Pursuitor! - An Adventure and a Half!

[kirbyman198]

Hello hello! Welcome to the Pursuitor thread![/s]

(Project Status: Deader than a doornail)

Pursuitor is a 2D action platformer game.

It was a lovely day in the flower fields, Autumn and Tenae were enjoying their time together watching whatever was on TV. Meanwhile, the evil witch named Elizabeth was beyond bored with nothing interesting or chaotic to do. A idea hatched in her mind, she found the perfect cure to her boredom. She quickly rushed to her library to find a book on mass transformation and manipulation. She draws the transmutation circles and whatnot and casts the spell, magically turning the surrounding lands into things people of this world have not seen before. But she left out one land far away from her castle, the flowery fields. So instead of just casting the spell again but nearby, she flys over and steals the first person she could see and traps them. This just happens to be Tenae, Autumn's lover!

Autumn must rush over to save her loving Tenae and ruin Elizabeth's chaotic fun.

This game has no planned release date, but I'm working on it everyday and shooting to have it all done sometime this year! Also if you want quicker updates on the game, check out Pursuitor's twitter!

Personal Twitter (Post about my life and sometimes small gifs of bugs I found in Pursuitor.)
Pixel Resort Twitter (Company twitter, mostly jokes.)
Pursuitor Twitter (Updates faster than the main thread.)
Itch.io (Where Pursuitor will get posted to and also my games.)
Soundcloud (Where I attempt to make music.)
Blogger (Where all art gets posted to first.)
Tumblr (Where all art gets posted to last.)

Z to Jump
X to Attack
C to Use Item
Shift to Change Items
A to Swap Weapons to the Left
S to Swap Weapons to the Right
D to Swap Characters
Arrows to Move
(Use JoytoKey if you have a controller! I dunno how to program reconfigurable buttons yet...)

The game is all drawn and animated by myself; It's all pixel art because that's all that I ever draw. I'm making Pursuitor look like a game I would want to make. There is no inspirations or based on artwork, it is all original art made by my hands and my hands alone. All of the animation in the game is also done by myself.

Aka, the thing that's not worked on yet. Sorry!

-Subspace Save Zone: Every now and again you'll find a place where you can save. I've got some cool ideas on how to make this place look great.
-A Tiny Map: A map that will show you what world you're on. This can opened at any time and will also automatically show up on the wall in the Subspace Save Zone and at the start of the world.
-Optional Boss Rush: After you beat the game, you unlock Boss Rush to brush up on your skills of fighting the bosses back to back. You can even limit yourself and see if you can only use some weapons or locked heath!
-Langauges: Yes that's right! We'll have support for two languages! The languages we have planned are English and Japanese!
-Manual: I thought it would be neat to make a little pdf game manual for those who are into that sort of thing.
And that's just a few things that are planned!

The game has a total 6 worlds, each themed after a type of environment. I'll will only talk about the first four.
-World 1 - Unnamed Flower world: Flowers littered everywhere! Each one more beautiful than the last; It's a flower picking dream! But I'd be conscious of what flowers you chose to pick, some might bite.
-World 2 - Unnamed TV world: A once booming landscape now littered with half working TVs. Some are on and are playing some TV show, while the others are smashed in or don't have any power.
-World 3 - Misguided Maze of the Mind: A tricky place filled with beautiful crystals that anyone can get lost in just by simply gazing into. Getting lost is almost as easy as encountering a monster in here. Lots of weird things happen here as well; I'd keep a good look out on my surroundings if I were you.
-World 4 - Unnamed Candy world: The sweets here threw a little party from what it seems. Maybe it was for you? Maybe... Well who knows, they might be friendly since they're made of candy and all.

With each world, a boss lays at the end of the road. Each boss will be challenging and will force the player to play good watch out for every attack. I'm going to try and make each boss rememberable, but not be cheap about it and force them to be hard just so you spend more time on them I. e. insta-kill attacks, undodgeable attacks, etc.
World 1: Unnamed Flower Boss
World 2: Unnamed TV Snake
World 3: Shattered Screeches
World 4: Unnamed Candy Boss
Here's the boss of World 1, Squashmin! The OLD first boss. The NEW first boss will be something of a flower.

Here's also World 2's boss!

I often get gifs of small changes and funny bugs I encounter. Here is just a few. A few spoilers are in here!

