[=Ascendancy;93654]
What if you made a high score system, where the taller the building, the better the score? Or walljumping has a multiplier when you don’t touch the ground? Just some suggestions, it looks really good!
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Thanks! Good ideas. I actually experimented with a building size = value system early on before switching to the current method. I found that since largest buildings were the easiest ones to skim it didn’t make sense to further incentivize them. I then tried having the smallest buildings be worth the most, but that didn’t make much thematic sense and the way they clustered tended to overpower them. Constant returns for every building means that the player can self-direct the difficulty by choosing to either slowly platform, or play it fast and risky on the outskirts.
I hadn’t tried adding a combo system yet but the thought did occur to me. You’re currently already heavily rewarded for “flow” since constant speed means both efficiency and less of being shot. As such I don’t feel there’s currently a need to reinforce that further.
So I’ve been slow recently both because I’ve been ramping up work on my next project and because I’ve been struggling with a new medication I’m hoping will finally deal with my cluster headaches. The side effects have been taking a lot out of me but on the good days I no longer feel like I live in an active food processor.
A couple new features to report. One is the timer:
Exciting!!
Getting it to look decent was more work than I expected. Blueprint has quite minimal string formatting options at the moment, and I didn’t want to have another HUD element permanently cluttering the screen. In its current iteration, I made the timer appear on screen and fade to transparent over a few seconds only at particular moments of interest, such as when the game starts, at 30 second intervals, and when major score milestones are reached (so that speedrunning players can check their splits mid-run). This has the added advantage of making the timer harder to mentally filter out than it would be if it was constantly visible. There’s more of a sense of it looming over you and causing pressure. No reason that basic mechanics can’t also add atmosphere!
I’m also getting around to implementing the death effects, for when a car hits you. I started by finding a shattered glass texture on cgtextures.com:
I tried using this in a post-effect, but refraction and surface normals seemed a critical element of achieving the broken window look. So I just smeared it on a plane and stuck it right in front of your fat face:
On death this plane becomes visible, as well as a number of post effects. Here’s the current version of the material:
And here’s me bouncing around the level with a broken screen while testing different refraction values:
