Breaking Bad...

Well, I didn't think I was going to get too far today, but it turns out I got a number of things done that have significantly contributed to the feel of the game...

One of my playtesters reported that they couldn't use the F1 and F2 keys on the Mac. Well, that was simple enough to start with, so I added "h" for help and "d" for debug. I also reorganized the keys so the ones needed during gameplay should get found faster. And I fixed an annoying issue with the key help where the spacebar (key) was just shown as a... space. Now it refers to it as "[space]", which should hopefully get the point across.

I also sped things up. The fragile items were too "floaty", so I kicked their dy up quite a bit. Much more satisfactory. I got rid of the jump sounds because they seemed too distracting. But, in return, I did some work on the jump parameters, fiddling with gravity (hero.ay) and the impulse from jumps and springs until I had a better feeling jump. I also sped the horizontal motion up a bit too. This stretches the jump parabola out and makes the game feel a bit more exciting. I can see that speeding it up even more as the player progresses could be an interesting challenge.

Those fragile items? I couldn't leave well enough alone, and finally got some sound effects wired in. I was originally going to play breaking noises when they actually fell below the bottom of the screen, but it felt more... "visceral" to make the sound when Kat runs over them. I also reorganized the opening phrase to make it clear what's going on with the fragile items. And there are more of them! Painted four new fragiles, and seven more kibble. It was turning into a lot of work to load these, so I wrote a little function to automate loading in a strip of sprites.

But the *big* news for this update is the background work. One of the new sprites I painted was a five story building. I added a new (sys-bg) System that creates entities tagged 'bg for the background, using it. This function also adjusts the height of the building so it looks more like a built up landscape. Once I add in a few more buildings, I think we'll have ourselves a stew here! The building heights are computed in TILESIZE steps so that they don't get too random. The same System clips buildings when they scroll off the screen.

So, a good chunk of work done today!