ALL OF THE GIFS ARE OLD AND POOP AND DON'T REALLY SHOW OFF THE GAME THAT MUCH

Little dagger stabbing.

The finished hitsparks.

All types of weapons and characters.

Dagger not actually being where it's meant to be.

Trickshotting (Not actually in the game.)

Playing around with bullets.

Little bat monster for world 2.

Little box art cover I drew!

There's a number of planned Easter Eggs, probably about enough to be 50% of the game! In a effort to have players come back and keep playing, there's a bunch of little goodies you can find, some being more useful than others. But the more useful they are, the harder they are to find, so place keep this in mind! But sadly, since they're secrets, I can't talk about them a whole lot...

I really just wanted to hide a bunch of cool stuff that may or may not affect the gameplay when found; Because I think it's cool.

So yeah! This is my little game I've been working on. Got any ideas, feel free to say them! Bwarch said I could make a thread on my game so I did.

[/s]

[kirbyman198]

A video showing off what I did today, which was make this pretty looking background!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oJYH0bX0eY

[Bwarch]

Looks good, nice to see the game in motion. Love the different scrolling rates of the hills.

[Jesuiscontent]

looks cool, what is the game made in?

[kirbyman198]

Looks good, nice to see the game in motion. Love the different scrolling rates of the hills.

Thank you! They were actually really easy to make funny enough, haha.

looks cool, what is the game made in?

Clickteam Fusion 2.5, basically babies' first complex game making software, without the need of actual coding knowledge. Perfect for artists that don't want to spend time learning code. (aka me) It's basically as powerful as Gamemaker 7.

[kirbyman198]

Double post whoop whoop

Working on first boss animations! It's still a little rough, but I'll fix it up to look prettier tomorrow.

Edit: Not going to really make a new post because this only really minor.
I fixed up Squashmin's idle animation! Compared to the old one, it looks way better.

[kirbyman198]

I guess now's a good enough time to update this thread; Seeing as though it is my birthday and all.

-----Things Done-----
-Got one of four attacks made for Squashmin. It's a pretty simple one.

-World 1's Monsters have been made and half of been planned on what they do. Though I might want to come back and touch up their colors.

-Tenae's bow has been replaced with magic and spells (Because bows are LAME)
-All swords have proper hitboxes, but sword2 needs tweeking with it's hitbox.
-SAVING AND LOADING WORK Thank god
-Touched up both intro frames a lot.
-Added effects for when switching between players and weapons.
-All of the secret stuff has been programmed and just needs to be tested.
-Broke 500 lines of code just in the debugging room alone.
-Started work on programming hitstun/knockback

------To Do List------
-[SECRET]
-Program hit stun.
-Program [SECRET]
-Look into weird sword thing when falling.
-Make [SECRET] look better
-[SECRET] needs to make particles
-[SECRET] needs to make particles
-Need better firing effect
-Need better destorying effect for bullets
-Platforms you can jump through the bottom

On top of all the stuff I've done and have left to do, I've got a lot of concepts I like written down that will make it into the game. Sadly, most of them are about secret stuff and can't talk about them.

Give me a bit more time and I'll actually have more stuff to talk about and show off.

[Arctangent]

To be honest, the weapons look really unsatisfying to use. They don't really seem to add any weight to the movement, and the swinging sound in the video seems really kind of wimpy. Maybe the hit sound adds some feel to them, but I can't seem to find anywhere to hear it.

I think it hits the bow girl the hardest; there's barely any animation for her or the projectiles, and especially with the shortbow the projectile fading into thin air after only travelling a ridiculously short distance really seems underwhelming from the gifs. If combat's going to be a core part of the game to the point where there're weapon upgrades, perhaps some more time reiterating over the basics of it would help? Aria of Sorrow on the GBA would be a good reference point, especially since it seems like you're taking cues from the Metroidvania Castlevanias anyway.

Edit: Oh wait you're replacing the bow with magic. Well, the same criticisms apply, although give that it's magic there should be a lot more freedom with what you can do with the attacks that could potentially help with this.

[kirbyman198]

To be honest, the weapons look really unsatisfying to use. They don't really seem to add any weight to the movement, and the swinging sound in the video seems really kind of wimpy. Maybe the hit sound adds some feel to them, but I can't seem to find anywhere to hear it.

