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Re: Enemy Respawning

Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2014 4:07 am
by James
It's not looking like we're going to do visible equipment. We've chosen an animation style that's way too fluid, and hand adding a piece of armor to thousands of frames just isn't worth the effort. On top of that, our outline-less style makes it very hard for elements to pop visually, and we take great care coloring everything. If we just had any sort of colors drawing over areas there would be sure to be problems.

I think maybe Catacomb Kids is doing visual armor?

Re: Enemy Respawning

Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2014 1:40 pm
by inclining
Rogue Legacy would be another example of some visual changes for equipment.

Re: Enemy Respawning

Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2014 1:02 am
by MajorFordson
Bugger, games that tell you you're wearing a helmet or chain mail but just show our standard guy really tick me off! But alas, time and money and all that!

As far as enemies go, why not go for the Earthbound approach? Once a player reaches a certain power level, enemies will try to flee from you! This is an amusing behaviour, and the play can casually slash them to bits as they run through. It also means more interesting enemy patterns, as I'm sure you can still crash into frightened bats.

Another idea is to give the player very small incentives to kill enemies that are beneath them, such as 1HP per kill or something. Just something so it doesn't feel like you're simply destroyed repeated minor roadblocks. I mean, HP gathering from minor enemies was a useful feature in Metroid.

Re: Enemy Respawning

Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2014 7:50 am
by Nemomon
I'm not sure about fleeing enemies. In Earthbound it was easy to do, because fights were pretty static. In Chasm they are not. Plus, I hardly can imagine rats, bats &c suddenly being afraid of a main character.

Re: Enemy Respawning

Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2014 9:08 am
by red36
inclining wrote:Rogue Legacy would be another example of some visual changes for equipment.
it's always clear to me that for 2d animation having visible equipment ALWAYS makes the animation itself suffer. All the elements have to work separately which of course is not at all how a body works.

a palette swap could be nice tho and mightn't be too hard to batch process.

Re: Enemy Respawning

Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2014 11:08 am
by James
The problem with palette swapping in Chasm is the lack of outlines on the sprites. We very carefully pick background colors in order to make sure things contrast properly. By having different colors on the sprite, he may blend in to certain areas. If we have time later though we may check it out.

Re: Enemy Respawning

Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2014 2:24 pm
by red36
ah yes of course- should have considered that. perhaps swapping hues but maintaining values. for instance the shadow on the main chars shirt could be (rgb) 3, 33, 93, (a blue) which is rather close in value to the 82, 17, 67 that it is now.