cool man,
Again, I plan to be cranking on The Wizard's Den through March.
In the interim, I'm mostly hoping to figure out how to best work with you and Paul. And maybe experiment with some procedural level design, just to figure out how hard it is (it's a rabbit hole i've stayed away from in the past. but could probably serve your project - as well as some of my work projects).
I went to a cool talk on how it usually works at PAXdev back in august (kind of covered common pitfalls, and a vague summary of the backbone of it):
http://dev.paxsite.com/schedule/panel/p ... -mythologyalso, enjoyed a talk about creating art for a procedurally generated project:
http://dev.paxsite.com/schedule/panel/t ... t-of-belowjust mentioning these because I have notes from them, which i'll hope to share if we go down this road. and to mention how little i really know about that world. so far.
- I've only played the demo for Bastion, and was kind of underwhelmed (unfairly). But I was in it for the narration feature. which was promised to spew story about whatever you did. I was hoping this would mean rambling for hours about the last goomba you killed, if you didn't move to a new area. but. sadly that's not the route they took. no idea how that could actually work. but. (it'd be fucking awesome).
my first thought for your game is : maybe we could bring the level chunks in with some other visual. like fading them in, or scaling them up from nothing. So, really just a minor animation quibble. eh. so i dunno. heh. eh.
- do you guys have some sort of design doc? (and should we just babble openly/endlessly about it here in forum? i don't mind, just checking).
- i think it'd be good to pick one core mechanic for her attacks, and emphasize it. like, does she carry a hockey stick around to deflect things? or a baseball bat? i'm guessing no. So what would she use in lieu of those? If you want to focus on deflecting things as the core mechanic, then i think you need to pick an iconic item that she used to do it. maybe something you'd find in the environment of the first level?
I dig the idea that she doesn't really have an attack, so much as this deflection defense. but it might be frustrating for players to be "passive" in this way. (we're all kind of trained to expect a power fantasy from video games).
maybe she could have a "snarky insult" attack that never really hurts anything. Might be kind of funny to have this deep combo system, but instead of moves, it's all about chaining words for powerful insults. and maybe eventually you'd find enemies that specific chains totally demolish.
... but i guess that kind of funny route isn't the right approach for a cool Dreamland Adventure.
I think the fireball could work if yall want it. ... maybe it could be some kind of insane asylum jacket? like she flips her arms around herself to conjure a straightjacket, then flings arms forward to throw it, burning, forward?
- one other random thought: i'm buying this goddamned Samsung Gear VR mount. because I'm lightly obsessed with the VR fad that may or may not be starting. So i may be annoying about pushing for some sort of VR support shit. and this leads me to a random game mechanic idea (that only really makes sense in VR?).
eh, so Oculus showed this suprising use of their VR goggles in the game "Lucky's Adventure":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUyFyjjJaBYyou are dragged along slowly in this 3rd person platformer.
so i'm daydreaming that if we made something like Bastion, where the stage only appears as your character approaches it, we could put a twist on it: where turning your VR-Goggled-head to look around in the environment would reveal blocks. so you could potentially look ahead of your character, revealing dangers ahead. maybe it's hard to deal with certain enemies because as soon as they appear they attack, and you have little time to react, but if you look ahead and reveal them earlier, you'll be better prepared to deal with them.
or maybe you reach points where you want to use your deflect trick to flip some switch, but there's no one around to lob things at you : so you look around to reveal some island that has a thrower on it. then he throws at you, and you can use it.
anywho. lot of typing. wee. more later.