I think it hits the bow girl the hardest; there's barely any animation for her or the projectiles, and especially with the shortbow the projectile fading into thin air after only travelling a ridiculously short distance really seems underwhelming from the gifs. If combat's going to be a core part of the game to the point where there're weapon upgrades, perhaps some more time reiterating over the basics of it would help? Aria of Sorrow on the GBA would be a good reference point, especially since it seems like you're taking cues from the Metroidvania Castlevanias anyway.

Edit: Oh wait you're replacing the bow with magic. Well, the same criticisms apply, although give that it's magic there should be a lot more freedom with what you can do with the attacks that could potentially help with this.

What do you expect for my second real game?
The video has really bad framerate because my computer is slow, but the game runs fine normally. That's why the video isn't very good at showing off combat. The combat in Pursuitor is going to be simple, three weapons to choose from between two characters, so a total of 6 different types. There is no hitsound because the sound is next to the least worked on. (Next to music being the last.)

Tenae, the name of the bow girl, is the character that has the least amount of development combat wise because I'm still finding my footing for her and seeing what style of combat that would be best for her. The bows are merely placeholder stuff that was quickly scrapped once I choice to make her attacks magic based.

Believe it or not, but I'm not huge on Metroidvanias. The style of platforming in the debug room is purely for debugging. The room designs are going to be more open and large with lots of things to hop over and making good use of the attacks the monsters have. Similar to a Kirby game, but with some platform styles of Pre-Bigbang MapleStory.

As for the magic stuff, that's all still being worked on. I'm thinking of making her attacks be something like homing attacks, a sinewave attack, and something slow. But this is all just written stuff, it still needs more planning.

[Arctangent]

I'm not sure if it's just me being used to 30fps Youtube videos, but I don't actually seem anything wrong with the video. If it's actually really slow compared to the runtime game, honestly seems like a better pace compared to the gifs, especially considering that attacks don't seem to impact your movement at all. The gifs seem to go by too fast, and without anything anchoring the characters I'd imagine that actually fighting at that pace would become an exercise in accidentally running into what you want to hit.

Also, the context of what the level design is supposed to be does help figure out the context of the attacks - and in that case, the change from bows to magic is a really great call, because while the main girl has different uses for her weapons and therefore has an actual reason to have all those weapons ( knife for close-range stunlocking I'm assuming, sword for hitting enemies above you, big sword as a standard weapon ) the bows and guns seem like they longest ranged one made the other two redundant, because they literally accomplished the same thing. I'd recommend perhaps moving away from the homing shot concept unless you want the other two spells to be either utility-based or not really ranged, because something that automatically hits enemies for you has the tendency to overshadow the other options or has to be weak enough to not do so that it doesn't really have much of an use. Maybe have one spell shoot forward, one spell shoot about 45 degrees upward, and another shoot straight up? The projectiles themselves don't have to just fly straight in those direction, but can rather have a movement pattern that compliments their respective area of effects.

I suppose feel-wise I'll have to wait and see for when you implement more sounds before I give my final judgement; considering everything, I doubt you're going to give the weapons any real weight, so there's not really many other ways to make them feel good besides sounds. Well, the spells can get some delicious particle effects at least, but the blades don't really seem like they'll get that option.

Also, I forgot to say this in my first post, but I really do think the art style is gorgeous. >>b

[kirbyman198]

[Lots of text]

The gifs are actually recorded in 30fps, while the video is around 21ish~ fps, all the while the game is a solid 60fps. The gifs go by too fast because Gifcam is stupid and only records the fame every 0.1 second, which looks like poop because it misses a lot of important animation frames. Things feel more lively in 60fps.

I agree that homing projectiles might be a little overpowered, but I'm still figuring out them. They're still very, very early on their design. I'm still going to go through lots of various ideas and possibilities. I have to make sure everything in the combat and basic stuff is set in stone before I start work on the actual levels. (This is due to the gamemaking software and it's limitations.)
Also here's some unsized up spell animations I did in one night. They're not sized up because this game is pixel perfect.


Oh yeah, the sounds are like, the last thing I'm going to do while in the Debug room; Then I might release a playable version to have people get a feel for the game? I dunno. Also thanks! I'm getting tips from friends about colors and whatnot and it's been helping.

