Halloween Forever Dev Blog: Knockback, bosses, platforms

Last week I wound up spending only one night working on Halloween Forever stuff so I didn’t have as much to write up a full summary. With last week added onto this week’s additions I think there’s a nice chunk of progress to show.

Player knockback is in and getting polished

https://www.instagram.com/p/BCrbAmPv2EV
Player knockback is something I wanted in since before the itch.io launch but was intimidated to try. Partly not knowing where to begin and fears about needing to do some heavy refactoring in my player controller had me avoiding it. I never was really happy with how unresponsive getting hit by enemies and projectiles was…last week I decided to investigate and in a little over 2.5 hrs of streaming I had it in and (albeit rudimentary) working! I did some more touching up on it this week, making sure it hooked better into global player vertical speed and not being as much a separate thing from the player move controls. If you look at it in some of the videos below you might see some subtle changes.

New boss setup in progress: Big Blue Demon

Indie Luchador’s favorite big blue demon started to get his states and boss arena sorted out. Also I found a temporary (maybe permanent?) home for these player tracking moths I made way back when but never had a place for. A moth coughing big blue demon is kind of fun. He could use one more attack, something that targets the top row of platforms. Probably something like a jump and maybe even a grab…!

One way platforms are in

One way platforms is another thing that has been on my dev wishlist for ages. Late Wednesday night had me referring back to the Shaun Spalding tutorial on one way platforms and I had mine in and functioning in about 20 minutes. Right now they trigger when you press down but I will likely make it down + jump so you can still duck from bullets and flying things when standing on them.

Hope you enjoyed checking out the updates! Check out Halloween Forever on Steam! store.steampowered.com/app/425650
Also come join me on Twitch when I’m streaming gamedev or playing games! twitch.tv/imaginarymonsters