Feature Spotlight #3 - Mechanics

Sorry, folks. No video again. I was a bit under the weather this week, so I'm afraid that screenshots will have to suffice.

But enough with the excuses. Focus has been less on graphic art and enemies, lately, and more on smaller, more fine details—the mechanics of how the game is played. I thought that I might introduce a few things. Firstly...

Swimming

I mentioned this in one of the first posts, I believe. This was one of the more difficult things to add to the game. The hard bit wasn't the animations and music, but finding a way to simulate buoyancy. If you do not know what that is, I suggest looking it up.  I do not have time to explain three-sylable words to people. If you do not know what "syllable" means, use your dictionary to look it up and buy a sheet of vocabulary words so you won't run into these embarrassing situations again. If you don't know what "embarrassing" means, rethink your life. I'm sure you'll find it apply to many occasions. (Kidding! ;) )

(Ahem) So what I eventually came up with was a similar concept to gravity (or the lack thereof). Negative gravity. That way, instead of being pushed downwards, the player is pushed upwards. That's why it's interesting to hear about astronauts testing their space suites underwater to get a feel for zero-gravity. They obviously don't know a thing about physics, and how when they're underwater, they're not actually simulating 0% gravity, they're simulating -10% to -20% gravity or so. Sorry, NASA. I guess artificial gravity is the future of accurate space-suite training.

So if you were to lazy to read all of that, I basically said that buoyancy is essentially negative gravity and space explorers are going to be hopelessly unprepared for space travel due to inaccurate anti-gravity training.

And here are the screenshots:

At the top-right of the screen, we can see a timer telling the player how long he can be underwater for.

You can "run" at a slow speed when submerged.

You can leap out of the water at higher speeds if you jump from the bottom of a pool.

The player, in this picture, has a respiration powerup so he can breath underwater for the rest of the level. 

Pencils can be found underwater.

This is the player expelling air so he can drop.

You can stand on platforms with your traction boots.

Minuscule details that you'll probably never notice

I also added tufts of grass. When the player runs by it, the tuft will wave in the direction he's running towards. Here's a picture.

Blurbs

This has to be my favorite feature in the game. I'm immensely proud of the script which took me days to write, but the results made it very worth it. When the player walks by a villager, a speech bubble pops over their head and the player can talk to them... and even say a few things of his own. Picture time!

This is a picture of the player talking to a tutorial guy.

HandDrawn currently supports one fork in the speech pattern. You can choose what to say back from a variety of options. Usually, there's one intelligent thing to say, one rude thing to say, and one stupid thing to say.

And of course, reactions differ from person to person.

Some villagers are helpful.

Some are very stupid.

Mushrooms

This is another cool feature. The description is simple: the player can jump on these objects and be propelled a short distance. If he presses the spacebar at the right moment, that is, as he collides with the mushroom, he is bounced further. The force that the player is bounced at varies, and if the player falls on a mushroom, he won't get hurt.

This probably won't be enough of a boost to get over the gap...

In conclusion...

I have so much I want to talk about, but I think this post is large enough. Oh, I almost forgot: I did promise to mention the first release candidate of the game's release date. Drumroll, please...

Friday, the 25th of October (2013)!

This will include the first version of the game as well as the addition of the entire script source (as well as the executable) uploaded to the Git repository. For more details on the game, please check the wiki. Thanks for reading, and make sure to leave feedback in the nifty comment box about how the game's coming along! Tell your friends, as well!