Game1, Day 11 – I’m determined to make SOMETHING glow, damnit!

I’m dying to add glowy stuff to my game haha  Back at the place I used to work I was pretty notorious for adding glows to anything I could.  I just love flashy effects… I think that’s why anime appealed to me when I was a teenager.  Bugs Bunny was eating carrots and the schoolgirl in Project A-Ko was jumping off missiles destroying giant robots… sign me up for that, holy crap!  So I was messing around with making a throwing-star that materializes out of a glow as it flies toward the player and has a little curve in it’s motion:

Realistically though, the flash over and over might get annoying pretty fast, and the curving motion makes it pretty hard to predict where the throwing-star is going to hit, which means the gameplay would suffer a bit.  I’m already working with a strange angle as it is… a straight-on view means it’s hard to judge depth and tell exactly when the throwing-star is going to hit the player, so I kind of don’t want to mess with that and make it worse.  So I think glowing throwing-stars will be a no-go, damn it. But I’ll make SOMETHING glow, haha

I figure there will be Dangerous objects and Helpful objects. Helpful ones will give you a life back or make you invincible or slow the thrown objects down for a period of time.  Dangerous ones will be explosives and different types of weapons that come at you (each will have a different property, like an explosive might target a spot randomly and explode doing an area of damage you have to be out of, whereas a throwing-star targets you and only does damage the size of itself).

I haven’t decided if I’m going to have multiple backgrounds or not yet. I could divide it up into levels with little cutscenes between each one, which is cool from an art perspective, but in terms of gameplay imagine if Canabult paused every 10 seconds to show a little cutscene… it would ruin the flow of the game that these “go through a challenge that gets faster and faster until you can’t keep up and lose” games are built on.  So I might stick to just one background… it’s less work on my end too, but that’s secondary to the gameplay concerns.

Another option might be seamless background progression… I’m making this up as I type right now, but what if the action continues but the ninja’s idle animations change slightly to show him doing a transition animation (falling or running sideways or whatever) as the background scrolls to another scene without interrupting the gameplay (if the player slides his finger, that takes priority over showing the transitioning animation).  hmm…don’t know how that would look, but maybe I’ll doodle it out and see sometime.

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