Stone

[michalove]

I will add a stone object. That will work exactly as shown in the button-end-screen animation. When it falls onto a button, it will be pressed.

[Germanunkol]

Awesome idea :)

[michalove]

I was just thinking: Maybe the stone should only be included, if it has more than one purpose. Otherwise, we might equally well use a different object. I will find something.

[michalove]

I inserted the rock for now, but at the moment its only purpose is to push buttons (see level "house of the many spikes"). Some other uses for it could be:

• kill the player if it falls on him
• kill enemies if it falls on them
• block line of sight for shooting enemies
• catch flying projectiles (collide with shuriken/bullet)
• be an obstacle for walking enemies (it would be difficult, though to let the player walk on the rock, because then it would have to be of exact 1-tile size and when it moves between the tiles we would have to come up with a solution.)

What behavior do you expect from a big rock?

[Germanunkol]

The rock works great. A few things I noticed:

• If the player can walk infront of it, I'd make it a bit shorter towards the bottom. Otherwise it overlaps the tile it lies on too much and then it looks a lot like the player should collide with it (it looks like an obstacle).
• When first trying it out, I intuitively thought I could stand on and push it.
• I think it should either collide with pretty much everything or nothing (except the button). If it only pushes down the button I think it should be much flatter, so it doesn't look like it's an obstacle to the player.
• I liked the falling button in the house of many spikes. The way the level is now is great and works well, but I think we should have a falling button in some other level then. It was unexpected and had a great "aha"-effect when I first found out how that falling button worked. I also saw other testers laugh when they figured it out.

[michalove]

• True, I will fix that.
• Standing on it and pushing it is currently not supported by the engine. Implementing it in full functionality would be possible, but a lot of work. It would mean that we have to check for collisions between each pair of objects and then resolve these. Possible solutions are: 1) implement full collision system for objects or 2) make the rock square-shaped and implement collision via the already-implemented collision system. Then pushing will not be possible, but standing on it. The behavior would be like this: Whenever the rock is falling, it would be lethal, killing everything it touches. Once it rests on the ground, it would cover exactly one tile and act like a normal wall. 3) Make the rock much smaller and use it for buttons only. That would be waste in terms of the objects/purpose ratio.
• I didn't know people like the falling button. I always thought, it was illogical, because the button has to be attached to a ground to function. But if you and others like it, let's keep it.

[Germanunkol]

Yes, please let's keep the falling button. It's not something we need to use all the time, but if we use it just once, it'll be a nice, fun little effect.

To be honest, I don't think we need the whole collision thing as you mention it. It seems overkill. Plus, pushing boxes around is so... 0815, if you know what I mean. Almost all platformers have it. I think the easiest way (implementation-wise and logic-wise) would be to use a non-walking enemy which has spikes and just falls down. It could even look a bit like a stone (round-ish and fat). And it could have an animation while falling and another one when touching the ground. So it would be very similar to the walking enemy except for the fact that it doesn't walk... (code-wise, we could re-use almost all the code from the walker, I think). I don't think it should kill enemies, though. That would be illogical again, since enmies currently don't kill each other. But when the player touches it, the player dies.

[michalove]

Cool. I like the idea of the falling, nonwalking enemy. Maybe a grumpy, not-amused looking block. I will go for that.

Also, I will keep the falling button. :)

[Germanunkol]

Maybe a grumpy, not-amused looking block.

Yes, exactly what I thought!

Also, I will keep the falling button.

Thanks :D