addaline

a rare dev post here, but the gif was small enough this time

i don't post a lot of gamedev partially because of the gif upload size limit, but i had a nice short one;

game dev is all about iteration; i think i'm going to try and move away from using the height map that i had set up before. the height map is a essentially a topology map of the room with every x coordinate getting a y value for the highest floor point in the room this may still have a use for some of the weather effects, even in stacked rooms.

you see, my little particle effects like the leaves that get kicked up from leafy floors would use the height map for blowing around, so they wouldn't clip through the floor; this had a problem though. in places with another 'floor' over it, the particles would snap up to the floor overhead, since the highest floor was there. the reason for using that was so i could avoid collision checks with the particles, and essentially pre-compute the collision locations. but with stacked areas making their way into the level design it's time for another approach.

i've learned the value of offsetting update tick rates for more expensive effects, and also that the point-collision check is relatively lightweight in GMS2, and also that i'm ok with some amount of inaccuracy and chaos in the movement of particles, so they're back to collision checks.

i'll keep refining the math, but it's been nice getting the particles back indoors again

oh no, the gif size has a limit of 5mb, i'll have to get tricky with my gifs again;

so i'm revisiting a very old scrapped concept of having targeting - i had tried this out very early on, and ended up deciding against it at the time. Currently, there is an Emote button that pulls triple duty as Emote/Taunt, Interact, and CallAssist. I've wanted to split these up, and currently I'm considering some adjustments to assists, though that's tangential to the targeting.

The idea is trying out the Emote button being Emote/Taunt + Interact + Target, as a sort of 'single someone out' button. Suu's emotes are cancellable, so it's not a commitment to target. It can also be done -during- any other action without interrupting.

targeting felt useful, as combat during the fighting-game-mode duels felt nice with the added ability to backpedal, especially since currently holding back/down-back is how to block. It works the same way untargeted, where Suu can block while walking away, but her backpedal speed is a little slower and being targeted makes sure your attacks are towards the enemy.

There's going to be a lot of edge cases to work around, and I want to make sure that the untargeted mechanics are smooth enough that not using targeting isn't a huge disadvantage. As far as target swapping through groups, I may not be able to come up with an ergonomic solution that feels right, so I may lean towards having it be a limited system in that it just lets you target the closest target ahead of Suu