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...
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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...