[kirbyman198]

After struggling with a major art block, I am back at it again and working on Pursuitor! Here's some more gifs I made when I was fooling around making knockback. Gifs are hidden in a spoiler to cut down on size of post.

Joke wall jumping (Not actually going to be in the game [Well actually maybe who knows])

The first real knockback I made. I made it faster than this so don't worry.

This was me finding out a bug that was funny and also finding out that GifCam can record in other frame rates. 33fps is too fast.

Closer to the finalized version of knockback and me testing death.

A few more things.
-Currently finalizing all of the secret stuff and everything else in the debug room.
-All of Tenae's spells are made and just need balancing and a bit more bug testing.
-Working on making a few more effects for things to make them look prettier.
-Fixing a few nasty bugs that can ruin a the game.
-Working on sfx.

Also, while I'm at it, I made a quick little game in about 24 hours. Give it a play! http://kirbyman198.itch.io/g-w-tiny-toil

[sonicspin]

bhum
it's really cool

[kirbyman198]

bhum
it's really cool

Thanks!

Also Pursuitor is back from hiatus, and I'm fixing up everything lame and making it better.

[kirbyman198]

Pursuitor is still alive don't worry.

Working on a number of things.
1. Music
Or more specifically, the intro music.
2. The Intro
Yeah the old place holder intro I had made sucks, like a lot. The new intro will tell more of story than the first one poorly did. I'm shooting it have it be around a minute long so I can actually make a trailer out of it.
3. Fun things
I'm working fun things like switches, breakable blocks, etc. Currently there's a total of 4 switch blocks, but three can only be triggered by pressing a button. These kinds of things will get recycled all throughout the game because why not. Beats thinking up something new for every world.

Also the main post got a HUGE makeover and now looks pretty. Also a few more of the areas got filled in with info like the about tab saying the intro of the game in text. I hope it is enough to get you interested into playing my game

Anyway, here's a picture dump. Like always, there's a few spoiler things in here.

New spell!

A sketch of one of the scenes from the new intro.

Switch blocks

Walking around the debug room

Also I made a little playable art type thing for my friend Mo who is a really cool dude. Give it a look!

[kirbyman198]

Another few weeks past and I'm still working away. I'll make it easy to for me and just list off what I've done.

-Entire NEW intro is sketched out, animation planned as well, and finally started to get colored. (This was really big to do)
-Tutorial Room graphics are being brushed up and finished.
-Started sketching level design and is ready to be built in-game and tested.
-Brushing up attacks to make them actually interesting and cool still; all new attacks are written down on paper and just need to be implemented.
-Revamping almost all of the secret stuff.
-Revamped the world layout to be more unique and interesting instead of basically Grass World, Ice World, Cave World, Fire World, etc.
And a few other small things I won't go into detail about.

Sadly, nothing much to show off this time because most of the stuff I'm working on is mostly art based. I will have intro fully colored and animated probably next month or so, and have a video up showing it off. And probably by then, I'll have a first bit of real gameplay instead of gifs of me running around.


The reason work is sorta slow on Pursuitor is because I keep getting caught up playing video games, drawing other things, and just generally being lazy. Because I have my sleep scheduled back in order and I wake up 8am now, I'll be able to get a lot more work done during the day and not get bothered while working. Hopefully Pursuitor's progress will be steady from now on.

[kirbyman198]

Whoa hey I'm back again after some more working. I took a break from working on Pursuitor because my love came down and visited me for a week. (It was super fun)

I'll just roughly summarize what I was going on about in Pursuitor's twitter real quick.
I took a week off from working on Pursuitor, it's hard getting back into the flow of work but I'm doing it. I'm also junking a few more ideas because I can, also it will speed up coding because the replacement stuff it easier to code and will be way more fun. I am literally working on the intro every single day. And finally, it's hard to make a huge game when you're the only person doing the music, code, AND art.

Anyway, enough chitchat, stuff.
Here's screen 8/30 of the intro.


I'm junking the save room idea and making it a convenient store instead. The store will be ran by my slime girl character! She'll save your game whenever you need to, and she's got many shops setup so you'll always be good.


Also, I'm junking my original big secret and making it more simple. What's going to replace it is yet to be determined.

And finally, I made a art thread! You can totally check it out and reply if you want. You don't have to, but check it out for me if you want. :>

[sonicspin]

yay also you hav improve