La-Mulana PC Remake - First Impressions

Not a review, more like a comment, but I felt it to be blog worthy.  Besides, I might never actually finish this game till a few months or years later given my current progress, so any review I do wouldn't do it justice.  So I'll ramble instead.

Bought La Mulana, the paid PC remake of the old freeware game.

Still got mixed feelings about it.  I don't regret buying it, nor the time spent playing it. Not in the slightest.  Up to 13 hours so far and have barely scratched the surface, revealing a much deeper game than I expected.  This game is rather long for a Metroid-like game, especially a platformer.

In fact, it's one of my new favorite platform/exploration games of all time.  Scratch that, one of my favorite games of all time, period.

But man, sometimes, I just want to throw something at the designer.

I constantly waver between throwing massive nostalgia tear soaked thank you notes for all the hard work this near perfect gem of a 2d platformer has taken to produce. Or the biggest, heaviest, most painful to die if hit by spike studded object I can find.

But I do want to throw a Something. Just not sure which yet.

Maybe a spike studded object covered with nostalgia tear soaked notes would send the message?

The new graphical overhaul in the PC remake of the game and the refined puzzle design makes it all the more sweeter to play, while the difficulty of the old freeware game has been kept intact despite having a Wii Ware release.  And the length, in a world of Metroid clones that last 8 to 10 hours, La Mulana's puzzles and just plain massive maze like map is very refreshing.  The content is also quite varied, no two puzzles are quite the same, and often they are unique riddles that need to be carefully thought about and then acted on in experimentation to solve.

This is a good game.  Of that there is no doubt.  

But it is certainly not for everyone.

Light headaches, code progress, and combat control theory.

Running through compiler errors while having a headache from a sickness isn't a recommended activity for entertainment. It's a bit demoralizing, to say the least. I may need to take a break till this sickness runs off.

In good news, I now have a script that lets objects be "aware" of how many of a given type of object are around them.

Still working on getting the distances between them returned as well. Ideally the script would enable the object to request how many of X object are within distance Y, and get an array returned containing either distances or the object references.

Why do I need this?  Good question.  It does seem like a silly script taken out of context.

Our main character needs to know how if he is fighting one enemy or a group. Combat changes a bit depending on which situation he is in, so like a real fighter, he's got to be dynamically aware how close the nearest enemies are and change his moves accordingly.

In turn, the proposed system lets the controls be super easy (just one attack button) while the combat itself can vary from "doing combo attacks on the big thug enemy" to "swinging all around to defend from all sides". It should be pretty fun once it all works.

But mainly, having him aware of how many enemies are near helps solve the problem a lot of games with a combo attack system have.


Yes, game design rambling oncoming:

Anyone who's played them knows one of the most annoying things ever is to have your main character "lock on" to one enemy, only to be smashed to bits by the three other surrounding enemies.

Realistic, sure, after all, you were the one that mashed the attack button telling the main character to start the combo attack. However, that doesn't make it any more fun to be a victim of this when you panic in the heat of battle.

Most games call it "skill" and leave such a trap in on purpose to punish the player for making mistakes. For a combat focused game, that would be an acceptable additional complexity.  There's nothing wrong with it actually, assuming your game is mainly about fighting or has a complex fighting system in it.

For games that don't have such a system, they usually solve the "combo gets you killed" in a few ways:

-Having the other enemies mostly just stand there while the combo is going on. This works, but makes the enemies look kind of stupid since they go from charging into battle to just standing around screaming while their friend is brutally murdered in front of them. Assassin's Creed players know this all too well, it happens so much in that game it's often immersion breaking(They've been trying to fix this in the sequels, with varying success).

-Splitting the attack commands into a "Light attack" and "Heavy attack" option. This creates two buttons in the controls, which works for complex action games, but for this game I want to keep controls simple so anyone can play. In a game where fighting is only going to be a third of what the player is doing, it doesn't make too much sense to make it so complicated.

-Give the player a control for "dodge" that interrupts the combo, even when it's been pressed into motion. This is fun, I like games that do this, but once again, we're adding a third button that only exists for the sake of combat. Combat in turn is only a part of the platforming game experience, and so unless we can come up with a lot of platforming uses for the button, it's just adding more complexity to the controls.

