Bay 12 Games Forum

Nothing hard-coded prevents a single creature from acquiring as many secrets as you want, and I'm pretty sure that the whatevermancers are not exclusive. However they will only have one "title" so it can be hard to tell if they actually learned the new secret until they go into battle and suddenly transform into a cheese-spewing dragon.

Sounds good!  I'll try it out when you post it.

Maybe this is the first time they created a race of sapient punching bags?  At least to this extent?  Maybe even not just goblinoids, but the entire dungeon-crawl setup where adventurers kill designated targets for experience.  An entire world seemingly engineered for endless, morally-justified combat, DND style.

This could be related to Thor and Hel's game.  A world where one race's afterlife depends on them dying valiantly in battle naturally demands more Evil creatures for them to die valiantly in battle against.

I fixed the bug with the positioning.  I've also fixed a bug that caused sprites with a direction of 0 to load facing north.  By the way, the reason why SculptorDia loads facing a random direction is because it has idle motion settings.

I plan on making a sand storm area myself, so I'll probably add a graphic for that anyway.

I also need to come up with a solution for checkpoints and saving in larger worlds.  The main intent of the "death gate" was less of a gamey respawn point and more like a place where you get rescued or captured, so it doesn't handle things like rolling back items all that well.

Edit: It looks like any fog or cloud foreground, colored yellow and moving at a high speed, makes a pretty fair sandstorm effect.  You can then make a few copies of the layer with slightly different speeds to make it look more dynamic.

Increasing the VIOLENT and BRAVERY personality traits used to work well, but I think that it stopped working on wild animals a few versions ago.  Not sure why, I'd really like to see it brought back as that used to be my go-to method for making small creatures that are willing to attack larger ones but will run away if they are losing.

Setting PRONE_TO_RAGE as 100 should make them constantly rage.  They will lose their rage for one tick but get it back immediately after if the enemy is still nearby.  The problem with this is they will also get all of the rage effects (like increased attack power, decreased accuracy and immunity to pain) and will never flee from combat.

I don't see the Sculptor doing anything odd, except facing the wrong direction.  Using a walk command to set direction can be a bit unreliable, it's better to use _face (0 is right, 90 is down, 180 is left, 270 is up).  Or you can use { _face = _direction_to(@) } to make them always face the player.  I'm going to try and make walk commands more reliable in general, they still seem to fail occasionally seemingly at random.

The boss feels good, though could still use a bit of polish (EarthquakeWarn as a slow implosion, followed by EarthquakeHit as a fast explosion looks good).

I've fixed up a few things with large numbers of effects on-screen; now sprites with "Is Effect" checked should cause much less slowdown.  Still haven't figured out the stattaco framerate bug, though I am slowly tracking it down.  Since it only shows up on rare occasions, testing is tricky.

I should mention that objects in the foreground always appear over objects in the main layer, which can cause some weirdness when spring-jumping in front of them (for example, the cactuses).  Mostly I've been handling this by making small, stationary objects into sprites, this is the reason for the above (if you make them Effects and then use a solid tile to block them off, they cause much less slowdown).  I would like to figure out if there's a solution for objects such as these in other games... 16-bit RPGs had it easier by just not allowing the player to jump too high.

I've decided to make my story a bit more broken up, instead of putting it all into one single world.  After all, BoundWorlds' demonstration story should probably include the idea of travelling between worlds in it.  I'm still going to be keeping the same main characters, but they will each have their own world, with the final world being unlocked after the others are completed.