Metroid-inspired project progress - Journey Galactia

mudmask

Thanks. Well if you want we can add each other on skype or facebook and talk about game development ideas and throw the idea ball around.

As for being busy, I guess. I'm not exactly developing the game full-time all day, it's mostly when I feel like it and when I get an idea of what I want to do next. But I do try to spent about an hour a day staring at my engine and testing the game around for bugs to squash. Might do the charge beam next.

I want the game to be great in terms of gameplay and mechanics but I want it to be simple enough for me to finish.

You use webstorage to save the weapons? You mean does the player currently have them and such?

I use global variables for that. Seems interesting, but I'm just curious as to how you did the mapping areas.

When I saw the charging for the weapon, it reminded me a lot of 'Ghost Song'.

About the refilling stuff and " where you just run out of ammo and that's kind of it until you find a way to get some more or hit up a recharge station", it's actually not that easy to run out of missiles unless you're just purposefully wasting them, and if you're not at max capacity for ammo it's frequently dropped by enemies. The only type of weapon you're at risk of running out of ammo for is the Super Missile in Metroid Zero Mission and Super Metroid, I know in Metroid Zero Mission normal players will get about 24 by the end of the game but that's with a purpose, since they can kill the end boss in 4 hits.

Think less about actual ammo and more about the usability of the weapon,

e.g. with the Super Missile it seems fairly limited in ammo but there's never an occasion where you would just spit them out like beans

+ Normal Missiles are plentiful enough to never run out with normal usage, and enemies regularly drop pick-ups, I've seen videos of people beating the games with only 4 missiles (max ammo, not just 4 literal missiles) on hard mode (Zero Mission).

+ Power bombs are powerful (ha) enough to not be needed a lot, although in Metroid Fusion the number you can get is just ridiculous, I've never run out of them even when I'm just wasting them on purpose.

+The player has the charge beam, which most players use.

Not to mention that the way the maps are design kind of naturally prevent you from running out of ammo.

But the current way you're doing is does open up other options; like items that increase recovery rate and the limit.

Nesteris - good points. A big part of my decision, like I mentioned, was to just keep the game moving kind of faster (but not too fast).

About webstorage, I only use that when an item or option is changed from the pause screen. when I exit the pause screen I essentially reload the previous save state of the game, and when that save state is loaded, it also loads the changes that were saved using the web storage. for example, if I switched a weapon, or used a med kit or something, obviously a save state wouldn't load those changes because you're going back to a previous state of the game. you would need something like webstorage which remained independent of the save state in order to load any changes that were made from the pause screen.

mudmask

That's pretty clever. How did you do the map for the pause menu? Is it a collection of sprites that become visible when the player enters a room? Still wondering if I should make a map or not for my game.

Nesteris - I have a function that creates an array based on the size of each layout, and records which screens are empty and which have important things in them, then it just outputs on the pause screen. It's pretty crude, the procedurally generated levels, since they're already based on an array, put it together a bit easier and allow for auto mapping. one of my next tasks is to do that for my normal levels.

Nesteris - I have a function that creates an array based on the size of each layout, and records which screens are empty and which have important things in them, then it just outputs on the pause screen. It's pretty crude, the procedurally generated levels, since they're already based on an array, put it together a bit easier and allow for auto mapping. one of my next tasks is to do that for my normal levels.

Pretty impressive, beats the "Fog of war" method I've heard other people using.

AlfonsoVerlezza - thanks man! Now I just gotta finish it...