Boy. I had to take a trip for a few days, which of course led to being sick for... a week and a half. I am just now recovering my physical capacity to function. I hate leaving my house. But anyway, not much has happened, but here's a new feature I've been working on in Titan Tunnels:
You might say, "whoa whoa, Ham, why is a level 1 enemy shooting a massive stream of bullets? That seems hard!" You might also say "that environment is really blocky and lame". That part's because I haven't implemented the tile cleanup from the auto-map generation yet. Low priority - functional is better than pretty. But the stream of bullets does seem dangerous. It's not as bad as it seems, as it is initially aimed at you (to the nearest 45 degrees) but stays aimed that direction for its whole duration. So it's more of an area denial than an attack. Although if you do end up caught in the middle of it, you are pretty much dead as it shoves you into a wall and pins you there.
Do you see the interesting yellow bar on the enemy life meter? It's my own invention and I think it's completely original! You know how many games give enemies a 'stun meter' or a 'poise meter'? It's a secondary health bar, and if you deplete it, typically the enemy will collapse to the ground allowing you to beat on them viciously for a few seconds (or do a huge super execution move, that's always fun) before it refills and they get back into action. I enjoy those, but wanted to do something a little different, so this is an Ability Meter. Some enemies (definitely not all, mostly the big tough ones) have an Ability Meter, which is shorter than their life bar. Doing damage to them damages both meters equally (though some skills will do extra damage to the ability meter, or erase it immediately). When you empty the Ability Meter, the enemy is indeed stunned, but only for a brief moment. That's just there to make the moment more notable, and in case they were currently using their ability, to cut it off. Because once you break their ability meter, they lose their special ability for good! The obvious example of a special ability here is the Mechie Mouse's machine gun.
The idea is that we're adding a little layer of strategy to the game. Enemies with their special abilities intact are quite dangerous, but it's not very hard to disarm the ability (this screenshot shows a 50% length ability meter, but that was just testing. The actual meter for Mechie Mouse will be something like 10%, so you whack them twice to disable it, if you can get past the storm of bullets). So instead of just attacking the pack willy-nilly, you need to go after disabling the mean ones first, to make it easier. I think that's a little more interesting than a basic stun meter, and I also like the tradition of knocking out an enemy's attack (like the classic way you can blow up the turrets on a big battleship in shooting games).
As I said, some skills will do extra ability damage, and the most notable of these is the Rogue skill Murdalize. Because this game is very much not designed for stealth mechanics, it's a little tricky to shoehorn in a stealth play style. If you stealth your way up to a crowd of enemies, and backstab one, it doesn't matter much because there are like 12 of them. So this is a way to give Murdalize some extra functionality without having to make it extremely lethal (if it can instakill the toughest enemies, which is what would make it useful, then it's overpowered!): it instantly erases the enemy's ability bar. So you can pick a target in the crowd that has an ability you fear, and make sure you don't have to face that ability, resulting in a unique gameplay feel that hopefully is fun! All of this is hopefully fun, I'm making a video game.
Also of tiny note in this picture is the teeny tiny shield next to Mechie's life meter. It visually displays how much armor an enemy has, and some skills can break armor, which would turn that shield black. I'm enjoying having lots of icons and bars on the enemy meter. I have toyed with the idea of having breakpoints in their life meters (generally for bosses, but maybe for some Tough Guys too), just a line on the life meter where
something will happen. Could be a refill of their ability meter, speaking of that new concept, or maybe they refill any broken armor, or maybe they transform into a monstrous phase 2 mode. Who knows, just something fun. I might do that, but it's another low priority idea. The other thing that does definitely show on life meters is icons to the left of the meter to show any buffs or debuffs, in classic RPG style. That is implemented, but I believe I have yet to implement any buffs or debuffs, so nothing to show there. I'm also thinking of showing poison on life meters, like some other ARPGs do, where the amount of life the poison is going to remove is marked off on the meter. It's nice to know when you've done enough and can walk away and leave them to funeral planning.
