Phases.
I thought of a new possible innovation in modern games. Since HP is often considered an abstract, why not have enemy gunfire graphically miss your character even if it would have done damage. You can't dodge a hitscan weapon, but you can make it "look" like you did. Only the hit that brings your health below 0 would actually impact the character, making it more dramatic.
Cytomight
I kinda forgot where I was going with this project. I know I wanted colour changing and absorbing, but I can't think of a format. For all I know it could have been a bullet hell shooter (The body is quite linear). It could have been a metroidvania, since a body is also has "zones" with different barriers, but I think I wasn't since this would have been a lot of artwork. I can't program and draw at the same time, well I can... what I mean is if I do everything I'll be too busy picking for perfection as opposed to delegating art to another person where I can just trust them to do a good job.
I'll probably keep picking at it. I've had to renovate the basic game as I discovered similar games so that my game isn't. Osmos, for example, had the expansion and division mechanic I was going to do, so I dropped it. de Blob has a colouring effect, but doesn't overlap with my core gameplay; so I didn't drop it.
Other Projects
I'm really liking my latest art project. These little guys are very poseable and emotive. Their object based design seems to say "Flash", but no way I'm paying $800 for a weekend project. I could try to find a way to get it to work in Gamemaker with fixed body and head types. This still would mean drawing into a uniform space (say, a 64x64 sprite) which I don't do well with. Even if I go nonuniform I'd still need to make sure any animation is properly synced. I don't have the resources for this kind of animation. Using single stock frames is out of the question, that really only works for storybook games. Plus I don't know what kind of game I could make these guys into since, well, they're just people... anything would technically work and nothing specifically accentuates.
Gaming
Grinding in Global Agenda. It's good. It combines all the best features of MMO's and FPS's and tosses out a lot of the junk. Levels don't really matter, as all the items are mostly balanced (but high level items have cool tricks to them). Basically as soon as you hit level 10 you can do almost all the content, more at 19 and finally everything at 30. The level cap is 50. I find the speed of grind to be quite acceptable, but you can even double your gains by buying a booster. If you get referred to the game by a friend I highly recommend buying a booster since the booster will also get the 50% discount for being referred. All the classes are uniquely different and that's what separates it from the modern EQ-clone. One, the "tank" (Assault) happens to also do the most damage to bosses (although the Recon does compete directly). Two of the classes can be healers, but neither of them need to heal to win with good strategy. Bosses are good. You can use cover to avoid their fire, but they know to switch targets and move into positions where they can attack more than one player. They can "call for help" and a bunch of minions show up who "seem" to be specifically spawned to defeat your exact party configuration (although I've been told it's actually random). PvP is fast and uses a lot of the classic game modes from FPS's such as Nodes, Control, and Payload. Agencies (Guilds) can even compete for persistent control of a world map. One caveat... since there's a lot of different yet equally viable strategies available it's often difficult to agree on a strategy without talking so make sure everyone is on the same page when doing something.
That aside I've also been playing Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Still haven't gotten very far, but I'm still at the phase of the game where I just rush everything to get a feel for enemy strengths/weaknesses. I also bought Command and Conquer since it was on sale on Steam, but I lack the HD space to install any of them. Yay Steam! Buy now, play later.
I've been watching someone play Nier. This game is very... umm, it lacks fluidity. There's great dramatic music and cinematic boss fights (as you can see in the intro video even) mixed in with chains of chump quests, uninteresting environments and general misuse of resources. The scene direction is excellent, but it also combines it with irrelevant flashes of... umm. Well, characters who have no business being there try to steal your scene multiple times during the same scenes and then immediately poof into non-existence as soon as the scene is over. Imagine if you were fighting Bowser and halfway through Luigi shows up to land one hit in a scene and then poof into non-existence... That aside the game makes good use of timing queues to make sure the music syncs up with the action required. Not to mention every time you turn the game on you hear "Weiss, you dumbass!"... loud, and every time. That's just the kind of shock you need before you go hunting sheep.
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IMO, Lok
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