My project: Spiral Adventure

[molul]

After a couple of weeks learning Löve2D, I have a small demo of my project, Spiral Adventure. It's meant to be a classic platformer, like the ones I've mentioned in previous posts (Sonic The Hedgehog, Super Mario Bros, Dynamite Headdy, Donkey Kong Country, Ristar, etc). I'll get into the plot details later

The attached alpha demo has only the hero, Spiral, in a tiled map with a 5-layer parallax scroll. No enemies, no items, nothing else. Also the graphics are from the old version I started almost ten years ago. The new version will have HD images (I'm waiting for an artist to send me the new stuff). I've been told to keep a low-res version of the graphics, but I'll think about it when the project is done.

This will sure be a very long development, and I will only upload updates when I have anything interesting to show. By the way, thanks a lot to all the people that have helped me getting started

Well, I hope you like it

-------------------------------------------

Controls (UPDATED):

Keyboard:
-Left: A or arrow left.(NEW)
-Right: D or arrow right.(NEW)
-Down (camera down): S or arrow down.(NEW)
-Up (camera up): U or arrow up.(NEW)
-Jump: J. or Z
-Megajump: K or X. (NEW)
-Spin: L or C. (NEW)
-Quit: Esc.
-Fullscreen: F.

Joystick:
-Left, right and down as expected on left stick or in the hat.
-Cam up and down: right stick up and down. In a non Xbox controller it might be left and right, but I don't know why :S
-Jump: in an Xbox Controller it would be A. In a Playstation controller, X.
-Megajump: in an Xbox Controller it would be X. In a Playstation controller, square.
-Spin: in an Xbox Controller it would be B. In a Playstation controller, circle.


Special movements:

-Mega jump: press and keep pressing Megajump. In the top left corner you'll see the variable "MEGAJUMP" increasing up to 50. When it reaches the maximum, release the button and Spiral will perform a higher jump.

-Wall jump (IMPROVED): if you're close to a wall while on air, and press Jump. If you do it after jumping, it only works when you start falling (a bit before, actually).

-Ground pound (NEW): while on air, press Down.

-Spin and roll (NEW): if on ground, press spin. You'll see the "SPIN" counter increasing until 50. Releasing the spin key at any time will give you the proportional impulse in the direction you're facing, unless you press in the opposite direction. In the future I want to implement a drill (Spiral would break the ground beneath him) that would work by pressing down before releasing the spin button. Oh, and before you say it, I know the spinning animation sucks

[coffee]

Nice alpha, nice parellax's. The Mega jump seems interesting and the accumulator method good.
Two suggestions for your spiral character. Jump a little bit more when "walking" would look more fun. Also rotate your character a bit when wall-jumping (with spring against the wall).

I hope to see developments in the gameplay.

[Jasoco]

I notice you make wall jumps work when pressing towards the wall. I would suggest switching that. Make them work when you are pressing away. I kept bouncing off a wall when I didn't want to because I was still moving towards it.

Or do like NEW Super Mario Bros and require a second press of the Jump button to perform the wall jump.

Either way, it's best to avoid accidental jumping when you don't want to.

Also, arrow keys please. WSAD only makes me sad. Oh, and why J for Jump. Use Space.

[Ellohir]

The ground is PO2 compatible and looks nice.

[molul]

Jump a little bit more when "walking" would look more fun.

Are you talking about the animation when he's on ground? Or do you mean that jump (with the jump key) should be higher if you are walking than if you are still?

Also rotate your character a bit when wall-jumping (with spring against the wall).

Yeah, that movement still hasn't got its own animation. It will be updated as soon as the designer provides me the new animations

I notice you make wall jumps work when pressing towards the wall. I would suggest switching that. Make them work when you are pressing away. I kept bouncing off a wall when I didn't want to because I was still moving towards it.

Or do like NEW Super Mario Bros and require a second press of the Jump button to perform the wall jump.

I'll try the second idea. Pressing in the opposite direction would result in losing the wall detection, while not pressing any direction sounds more intuitive and actually easier. Also the bad thing about my current approach is that when you do the wall jumping, you're pressing the opposite direction than the one you jump to, so you loose a bit of speed in the very beginning (not too much, but it's ugly anyway).

Also, arrow keys please. WSAD only makes me sad. Oh, and why J for Jump. Use Space.

Hahaha. Actually the game will allow the player to define its keys (you can already do it in the "const.lua"). Personally I never liked playing platform games in PC with the arrow keys. When I played my favourite platformers on Genesis, my left hand did the movement and the right one the actions, and I like to keep that

About the jump key, there will be another key (K) for another set of movements. J wasn't chosen because being it "Jump", if that's what you thought I might move to K and L. It's not something that worries me in this early stage, hehe.

The ground is PO2 compatible and looks nice.

Newbie question: what is PO2?


Well, thank you all for the good feedback. Much appreciated.

Oh, and one question, if you can help me with it: currently if you jump and touch a wall while the jump key is still pressed, you'll do a wall jumping. I want to avoid that, so you can only wall jump when you release the jump key and then press it again. I've got some ideas to do it, but still haven't figured anything really simple

[MarekkPie]

https://love2d.org/wiki/PO2_Syndrome

[molul]

Ah, I see. It's a big world of acronyms. When I googled it, my first result was an arquitect college from Spain (lol).

[molul]

Jasoco, I finally made it without having to press left or right and it really is better. Now the condition to jump against a wall is that you press jump while on the air and facing the wall you want to jump against. Also I managed to make it only available if you released jump previously, so I can say it's fine now. Thanks again for the idea!

[Lafolie]

I'm really impressed that you have a tilemap and scrolling/parallax environment set up so fast. It's pretty smooth too, looking forward to playing an actual level of this.

[molul]

Thank you Actually it wasn't very difficult, as the tiledmap loader and the camera class were already implemented, and most of the graphics were done a few years ago. Not to mention Löve is really powerful and easy to use

I've made a lot of improvements to the ground/walls/ceiling detection and implemented some new movements for the player, but I prefer not uploading anything until I have put more stuff together (at least until I get the new HD graphics and program some enemies and items). I hope to have a full level in a couple of months. I'll keep you updated!