Total Hours Since Wednesday: 7
At last Zone 1 is complete, that is, depending on whether or not I want to make it more detailed. For the most part Zone 1 is done. Blobby can finally transform into his ninja form once the player reaches a certain point in Area 2 of this zone. Along with the transformation he can also throw shurikens at his enemies with the limitation of five onscreen shurikens with the ‘F‘ key. Ninja-style Blobby can defeat his enemies by throwing the shurikens at them except for those with stronger defenses who can take more hits. The whole shuriken/ninja business took about 3 hours and an hour searching for new sfx for this level. I wanted to make a transformation animation for Blobby but kind of just scrapped the idea after an hour or two of trying (these hours are not counted towards the total).
As promised, Gorbo will be at the end of Area 2 to do battle with our hero. It is not the brightest one as it only moves back and forth trying to run over Blobby as it roars through the battle. I was thinking of giving it the ability to jump once its health was low enough but I’m not sure yet. Bosses tend to have greater defenses than their minions so it’ll take a lot of hits before this plant monster goes down. I chose not to display Gorbo’s health and instead changed its appearance when the player is close to beating it. I think it adds a little bit to the suspense of not exactly knowing when your enemy is going down. I also took the liberty of preventing the player from running away once Blobby enters the battle. Gorbo took about 3 hours.
For those trying the game, if you just want to try Ninja-style Blobby just use the cheat: ‘C’ + ‘Z’ + ‘T’ + ‘R’. If you want to skip ahead to Gorbo you can skip Area 1 completely by using the next cheat and jump to the point right before the boss battle by this cheat again: ‘C’ + ‘B’ + ‘Y’ + ‘E’.
I kind of deviated from my schedule of separating level design and implementation so I think for the rest of the semester I will just do both at the same time. After I finish creating a level I will add enemies, items and such into the game. For the following week I plan on working on the Fire zone of the game (and the paper of course).
March 17th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
This looks great…I wish I could play it. My computer always gives me an “alleg42.dll” error when I try to run it.
March 17th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Oh, and I wasn’t trying to be smart — I know it’s specific to my machine and that it works with most others.