Axe Cop

The Wobbler · Post by **The Wobbler** » Sun Sep 10, 2017 3:52 pm

Party size matters and difficulty matters. If you've got a game with eight characters, running some dungeons twice to find extra stuff isn't a big deal. If you're going to have like 15, being able to swap any time will make it a lot smoother for the player, because there's no way I'd be willing to replay the same zones 4 or 5 times.

Making the player think carefully about party composition for a particular dungeon, locking them in, and having to deal with the pros and cons of each hero is a huge part of creating interesting dungeon challenges, and that's lost if you can swap any time. If you're aiming for a more casual game, Paper Mario style, that's fine.

It comes down to what the game's intent is. If the focus is just on the jokes and character moments from the comics, it's fine to just let the player do whatever whenever. If the game's intended to challenge players, it's a different approach. For Kaiju I was planning on allowing players to swap the party at any time on Easy Mode, but not on Normal/Hard.

Soda_piggy · Post by **Soda_piggy** » Sun Sep 10, 2017 5:53 pm

Dungeons will likely take this all into account. So when you have the ability to swap out a bunch of heroes, then enemy numbers and difficulty level will probably be scaled in consideration.

RMZ · Post by **RMZ** » Mon Sep 11, 2017 1:10 am

The thing is... even if you have your full 15 people, you can still have a tough time in combat, because if you die with those 4 you still lose. At the end of combat if a hero got KO'ed, they come out with 1 HP. It's a feature I've put in since Batman & Robin and put in MTA and it worked out great. I haven't discussed this much publicly, but all the heroes are also going to be built very differently for combat so they are all equally valuable for teamwork.

The Paper Mario thing struck a chord with me because it is such a major influence on the game, that and Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga, but that's not relevant to party swapping. All heroes will get a share of the experience, so that if you suddenly have to use a character to solve a puzzle you won't be punished for favoring the combat style of somebody else.

As Soda put it earlier today, the party restrictions are for more conventional RPGs with the whole restriction being to set in preferred battle line ups. The example we used was FF7. There are no advantages or disadvantages out of combat for having a line-up of Cloud, Barret and Tifa. Wanting to use Vincent is purely a player preference, not a necessity to the flow of a map. As Surlaw put, backtracking 4-5 times will get old and nobody will want to do that.

Now, what I can easily do, is just create obstacles on the first play-through of a level that the player can't access with their story-based line-up until they get the new character. For instance, the dog Ralph Wrinkles can find a hidden path in the Land of Volcanoes. Moreso we just need to do some trial and error and see how the theories work.

RMZ · Post by **RMZ** » Tue Sep 12, 2017 1:14 pm

<img src="https://www.redtrianglegames.com/img/de ... net001.png">

Started work on tiles for the next mission in the Snow Planet. The concept of this area is a giant foresty-mountain type place. I'll be making a script for sprinkling snow and will likely make it so the snow can be of various intensities. Will probably take me like a month to get all the art done, but so far I'm happy with the way it's turning out.

The Wobbler · Post by **The Wobbler** » Tue Sep 12, 2017 1:51 pm

RedMaverickZero wrote:The thing is... even if you have your full 15 people, you can still have a tough time in combat, because if you die with those 4 you still lose. At the end of combat if a hero got KO'ed, they come out with 1 HP. It's a feature I've put in since Batman & Robin and put in MTA and it worked out great. I haven't discussed this much publicly, but all the heroes are also going to be built very differently for combat so they are all equally valuable for teamwork.

It's a matter of whether resource management will be part of the game's challenge or not. If three of your four guys die in a random fight, they'll come back at 1 HP and you'll have to spend healing resources to get them back up to full health. If you can just swap in another guy at any time, you don't have to worry about healing those three, so that factor matters less.

It's fine either way, it's just a question of how challenging you want the game to be and in what ways, knowing the audience and playing toward what best suits them.

RMZ · Post by **RMZ** » Fri Sep 22, 2017 8:47 pm

<img src="https://www.redtrianglegames.com/img/de ... net002.gif">

The past couple weeks have been pretty big. Finding it tough to going full steam into the game but this week I sorted out how to do random encounters with some major help thanks to James Paige. Enemies are loaded at random offscreen in a specific zone. Took forever to get it just right, but it's perfect now. Also, have it so the snowmen trigger as Chase You enemies if you get within 3 tiles of them which should spice it up a little bit. Learned the hard way that you can't alter an NPC reference, so I wound up making a separate NPC to create over top of it. I think this gif shows the snowman's changes pretty good.

