Travis

That all looks really good. That skeleton climbing out of the ground!!

I started working on the "art" a lot more yesterday and today, starting with the level pieces. I got a draft of the animations for the people and the Big Dog done when they are pushing to the left. It is hard to see the Big Dog's legs in this gif, but here they are as he drops off a person, and then zooms back. This giffing program can't capture the frantic backwards Big Dog footwork! The person still needs some work, but I think it's getting there. Here is the Big Dog animated. I had to watch the video of its walk, and it is even stranger when you're paying close attention. It's diagonal legs are perfectly coordinated. Eerie.

I am fairly certain I have gotten the logic down to spawn bots randomly in a way that is possible for you to actually score points. This took MUCH longer than anticipated. I just need to do a few more things to make it generate ad infinitum and then that part will be complete! (Dear God, I hope so.) Once I get that wrapped up, I can finally get back to making things look better and posting screens and things. Lots on my to-do list to get this looking and playing decent. Hopefully I can fit in everything I have planned. This is not an exciting update, but felt the need to post some relief and getting through something that was pretty rough. Phew.

Sounds like a solid premise, and I have been loving Pico-8 lately! Looking forward to it!

This looks really good. The presentation is very Wario Ware-esque, which is a good thing!

Well, yesterday (Saturday), I really started trying to figure out how to time everything, and it was a complete disaster. I slowly worked through the problem today with some serious Excel work and think I have a good approach. I can definitely manually create timings of everything, but I am pretty sure I have developed a system of equations that can randomly determine when to spawn bots on the level I have laid out. Tomorrow, I will code it up and see how it goes. This took a lot more time than anticipated, leaving things like animation and a few bug fixes lingering. If I can code up the spawn logic, that will save me from doing it manually at least, so I have my fingers crossed. badatstuff and BadMisty have continued to provide amazing sounds an a cool track that is very fitting. A rudimentary animation for the boss blob I had looks like he is just moving to the beat, so I think I am going to just improve that animation as best I can. Also, Flay was able to make a Big Dog sprite, which is awesome! Hopefully he will have time to animate it, else I will have to hammer it in there, and I'm sure I won't make it as nice.

That is fantastic!

Sounds pretty neat, and I like that faked 3D effect. It is looking pretty good in the second gif!

Days 5 & 6 (11/24/2016 & 11/25/2016): I wasn't able to do much of anything yesterday, as I was Thanksgivinging all day long. Got to fix an oddball character controller bug today, and outside of one other oddball case, I think/hope I have that locked down. I tried my hand at making the Boss Blob look a little better and animating him jiggling away over to the side... it didn't go too well. So, I finally turned to figuring out the real layout of platforms, holes, robot timing, robot speed, blob speed, etc... I have a few variables to play with! This is going to take some time, but I got a bot spawner set up with all of the knobs and levers I need to tweak away until it feels fun! I will also be adding a flashing light or some indicator when a bot is about to start heading down a floor.

Ha, I just thought you could throw in a reference to a HELLRAISER BALL CAP! Probably not worth it, but glad you enjoyed it anyway.

Days Four and Five (11/22/2016 & 11/23/2016): I have been working on several of the mechanics down for each scenario. Blob into hole, blob hits big blob, blob hits human, blob hits robot, etc... There are a lot of scenarios and how things should react. I have gotten most of the rudimentary actions in place now, so I have started doing some of the animating and art improvement. I think the little cool blob is looking pretty good, although he probably needs a little polishing (if time). I have barely started on the boss blob and have just been messing with palettes for the level itself, etc. The boss blob is made up of stacking segments, so figuring out which pieces will be animated for which events is going to take some time. The way I have him built right now is not going to work well, but I think it is a decent foundation. So, here is a short gif just showing the blob jumping in and out of holes and idling here and there. I should have a bit more time later today to do some more, but figured I would post some sort of an update to keep this a habit. If only gifs had sound... BadMisty has started sending me sounds, and his blob sounds for going in and out of the hole are fantastic! Very blobby!!

This sounds interesting, especially as someone who always preferred text to point-and-click (even though they were harder and I rarely finished). If you weren't already, I would consider somehow incorporating this post-credits commercial from the Hellraiser VHS tape.

You just need to send a PM to zerofiftyone (who is farther up the page) to get a slack invite. Glad to have you on board! Lots of artists needed!

I really like your concept, and Boom Shroom looks great.

Well, shooting is important in your game, so that's good progress!

Day Three (11/21/2016): Had one solid chunk of time to work on things this afternoon. No new gifs to show today, but I got the cool-blob/boss-blob interaction working (without any sort of visual appeal), and got a lot of the other interactions done between blob/humans and robot/humans. I have created a lot of possible scenarios here that have to be coded, so it is taking some time on something that looks fairly basic. I didn't yet get to timing any of the bot spawning, etc. I will try to get to that tomorrow as well as starting on developing some sort of aesthetic here so I can chip away at that over the next two weeks.

I like that walk cycle. Nice and slick and creepy...

Yeah... bare feet, sweaty face, mouth agape. If he wasn't yellow, it could be a normal guy on a plane. Love all of this art, bigJKO!

I like your little Batman in pico-8! I am still able to upload animated gifs with the "Drag files here to attach or choose files..." thing below each post. Then click on the image to insert it at your cursor. If that doesn't work for you, that is weird.

Day Two (11/20/2016); Didn't have a lot of time to work on this today, but was able to get a little bit done. I feel pretty good about the way Cool Blob moves around now. Using a keyboard, anyway, he moves smoothly, and I think his jumps feel right. Probably need to do a bit more tweaking when I decide on his speed, etc. I created a basic on-screen GUI and life tracker. I kind of prefer having them just hovering over the level, but for now, they are in front of a background because assuming I have enough time to get to level 2 and scroll the game up, I think this will work better. We shall see. Mainly, I needed a way to start tracking score and lives. All of this is still placeholder garbage, but you can see a human get stuck in a hole and the GUI reacts, and the score increases when a blob is "absorbed" into Boss Blob. For now, there is no depiction of him being absorbed... he just falls forever and the robot pushing him just keeps going off to the left in space. All of that will be fixed. @Rilen submitted a killer demo to win himself the cool guy emoting job! I am stoked to have him on board. I still have to send him the lines, but this is good to have locked down. @badatstuff sent me a draft of some music that is sounding great already. I went ahead and threw it into the game so it would feel farther along than it is... and it worked! I was struggling with how to manage Cool Blob falling off into the area where the humans are being pushed into Boss Blob. I was thinking about some sort of human-only door so that Cool Blob couldn't pass through. I think I've decided to let you fall off and get absorbed into the Boss Blob and then with a delay, get spit back out on a random floor. So, it is a punishment that will mess up your timing, but maybe if you need a hail mary to get to a certain floor immediately, you will go for it and hope to get spit out at the perfect location. I will probably try to work on this, more robot/blob reactions to events, and start figuring out actual hole placement and bot timing tomorrow. This will take a lot of iterating, I am sure, so I need to get a first draft in place before I start actually making the game look somewhat decent. I am glad I can see things taking shape, even if it is still kind of unattractive to look at.

This sounds like an interesting idea. Seems like it would be very confusing until you just "got it" all of a sudden. Looking forward to trying it out!

You are on slack already since I went to message BadMisty and your username came up!

Ha! I can't imagine how to do that with arcade-like mechanics, but I will keep thinking on it, cuz I like that concept.

I like this idea a lot. Looking forward to see what it looks like and taking some pictures of STUFF.

Ooooh, I like that photo collage idea.