Got Pico yesterday, and was up all night hacking at it. Wanted to start out by not pushing the limits of pico too hard and working pretty close to the constraints the engine provides.
I wanted to dabble slightly in lighting effects via my little shadow function, though it definitely doesn't scale as is. Also messing with the perspective of the camera and hacking in a tile animation/some more interesting blending on the tile boundaries.
Code is seriously messy, so next step is to clean it up a bit.
Cleaned up the code a bit and reworked a few graphics, going to poke at combat next!
been thinking about making a 3d software render with texture mapping, and i'm partially using this project as a way to get a feel for how much framerate there is to work with.
So far on my map, im drawing mostly in about 2x8 strips on the background layer. so, I'm averaging about 1 call per 16 pixels and I'm already hitting the edge of the performance bar. That's making me think 1 call per pixel for a brute force texture mapper might not work out so well. have to think on it a bit
That's a nice perspective effect.
Just an idea, since there's so much distortion and swimming pixels, maybe using bigger sprites for the characters would look better.
Curious what comes out of it
Ok, time to poke at this some more. first pre-task on combat is taking my random "player" and "other thing" globals and making an actual object data array which I can y-sort. I added a (semi-generalized) insertion sorter.
I scaled them up and added an outline, I think they do look a bit more in the style this way. :)
Hmmm...maybe at some point i could add some detail to the eyes...but i need to stop futzing with graphics for now and actually make the little critter do something...
Loving the new look of the characters! And yeah lovely 3D effect you got going on here!!
I would be interested in seeing the "camera" effect just constantly breathe in and out slowly instead of just upon up and down movement. Even more so if it synced with the character's idle animation's breathing. Just an idea! Especially interested in seeing what it would look like, at accelerated rates, i.e. the player being in a stressful situation. Or seeing it get wobbly, like "Touch Fuzzy Get Dizzy" ala Yoshi's Island, if the player is anxious or exposed to toxic spores. I want to see this "camera" effect really play into the player's psyche and perspective to give a bold feel of connection to the player controller.
@Cabledragon: that sounds like so much fun to messss withhhh. On the shelf to think about later. Now is time for gameplay determination face
Get out your seat and jump around.
Jump up, jump up and get down.
Welp, everything is on fire now... These hopping bastards have gotten a touch scary... Also I have less than 2000 tokens left, so i may either need to cut some features, or do a code compacting phase pretty soon. I'll put up another cartridge when i get the player's combat stuff worked out :p
OOOOOOK!
So, its been maybe 3 days or so of hacking. Finally took some time to look at the awesome stuff everyone else has been up to.
Turns out I'm a complete moron and Lua actually does have some OOP and functional programming support, so my pure imperative hacking is totally not the right way to approach things. replaces noob hat temporarily with celebration hat
Ok, so I'm going to call this a complete core loop. Its not all that clean or fun or balanced, but there is an enemy. It can kill you, you can kill it, and you can buggy-gannondorfily knock elements back and forth.
Next steps: I'm going to do another pass of cleaning this code the hell up, and once its in a better form, I want to make a second cartridge which is just the 3d landscape effect on its own in case people want to grab and re-purpose that :) Also I should make some music! #NoIdeaWhatI'mDoingDog#
I may continue the game from there, or i might play around with raycasters or voxels a bit.
Oh as two quick side notes:
1) you can also jump now
2) ...but it doesn't really accomplish anything yet
yeah, i think i might close out this particular codebase. I could refactor it all but i dont think thats actually the best use of my time, probably going to tackle something else
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