My game actually sort of uses the third solution without adding a third button, the Jump button will cancel a combo by jumping out of it. This actually serves a purpose in platforming, you can jump higher by kicking off enemies or combo attack-able elements in this way. Of course, this alone isn't enough to fix the initial problem of getting attacked by many enemies at once.


And so my final solution is to avoid ever creating the "combo mobbed" situation in the first place, by making the main character himself only be able to combo attack if there isn't other enemies nearby that might interrupt him.  It sounds simple on paper, but in reality there are a lot of little scripts that need to talk to each other to make it work and feel right.  In the end, it should just feel like the main character is "behaving smart" and helping the player out.  Since the game is primarily focused on collecting and platforming, having the combat be a bit light should work just fine.

Not sure how soon I can get the system up and running with all this illness going around.  But I think it looks really good on paper, and I really want to try it out in practice.

Gmod 13: how to fix broken model addons

Gmod 13 is no longer in beta. It's slick...has workshop support at the click of a button, and lots of shiny cool stuff. Updates are fun! However...

Of course, EVERYTHING OLD BROKE.

After some research and much stalking on the FP forums(which I will not link due to some of the content of that site being...well, let's just say not so good for most eyes.), I've found a few fixes so far that let one salvage stuff made for 10.

In order to help people not have to do so much digging and questioning, I'm listing the major thing here that let most of my stuff work again.
 
NOTE: This is going to take a bit of work with files on your end. If you are not comfortable with mucking about in files, it's probably best that you stick with what others are converting on the steam workshop and just put up with the fact all your old NPCs, models, and props don't exist.

No title, oh no.

Modeling...UV mapping...modeling some more.  That's pretty much my work day for today.  UV mapping is a chore.

Thankfully not everything in the game actually needs one.  Thank you Unity for supporting material settings.

In other news...Good old Games is having a weekend sale on various Ubisoft things.  One of these things happens to be Might and Magic 1 to 6, M&M 7, and M&M 8.  I now own all of them.  My party member dungeon crawling turn based combat itch should be satisfied for quite a while now.

Other things of note on sale: Hero's of Might and Magic 2 and 3, Beyond Good and Evil (No DRM version, YAY!), Prince of Persia Sands of Time Trilogy, and Assassin's Creed.  All fantastic games at this price if you enjoy their gameplay styles.  (I already own all of them on disk or various consoles though, but that shouldn't stop you from checking them out if you've never played them.)

Here's the website for lazy people(seriously, it's three letters long):

www.gog.com

I probably should have written something more useful here instead, but I've had a long day and don't feel up to a review right now.  So just go check out the sale instead.

Why Bad Piggies is Good - Android Review

This game is from the makers of Angry Birds, but aside from starring the pigs from it the gameplay has very little to do with Angry Birds.  Which is a very good thing, because I for one didn't like Angry Birds much.

I love Bad Piggies though.  I just felt that should be stated, so if this review sounds one sided, that's probably why.  I'll try to keep it fair anyways.  In short summary though, I heartily recommend this game for just about everyone.  It's hard not to be entertained by the cartoon outcome of the game, and building the many contraptions, then seeing them in action brings about a simple joy that should not be missed.

Game Project Progress

Finished sorting out all the current project modeling work and files into a modeling to do list and a modeling done list.

Next up, actually starting to add new content to the to-do list.  The result should be a massive, but highly useful page of all models, their current status(modeled, textured, rigged, animated), and a second list with all the complete ones.

All on a wiki page with html tables.  Who knew that html web design I studied back in my highschool years would end up being used to organize collaborative modeling on a video game?  I sure didn't see this one coming.

Custom Windows In The Unity Editor

People who don't use Unity are not going to get much out of this post.  If you don't find coding interesting, feel free to ignore this one.

The Unity documentation isn't very clear on how to setup scripts to add features to itself.  I found it rather confusing.  This is mostly because the biggest step, where to put the script file to make it work, isn't explained very well.  I aim to help some of you out with this post, having got it working this afternoon.

When setup right, having the Editor scripts folder and hooking code into the Unity Editor interface is very powerful.  Such a setup allows one to write custom tools.  In short, everything in the Unity graphical user interface(GUI) that you use to make your game project is written in Unity.

A quick disclaimer:  I am no expert on Unity.  I've got less then a year's experience using the tool, so don't take my words as law.  If you found this page in a google search, I'm probably about as experienced as you.

Anyway, enough rambling.  On with the useful info (after the break):