Game Development Diary: Another April 2019 update

Yup, it’s been a week since the last development diary and I’m still committed to this project. I believe I can do it and I’m coming up with great ideas that I think are pretty interesting. In the last month I’ve been furthering the development of the playable character and fleshing out the controls.

Evolving the playable character sprites

After a month of fiddling around with the sprites for the playable character of my game, I think I’ve gotten to the stage where I’m happy with the overall design. Sure, there’s probably one or two pixels I could change around to improve things, but I think I’ve hit the mark with what I want.

At first, I was going for a more traditional approach, with a character that has four physical arms, two standard arms with two more behind them. It felt different, but the more I looked at it, the more clumsy it ended up looking, especially from the side view where they just hung there and seemed useless.

The two extra arms were to function as melee weapons, producing blades to swipe ahead of the character. In addition, they would be used to hang from object while still allowing the character to use its hand cannon to shoot.

As I put more time into the sprite for the playable character, began to think of ways to make it look more dynamic and flexible. After some thought, I came up with the idea of having the two extra arms be energy based that float at the character’s side and can change shape into blades to use for melee purposes.

This change would allow the extra arms to be more dynamic in its animations and would be much easier to work with so that it doesn’t end up looking like it’s getting in the way. The melee animations would be much easier to do as well since the arms will be able to transform into blades when needed.

Another thing to note is that, at first, I thought I’d have some kind of arm/hand cannon, similar to what Samus Aran has on her power suit, but I’ve decided, in order to make things not be TOO Metroid, I think I’ll take a page out of Dragon Ball Z and instead, have projectiles coming out of the character’s hand like a ki blast. Of course, the blasts the playable character will be producing will be technologically based, but it does make things more interesting in terms of the ideas I have brewing in my head.

Figuring out the controls

Seeing as I’m working on the sprites, it also seems a good idea to figure out the abilities the playable character will have in the first place, which means figuring out the controls at the same time. To that end, I’ve decided to base the controls off the Xbox One controller, since I’ll be aiming this game to be a PC release. Of course, if things do get to that point, I’d be happy to release it on other platforms, but for now, my main focus is to get it working using the Xbox One/360 controller as well as with a mouse and keyboard.

Being a 2D sprite based game, there won’t be much use for analogue sticks for character movement, so the D-Pad will be used in favour of the Left Stick. That said, I am planning some kind of aiming feature in relation to the combat drone pictured in the sprite previews above using the Right Stick. The Right Stick click will be used as a pulse scanner related to an explorer drone you can see attached to the back of the character sprite.

As for the face buttons, I’m thinking they’ll be used to jump, fire weapon, perform a melee strike and use missiles, while the bumpers and triggers will be used to aim up and down at an angle, fire the combat drone weapon and launch the explorer drone.

And yeah, the explorer drone is my way of adding a morph ball element to the game from the Metroid series, without it being the morph ball. I figure, I can use the explorer drone for little puzzle elements and differentiate the gameplay a little. The combat drone is, of course, going to be used as a kind of power up that will make things more interesting, especially when used in conjunction with melee attacks and boss fights in general.

I’ve got a general sense of what I want all these buttons to do, the key will be make it feel natural and to get all the animations working so it feels seamless to go from one action to the next, to the next.

What’s next?

I think the next step for me is to start creating the sprites for all the different animations this character will need to perform. I’ll start with a standard running animation, then create a running animation with the weapon at the ready, then one where the weapon is angled up and another where the weapon is angled down, etc.