Given that this project is just meant to be a demo, I’ve mainly made the level design tutorialisation.

I don’t want to spoil too much in case you want to check the game out for yourself, so I’ll just include a little snippet of some of the in-engine scene here:

Where to Find It?

Here’s a link to the projects Itch page, which you can also find on this projects main page.

It’s stored as a zip, so just download the game, extract it and run the executable. Have fun!

The level!

This week I created an animation for the restart animation, which the player can trigger by pressing ‘R’.

This is vital for my game because you only have a limited number of spears per screen / level, so if you make a wrong move, the player may get softlocked.

Here’s a little demo of the player restarting:

If you’ve been paying attention, you might have noticed I’m taking a lot of inspiration from Celeste (or maybe by the fact I’ve mentioned it multiple times…). Restarting is something Celeste does really well, as they have smooth and quick animations that make dying almost satisfying. This was something I tried to emulate with my animation (which I put together in After Effects).

Screen Transitions

Another feature I put in this week is being able to move between screens. Not much to say about this one really, here’s an example of it working:

I’ve also added checkpoints, so when you enter a screen, you can always press ‘R’ to restart from that screen.

This post marks the project mostly feature complete! There are a couple quality of life things I may have added given the time, but I believe that I’ve managed a whole lot more than I thought I might have been able to.

Next Up: Level Design!

In this most recent update, I’ve implemented proper sticking to the spear. It now sticks into walls, the ground and ceilings! This is definitely the biggest step I’ve taken so far towards being feature complete. Only a couple more things to go now until I can start working on level design.

Here’s an example of it in action:

Bouncing!?

You may also notice that the player is able to bounce on the spear as well. This is another big chunk of work I managed to get out the way this week. As I mentioned before, I really don’t have much more to do in order to finish the mechanics side of this project.

This week I’ve added the ability for the spears to stick in a surface. Right now it’s just a simple implementation, however next week I plan to pretty much finish the system entirely (lets hope I don’t jinx it!)

Here’s what it looks like for now:

You might also notice that the spears are now also pixel perfect. I’ve implemented this by creating distinct sprites externally, and changing the spears sprite based on its current rotation. Currently, I don’t have enough rotation sprites to make this look fluid, but I’ve got plans to double the amount.

Animation Frenzy!

This week I’ve also been working non-stop on animations. I’ve realised that I now need a few more animations, such as a bouncing on spear animation, spear item animation and death / restart animation (as you will need to restart the level if you mess up the spear placement).

Here they all are!

The reset animation:

I’m especially proud of this one! It took a lot of effort to make the hat look 3D and move perfectly. I think this is a really good indicator of how my pixel art skills have improved since the start of this project.

The spear item animation:

I think this is another good example of a new and improved understanding of pixel art. Even just making this simple spear rotate is quite the task!

The spear jump animation:
I’m really pleased with how the spear ‘wiggle’ (for lack of a better word) ended up looking. I think it adds dynamics and character to the animation as a whole.

To be honest, the last aiming system I made was bad. It didn’t work very well and felt choppy to use. I wanted to create one that actually felt smooth and responsive.

I’ve instead moved to a pull approach, closer to the Angry Birds one I talked about last week works. This is done by hiding the players mouse and clamping it to a circular area around the player. This means that if the player walks back and forth, the mouse will follow them. I think this is the best way to emulate how it would work on a joystick (which I unfortunately won’t have time to actually implement).

Using a little help from this tutorial by sashbros I also created a trajectory made of little dots to help aim the throw. It’s all my own code, I just needed a little help on how to calculate the trajectory of where the physics would take the spear.

Enough talking, here’s a little demo of what it looks like to aim:

Where’s the Shooting?

Well, in order to implement the spear actually being thrown, I first had to create a system where the spear would rotate to the trajectory of the throw. Unfortunately, without complex physics and air resistence, spears don’t just align themselves to a throw as they do in real life. Essentially all I’m doing is setting the spears rotation perpendicular to its previous motion vector.

Here’s an example of it working:

I am aware that currently the spear is not pixel perfect, I plan to address that next week!

