Red Triangle Games Projects (Development Thread)

[RMZ]

This week was pretty great for Takoyaki. FInished up World 3 aside from audio items, and then this weekend I worked on the level perks.

If you can reach the Orca King in each stage you unlock a bonus round where you spin a wheel and get a beverage. It's not Gatorade, it's Orcaade. The implied joke is that the King is a mascot for the sports drink company.

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There are four altogether, red (power up clicks), blue (freeze all enemies on the screen but not bosses), orange (speed boost) and green (invincibility). They are pretty fun to use. I didn't want to break the balance of my game by letting player just spam the drinks for the entire level, so I made it a hybrid of ideas from Mario 3 and Mario World. Mario 3 you could enter any level with an accumulated power up and it was activated right away. Only one item. Super Mario World you could hold one item, use it, and then get another. So you can bring one drink per level. Picking and choosing when to use it is pretty key because if you die and have already used it, it's gone until you reach the world map to equip another one.

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[RMZ]

I made a trailer for the Steam page which is kind of a representation of the three levels currently made for anyone interested.

[RMZ]

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Been a little bit since I shared an update. Right now the demo is in final polish mode. I've made all needed segments to complete it, aside from an ending credits and thanks for playing part at the end of World 3. PJ has to finish up two songs to finish his part of the demo, Rue is going to play the role of the boisterous chef, Shefu, and I've got my buddy who did all the sounds for Axe Cop doing the voices for the squid. His wife will be playing the princess. So it's basically a waiting game while they take the time to do their parts before I can finish demo. I've got plenty of time to have it submitted for NEXT Fest and I got the email saying I was approved, so all is good.

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I'm not finished with this but am refining parts of the animations for the characters entering the stage. I wasn't totally happy with how I had it before, it was acceptable, just not something I was excited about.

Got a pretty good idea for World 4's design, I might noodle with some base tiles soon-ish, but am enjoying the slow down. I also have ideas for new random enemies to appear in stages I want to tinker with.

[Bluefeather42]

Your graphics are excellent.

[RMZ]

Your graphics are excellent.

Thanks!

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I think I finished the tiles for the 4th world today. You climb a giant cake to fight a smaller cake. The bosses are gonna need some attention to make them work better/smoother but I think in the coming weeks they'll be sorted out. A few slice tricks needed to do to make that happen. On another note, slice transparencies continue to be quite excellent. I didn't want a plain white frosting top to the cake for the floor tiles and the colors in my palette don't have super smooth gradients from white to dark gray the way I needed so I used a designated layer for tinting the floor tiles white until I got the effect I wanted. Tricked the game to add more colors.

[RMZ]

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Going a little slower paced now that I got the core demo content done. I finished the eclair today. Hoping to move on to the boss soon-ish. I'm expecting to do a big round of polish to the demo content itself, rebalance some sound effects before demo is released. Nothing as glamorous to share as a new level or new enemies.

[Bob the Hamster]

Hehe! The eclair animation is satisfying, and I love how big it explodes

[RMZ]

Hehe! The eclair animation is satisfying, and I love how big it explodes

Thanks! Seeing everything blow up is one of my favorite parts of the game. I love it when the game is like full on manic and you click a ton of stuff and it's just a ton of them happening at once.

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I'm pretty close to finishing the 4th world boss. I've got probably one or two more sessions of work on him before he's done. It's been interesting and challenging learning new tricks to make it work better. I had to rebuild probably 75% of this fight to work better or smoother and in doing so, our good friend Bena gave me the idea to basically inverse the flow of the fight. Originally you fought an ice wizard who would free you and then summon penguins to hurt you. This time it's a cake summoning ice cream and the cake freezing you just makes no sense. So if you bump into the ice cream it freezes you and when you get out of the ice more dudes are around to click. The boss won't actually have a pickle in his head, but that'll be a little flame you click. The flame is his weak spot and it'll go in and out based on if you aren't frozen or not. Can't have people camping out being frozen and getting in free hits.

Editing the eclair and the cake have definitely made me want to revisit a couple of the finished boss fights to polish up further. I think the french fry boss and the guacamole bosses in particular need some extra love.

[RMZ]

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Finished World 4. It's a short and sweet (pun intended) level with a lot of intensity packed in. I learned a lot more than expected about slice extras in particular for this one. Why some extras can't have a value of 1 I do not know but I didn't argue, moved on and figured out a workaround. Adjusting everything to use animations and timers and slice extras has kind of shown me a huge possibility with these. It's arguably more accessible than I thought it would be too.

