Pedestrians

Current store page logo

CLOUDS

Not a whole lot of newness this week. Mostly dealing with other stuff. Added a cloud effect using one of GM's built-in particle systems. I originally wanted to give the clouds randomized colors, but that looks kind of bad to me, so I ended up making them all red. They are currently stationary, as I'm not aware of a way to get them to move using this built-in effect. They tend to appear and disappear more quickly than I would like, so I added a timer that pauses the code for a couple of seconds.


SQUISHY LITTLE PEOPLE WITH JETPACKS

More or less finished adding pedestrians to the game. They are totally pointless, but amusing. No one is hostile to them, but they still end up dying constantly. Currently, they appear from stations or off the edge of the room, and either fly out of the room, or travel to a station, depending on where they originated. I wanted to use the player squish sound for when they die, but that got sort of annoying and really reduced the impact of the player dying. That sound effect needs to be a little reward for losing the game, so I can't reuse it for other stuff.

I'm not sure if I'm going to leave the pedestrians in the game, but if I do, the remaining feature to add is the ability to hail them, with randomized responses. 

After this, major things on my to do list  are the scoring system, events, better hit feedback, and visible damage on the player sprite. Plus more new enemy designs.


WEBSITE

Also got the game's itch.io page set up. It still needs it own devlog, and I'm not sure of the best way

itch.io page

to go about that yet, considering that these entries already exist. 

I'm hoping to have the page up and running soon with a download of the current build. However, I'm still debating how to set that up. Particularly, whether I should charge money for it, or just leave it free for now, with optional donations. This is just a prototype, after all, but I plan to update it at least until it feels feature complete, even if it lacks the meta-layer that would make it feel like a full game. 

Added a title image when you start the game, since I'd already had to make one for the site. The most annoying thing about this version of GM so far is that the sprite editor's eraser is not usable as a fill tool, or anything but a brush. This means if I have a solid color background that needs to be erased, I have to manually erase every bit of it with the brush, going around the parts that I need to keep. So the very simple task of getting rid of the black background on the title was instead 20 to 30 minutes of tedious erasing. Of course, choosing a transparent color doesn't work, because those are overlaid onto the existing colors. If there is a better way, it is non-obvious. A web search only turned up a thread from three years ago, and the only answer to the question was 'the sprite editor is still unfinished'. Okay...

Not much else got done this week. Working on other stuff. Still not sure if I should leave the flying people in the game. What do you think?