On Wednesday, 18 May 2022 at 17:15:44 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>Cool game! I got to stage 19. I had no problems with the Linux port, except the occasional crash when generating maps that was already mentioned.
Thanks for playing! Also I think you beat my current phase record! Glad to hear that your
experience was good excluding the map crash issue (still looking into that).
- You can make collision less frustrating by making the player slide along the edge of the obstacle partially in the direction they're facing. The easiest way to do this is that, when a collision happens, instead of preventing movement in the player's direction, you allow it to happen, but then as long as the player and the obstacle intersects, the obstacle pushes the player out, away from its center. Doing this in the same frame will make it seem like the player is sliding along the side of the obstacle.
Yes I agree, I think this would be the proper approach to handling collision. I actually made an attempt to implement this method a while back but never finished it. I think I'll re-visit this now to see if it can replace the current implementation.
>- This game could be almost categorized as a twin-stick shooter, though it's not quite so due to only being able to move forward in the direction you're aiming. I'm not sure what this constraint adds but it does seem very unusual.
I've had a lot of feedback about the movement being strange and it definitely is compared to traditional movement schemes, though I think it works well enough for how simplistic the game is. I may look into changing it in the future but I have a feeling that the movement will feel less strange if the collision is reworked as you suggested previously.
>- I didn't try all combinations of craftables, but there is almost no reason to build a regular turret instead of the tesla coil. The tesla coil has a higher DPS/$, never misses, and does not have friendly fire.
Admittadley I didn't put much thought into some of the craftables and how it melds with the gameplay, a lot of it was basically me getting an idea and thinking "Oh that would be cool" and then throwing it in. Turrets were the original defensive craftable that I had added, and once coils came along they definitely fell by the wayside. I'll be revisiting these at some point to see what can be done.
>- Oddly, sprinting energy does not recover when standing still but holding Shift.
Good catch, I'll add a fix for that.
>- "Game seed" seems to affect only the generation of the map layout, but not of pickups or your initial position; perhaps calling it "map seed" would be more accurate.
Originally it was actually called "Map Seed" and was really only used for the map. I recently changed it to "Game Seed" because I'm actually passing the engine's generator (MersenneTwisterEngine instance that actually takes the seed) to all of the "chance" based areas of the game logic, things like enemy type when spawning, crate types and what not, so it definitely should be influencing things beyond the map generation. I wonder if maybe the generator isn't properly being reseeded when creating a new game after a previous game? Regardless I take a look to see what the deal is.
>- Choosing to play on a larger map seems to be strictly disadvantageous, as pickups are more rare due to being more spread out.
For sure, there unfortunately isn't really anything in the logic to adjust for gameplay on larger maps. Honestly I really only put different map sizes in there to add some variance in what the player was able to choose from, but I'm starting to wonder if a better approach would be to meet in the middle with a "medium" size map and just design the gameplay around that.