[RMZ]

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Worked on something I brainstormed for maybe a month now, this week. It's a new enemy type for Takoyaki. Everything is placeholder for this gif but I think it still shows what happens pretty well. This enemy I am dubbing the tank, it has like 20 hit points. However you can right click it to freeze it which lasts about five seconds, that number might change, but yeah. I got it rigged up so the npc can register results based on the left or right click and then process the results of either. Neat thing I didn't know til I tried it is that npc extra data transfers when you make the NPC into a new NPC ID. I kinda thought it would get it's own new reference number being in that pool of npcs but it worked out good. In the gif you can see me clicking the pickle (unstunned form) a bunch and then it freezes, and I click it some more and the final number of clicks happens when it processes back to the unstunned form.

I don't know if these will be in the demo or not, they're pretty fun so I might figure out how to put em' in, at least for Hard Mode.

I have one more enemy type I've been tinkering with but it'll be substantially more work and I don't know if I want to pursue it. We will see. Spending lots of time planning helps get these types of things done quickly.

[RMZ]

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I managed to get custom saves sorted out for the game. Each save will be dedicated to Normal or Hard mode respectively. Demo is in pretty good shape. I've spent a fair amount of time away from the game to I think rebalance it a little more without being super accustomed to hard mode conditioning with the clicks. I'm hoping to have the demo ready for playtesting end of this week. If anyone wants to test feel free to DM or email me and you're more than welcome to help get the demo to the finish line with me.

I'm toying with the idea of additional enemy types still. Looking at the code I'd have to clean up I think it might be more trouble than it's worth, but maybe I'll just wing it and see if I like what I do.

[RMZ]

Took a good chunk of August off, getting back into the swing of things with the game now. During that off time, I had a demo tested to see how close it was quality and enjoyment wise. There wound up being a lot of tweaks, so I decided to delay doing NEXT Fest for the February one and then release the game shortly after that. It'll allow the game to be tighter too.

Some of the notable things I'm editing in are doing away with lives and giving the player health. Personally it nerfs the game a lot for me, but that just means I'll make hard mode harder. I also went and edited it so there are better hitboxes rather than bumping into NPCs. Since there are no lives, a new bonus element will be in for end of stage calculations and that's the accuracy bonus. Based on how precise you are determines this score. I think being 100% accurate any one time should be a good achievement to go for. High score will be handled differently as well.

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Hoping to be done with all the demo notes by end of the month or sooner and resume production on the next level. One of the big things to do for the demo notes is going to be an optional tutorial that teaches you everything you need to know and more about the game. Taking out a lot of the assumptions I kinda thought people would have came to, but this makes it a little more bullet proof in that regard. We actually had one in the 2010 version of the game and I kept thinking, why would anybody need this, you just click stuff and stay out of the way. But this will definitely be valuable for the game and make the demo stronger.

I am debating on making the demo shorter by one level and am still toying with this idea. I think the tutorial plus three stages is a lot of content, so doing tutorial plus two stages might be the sweet spot.

[RMZ]

Nearly finished with my Demo 1.0 updates and will be ready for the next build soon. The tutorial is finished, which I think is pretty solid. I didn't see the point in making it until the demo, but now that it's here it feels like a good companion to the game and does create an avenue to make the game feel more accessible I think.

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All I think I got left is add some custom text graphics to the buttons for the tutorial selection screen, and then figure out how to let players know a new level is unlocked. I'm hoping to be done with all of this by end of next week to resume production on new worlds in October.

[RMZ]

All of my tinkering this week has paid off handsomely. I have to draw and program the animations for the hard mode fish attack, but there's now a charge attack that lets you mow down dudes. Working on it has definitely inspired me to make more enemy types and handle level balance in fun new ways moving forward.

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Hoping this weekend to get that hard mode attack drawn and done and then update my tutorial to include this new attack. After that Demo 1.2 will be ready for the next round of testing if anyone is interested. Feel free to contact me to be in that group.

[RMZ]

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Demo 1.2 did really good. Really glad I've taken the time to consider what people's feedback would mean to the game and making said changes. It's made the game significantly stronger. There's a final thing I wanted to do from 1.2 feedback but I'm honestly just ready to move forward and will address that later, as it doesn't effect anything besides score things. World 5 is Kung Pao Octopus and it's the Chinese food stage. Has been a lot of fun so far and I think it's a good contrast from the whimsical nature of Baking Bad with it being on an entire cake. I'm probably halfway through the tile phase. Optimistically I'd like to be done with World 5 entirely by mid-November or a little sooner.