Post by **Bob the Hamster** » Fri Sep 22, 2017 11:27 pm

I love how those Trees look! :)

I saw what you had in mind for the script, but now with the new enemy walkabout sprites, it looks even better!

Also, check out the <a href="http://hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/doc ... id">change NPC id</a> command, which might come in handy. You can convert an npc reference to a different id without needing to remove and re-created it

Post by **TMC** » Sat Sep 23, 2017 9:52 am

Those snowmen and tree look great, pretty amusing. So the trees don't start battles if you walk into them? But the snowmen do? Or did you just disable that for the purpose of this recording?
Is that just "Chase You (Meandering)" or are you doing something else too, like randomly switching its move type? It looks like those snowman move in the wrong direction a lot as they chase.

RMZ · Post by **RMZ** » Fri Sep 29, 2017 2:42 pm

Yeah, the fights just aren't built yet. When they face you they will start up a fight. They just turn to the NPC movement type of Chase You. It's effective and works, no arguments there.

So this is what we're posting tomorrow.

<img src="https://www.redtrianglegames.com/img/de ... net003.gif">

Commissioned Spoonweaver to make this rad minigame to kind of break up the game from full RPG for a minute. Axe Cop is a super random comic, so it needs stuff like this to keep everything fresh I think and it does it just fine.

When you reach the Snow Planet you'll be at the top of the mountain, ready to approach the boss. Well with his evil Christmas magic he's going to push your whole team off the edge and Axe Cop being the cool dude that he is, snowboards down the mountain on his axe while his buds fall to the bottom like chumps. Then you have to scale the mountain to get back to the boss and stop him.

A large reason I wanted this minigame is because of how much nostalgia I have for the snowboarding section in Sonic 3. I got stuck in Carinal Night Zone cause of those rotating things for years and just wanted to get past them one time so I could actually snowboard. Anyways, that and the fact that Ice Cap Zone wasn't in Sonic Mania made me really want to do this. Spoonweaver knocked it out of the park.

Post by **Bob the Hamster** » Fri Sep 29, 2017 3:31 pm

Amazing! :D

Post by **TMC** » Fri Sep 29, 2017 4:56 pm

That definitely looks fun! What are the controls, just left/right, or also forward/back?
So was that in the comic? Ice Cap Zone is a great inspiration, though.

Shows that you're all Americans; I've never seen the abbreviation Km/H before :)

Post by **Bob the Hamster** » Fri Sep 29, 2017 5:07 pm

I guess it is not supposed to be capitalized?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilometres_per_hour

RMZ · Post by **RMZ** » Fri Sep 29, 2017 5:50 pm

TMC wrote:That definitely looks fun! What are the controls, just left/right, or also forward/back?
So was that in the comic? Ice Cap Zone is a great inspiration, though.

Shows that you're all Americans; I've never seen the abbreviation Km/H before

Yeah those are just the controls. Axe Cop sledding on his axe, or even riding his axe never happened in the comics. This is some idea I came up with. He's a super macho guy and he's the most confident character so I assumed he'd think that would be the sickest way down the mountain.

I'll revise the speed part. Great catch guys!

Spoonweaver · Post by **Spoonweaver** » Fri Sep 29, 2017 11:59 pm

RMZ · Post by **RMZ** » Mon Oct 02, 2017 12:53 am

<img src="https://www.redtrianglegames.com/img/de ... screen.png">

Alright, well the only person that asked for this from testing was Surlaw. After playing Spoonweaver's Tim-Tim 2 demo and how great his load screen was I thought... "maybe Axe Cop could benefit from that too" and so I spent this past weekend on the save menu. It uses a bit of everything to give the player two choices for saving data. I'll make a better screenshot later for likely a social media post next weekend but I wanted to share now while it was fresh.

The game logs everything into the save file you pick, not letting you pick each time, which save slot to save to. Similar to how Zelda handles things. Unfortunately this will be pretty confusing to all testers using save data (which is still fine), but after a new save with the new file when the next demo is released next year, it'll all be fixed since the game will have variables to export.