This took a lot longer than expected, but I've added a wrecking ball to the game.
It was surprisingly complicated, given a lot of the shortcuts I'd taken for ordinary crate carrying physics. I had to make the claw rotate around the ball this time, and then give it a slightly different physics feel to crates, so it swings around a bit more allowing you to smash into the rocks.
The things that were the easiest were actually the smashing rocks and getting the ball to roll around, which took maybe an hour each to make, including the smash animation (as you can probably tell, given that I'm a terrible artist by all accounts!!)
The main point of adding these was to find a re-use for the crate carrying gameplay and to break up the flow a little bit, forcing you to drop your crate and switch to a wrecking ball occasionally. I'll need to do a couple more things like that before I have all the gameplay ingredients. I'm thinking I'll need some obstacles that require using timing and flying skill to pass through or avoid, so those I should tackle next...
I didn't end up tackling what I wanted to tackle next. Instead I focused on a bit of art, trying to get some more variety. So I worked on the tilesets for the foreground and background and this is what I came up with.
I'll probably add more tiles to give buildings more variety, but I think the majority of it is looking good enough. I have no idea what people use to edit their tileset art these days, but I really find it lucky that I managed to find a tool I made a decade ago to do this on the internet archive (because I'd somehow lost all my own copies) that lets you paint directly onto tilemaps and do a bunch of other cool things. It's saved time tremendously, but I'm curious if there are other tools that do the same now.
My next task actually will be to make obstacles and a couple more interactive props and then onward to the level design...
It's been far too long as I've been really busy with other things, but I've finally managed to add a new object you can interact with. This is a big block that you pull out of the way to allow you through to other areas as long as you can get there before it returns to its original spot.
Hopefully I'll get a bit more time in soon.
Also thinking of a name change for the game. Still not sold on this. Any suggestions?
Another gameplay feature I added to the weekend - some smashing rock things I can use to force the player to slow down their pace.
I should add that you can't die in my game. All it does is push you back and you just try again, but since I'm asking the player to deliver crates as quick as possible this will add a bit more challenge to the game - I hope.
Oh, and a new game name - Cyber Pup Deliveries. Feels a bit more interesting. It'll do for now...
It's almost been 6 months since I've updated this, but I'm back on it and I've tweaked the movement physics quite a bit.
The first thing is I've refined the flying physics to give you a lot more fine control, just making it easier to go where you want when you want.
Secondly, instead of only being able to fly when you have energy you can now fly all the time, and the energy is used to give you a speed boost. To me this feels more like the energy gives you a reward, rather than feeling punished when you have no energy. And adding in some simple fx when you're boosting helps make it feel cooler. The big removal here is that by using these controls I had to remove jumping, but since you can fly all the time that feels less like a punishment:
Next, the boost energy can also be used on the ground.
It definitely feels more like the emphasis is on flying and less about managing the energy bar.
Hopefully I can pick up the pace and do more regular updates again and finally finish this game.
Previously, I felt like there really wasn't much interest in this game to finish and release it commercially, especially when I look at all the other excellent games out there, but I finally decided I want to finish this mostly so my son can play it because it's such a fun game to play anyway (I think!)
At the very least I'll release a limited free version and see if there's more demand for a level update or something like that. Or maybe I'll just give the whole thing away for free. I'm curious to know if anybody has any thoughts on all this?
This dev forum isn't the most active community of Playdate players if you're looking to drum up interest in the game - I'd recommend the Playdate Squad discord server and the Playdate subreddit as more active communities, if that's what you're looking for
I added a run animation when boosting just to make things a little bit more obvious.
Other than that, I fixed a few bugs and added an options menu screen.
I added lights to the game, or maybe it's better to say that I added darkness.
I set up lights to be grabbable, and to say whether they flicker or not as well as having different radii, the idea being that the player can use them to light a path or find items. I found this code here to get the idea working and then adapted it a bit for my needs
It was bugging me that you couldn't see the crate while carrying it, so now objects you're currently carrying will emit a small bit of light. I also shrunk the player's own light source to make finding lights more important.
I wanted to have light sources of any shape so I added support for sprite masks and now light beams can cast light too.
As well as that I made the carriable light balls stick to walls. This seems to have created some emergent gameplay where you can create ledges for both you and crates to stand on. But I've no real idea yet if that's going to be useful for anything yet...
Still not done with the light ball gameplay yet. There are a couple of fun things I want to do next...
I added light crystals that you can activate for a short time to brighten up your path. This way you can carve a path with light first and then bring the crate through it later.