This week I’m starting on the spear throwing system. Here’s what I have in mind:

• Right click to show a dotted trajectory line (to make it easier to aim)
• Pull the mouse in the opposite direction of where you want to throw, similar to how Angry Birds works.
• Left click whilst right click is held in order to confirm the throw

I’m taking a little inspiration here from how Nubby’s Number Factory handles the throwing of Nubby. I really liked how you have to use right click to aim and left to confirm, as I found it limits how many misinputs happen when you are playing.

In order to find out what direction the player wants to aim, I am currently using the mouse’s delta movement (which direction it has moved since the last frame).
Unfortunately, even with buffering between the frames to smooth the movement, it simply isn’t very stable.

What’s the Fix?

I think instead of using the delta position of the mouse, I’ll instead try to actually use the position relative to the player, to create more of a slingshot system. Sadly I don’t have time to do that this week (this system already took me too long!) but that’s my next goal for this coming week.

I wish I had more to show for this week but I’ve been caught up working on other projects. Expect a big update for next weeks post!

I’ve taken some time this week to create some more tiles for my tilemap. I now have all the tiles I need to create a full terrain with no ugly gaps or strange connections. You can see a little example of what terrain may look like below:

Here’s what the full tilemap looks like if you are interested.

I doubt I’ll be adding many more (if any!) tiles. I think what I have here is easily enough to work with for the whole project.

I would have liked to experiment with more colours or theming for my game, but unfortunately my time has had to go into other areas, maybe next time!

Walljumps

I’ve taken a little time this week to implement the walljump mechanic. Walljumps take a surprising amount of time to tweak in order to make feel right; I think it’s something to do with the input needing to be responsive enough to pull off consistently without accidentally triggering them when the player didn’t intend to. Here’s a little demo of it in game:

Plans for Next Week

I’m going to set the ambitious goal of creating the spear throwing system next week. I’m not 100% sure that’s achievable but I think I’m a little too far through the project now to not have the main mechanic implemented (although these features were all needed as baselines for it!).

This week I’ve gone all in on adding the character’s jump. I’ve created this cute little jump animation, with an emphasis on secondary movement.

The main goal with the animations in this project are to make the game feel as fluid as possible. This was something that Celeste got such critical acclaim for (I know I’ve mentioned it a thousand times already!), and I’m really trying to emulate its style.

Next is to actually add the jump into the game, and then add this as its animation.

We Have Lift Off

As promised, here’s the jump fully implemented with a lovely animation as the cherry on top.

I forgot to cover it last week, but I have set up a tilemap system in Unity. I only have my limited tileset so far but I plan to update that next week!

This was actually my first time attempting to create a tilemap. My approach was to draw what I thought a good floor would look like and then cut it up into pieces. I then made sure they could connect on either side seamlessly regardless of which piece was next to eachother.

Pillars

In order to have something for the player to jump off of whilst I test movement, I made a pillar design. It’s based on Roman style pillars, which turned out to be a lot harder to cram into 16×16 pixels than I thought. Given that this was my first time working on environment pixel art I think that these are a really solid foundation to work off of.

Next I’ll need to create some vertical ground tiles, in order to create some height variety on the floor. I also plan for the spear the player throws to only be able to stick into soft surfaces (the side of ground) and not these pillars, so they’ll definitely be a necessity.

Movement

I’ve added movement! I’m using Dawnosaur’s Movement* script and tweaked it to be more similar to Celeste‘s movement style. It definitely feels good right now but I’ll get the jump added over the next week!

*Dawnosaur’s script is completely free to use under the MIT License.

Not a car-fixing mechanic, but a 2D Platforming one. I have decided that my main focal point for this movement platformer will be the ability to throw spears at walls and subsequently use them as springboards to gain height and momentum.

I’m hoping to combine this idea with dynamic and responsive movement to create a satistfying demo.

Animation Progress

Remember the player character design I showed last week?
I have a walk cycle for them created now!

Take a look:

Unity Project

I haven’t actually mentioned it up to this point, but I am making this game in the Unity Engine. This is mainly because I have the most experience in this engine and given how long I have on this project I thought it best to stick with what I know.

I’ve set up a scene and put the player in: