Sonic fangame in a Sonic fangame expo, but there was some press near the end, from sites like Sonic Paradise and TSSZ - the reviews I managed to find were, in fact, rather positive, and fairly encouraging. Overbound mentioned to me that he thought that HBS was among the best in show, which is a big deal, coming from him. And in the Silly Awards, HBS got the "And Now For Something Completely Different" award, which, as a Monty Python fan, I got a slight chuckle from. Also, it turns out I need some more experience with streaming. Eesh. Still, I can't help but think that this game was mostly ignored, but every bit helps, I suppose. I'm gonna see if I can't go around some places and show the demo off here and there. As for what I'm doing now, well, I'm back in university. But I've been working on 'placeholder' animation parts to use in Spriter in Inkscape, and Construct 2's latest beta release just came out, with multiplayer functionality. I'm gonna see about integrating the multiplayer functionality into the engine - I have an idea of how to pull it off, it's mostly a matter of adding functionality to the input system to accommodate the way the multiplayer plugin works. At any rate, I'll see if I can get it working.

I don't get why people would design a 'modern' style game in the first place, especially in 2D. Even in 3D, Modern Sonic's gameplay is shallow as fuck, even with the improvements that came with Colours and Generations (Unleashed was just plain bad for at least half the game). I get that people like it, but boosting and quick-stepping isn't interesting by themselves, and the novelty of GOTTAGOFAST has long past and wrapped back around into mundane. If you're gonna try your hand at 'Modern Sonic', for pete's sake, try and make it not mostly shallow, try and do something interesting with it - all the games at SAGE with 'Modern Sonic' gameplay didn't even try to do that.

It's only 20 USD more than MMF2. which I swear had the exact same price not long ago. So? C2 can just as easily be used for desktop 2D games, or iOS games, or whatever else. Hell, you can export to the Wii U now if you get your hands on a dev kit. I myself prefer to use the web-game thing for demos, since larger games would be excessive for the web..

Hell, if you guys want an example of what Construct 2 can do these days, well... Granted, I'd be sporting a boner just because it's an F-Zero/SHUMP hybrid with Greek myth influences alone, but the fact that it's made in Construct 2 is just icing on the cake. And it looks so fucking good.