Design decisions and cool moves in Land Control

Design Decisions:
  - The destroying land completely thing is to force an endgame eventually. Destroying land is optional however so perhaps I should balance the characters so there is more insentive to destroy land. Or, I could add another insentive to destroying land...

- The decision to keep the bar charged when a player dies is intentional. This is based of the assumption that the dieing player has more of their charge bar charged upon death, giving them a slight advantage when they re-spawn to keep the game close and interesting.

I actually thought of a way better solution just now:
When a player dies, only the dead player and the dead players land should re-spawn. This way, the killing player has less land than the deceased player to navigate, giving the deceased player an advantage. This solution ALSO incentivises the idea of destroying the opponents land. This was something I've been wanting to incentivise more because it gives the players side goals. The point of the game was to focus on controlling land too, so double points.
I might go and implement this now...

- the laser beam is available at 8 charge bars. In that time, the opponent can fire 8 shots, which is a change of 16 walls above the opponent.
If the laser is fired accurately and strategically though, it can take out > 16 walls although average not-optimized shot is ~8 walls. Therefor, the weapons are balanced but the laser beam has a higher risk/reward, which is interesting.

Cool Moves:
Whilst testing I found some cool moves the players can pull off which make the game more interesting, even at a high level.

- The laser-shot combo - If you let your charge bar charge to 9 bars or more, you can fire both a normal shot and a laser beam at once. The laser beam clears all the land in front of the player so the shot has a free path directly into the opposing player.

- The waterfall - If the opponent has land above you, you can shoot it to make it change to your own color and fall one at a time. You can use this falling land to 'swim' upwards from falling block to falling block.

- The flying shotgun - You can successfully jump off your own land directly into the opposing player and shoot them from point blank range. This move is very risky however because whilst you're over your opponents land, you have no walls to shield you from their shots, whereas you have to get right in their face to shoot them (unless you have lots of charge and rapid fire whilst in the air). Another risk of this move is that once you've left your own land, it's very difficult to turn around and get back on it (unless you've pre-prepared land for you to land on). A good solution to this problem is the flying waterfall.

- The flying waterfall - If you're above the opponents land, you can fire a single shot to change the opponents land into your own. You can then jump off this falling land to safety.

- The God-Ray Attack - If you jump above the opponent whilst they're on their land and fire a laser beam downwards, you can cause them to fall to their death with no walls directly below them. If executed well, this move can take an opponent by surprise and kill them outright. This move is very risky because if you miss or the opponent manage to get back onto land, you will probably fall to your own death.

- The Flying God-Ray Waterfall Attack - If you execute a God-Ray Attack whilst on the opponents land (but still above the opponent) you can combine it with the Flying Waterfall to survive.

- The Flying God-Ray Laser-shot waterfall combo - To successfully pull this off, you need 10 full charge bars. It is essentially the combination of the laser-shot combo with The Flying God-Ray Waterfall Attack. I'll let you figure it out.

02 - Land Control 1.1 COMPLETE - 2 player game

Although I could do a lot more with this game I'll consider it finished for now.

Link to the completed game

Controls:
RED:
- WASD to move

- Left Control to fire a normal shot (Ideally this would've been left shift but shift causes problems)
- Space to fire your laser beam

BLUE: (MAKE SURE THAT NUMLOCK IS ON)
- 8456 to move (on the keypad to the right on the keyboard)
- Enter to fire a normal shot (on the keypad to the right on the keyboard)
- 0 to fire your laser beam (on the keypad on the right of the keyboard)


I finally fixed the sprite bug that caused the land to look all weird. I figured out that it was only when the land should be switching into a 'flat on all sides' sprite that it was failing to do so. The solution is kind of embarrassing. To execute this code (and all the other wall sprite changing codes) , the wall MUST have at least one space free on any one side. I don't even know why I thought it was a good idea to program it that way to be honest. The game played fine as soon as I deleted it (except for another weird bug but we'll ignore that =P).

The balancing didn't quite work and I think this is very much due to having never figured out how to implement the wall falling mechanic. In play-tests the laser beam is fairly underused but not loads. It's benefits mostly come from combining it with the normal shot, which is interesting in itself.
If I'd have properly implemented the wall falling mechanic however, the laser beam would've been much more useful as it would allow the player to cut off pieces of land without fail whereas the normal shots can be prevented from completely cutting off areas of land. I actually think the wall bomb would've been a bad mechanic to add with hindsight since the point of it is to counter the loss of land caused by the laser beam but since the laser beam. Since the laser beam is less powerful in this version of the game, it would've practically prevented an end-state caused by loss of land. This is an end-state I wanted the game to have.

If I had more time (and programming knowledge) I would have:
- Gotten the land to fall how it was supposed to
   - added the wall bomb to the game
- Made the game online (The controls would instantly get better due to having a whole keyboard to each player + many other benefits)
- Made a three and four player version of the game. Might be interesting.
- Made the characters more distinct in how they play.
- Made more variety in characters to play as, with different move-sets and tweaked variables etc.
- MORE JUICE!

Basically, I think this game has the potential to work very well on an online games website like kongregate.

02 - Land Control Game 0.3

Land Control Game 0.3 - Link

I've made quite a few changes in this update:
- New Character sprites (also, they control a bit differently)
- Charge Bar (to limit when you can and cannot attack)
- Some sounds (finally)
- New weapons:
    - Normal Shot (1 charge block) - changes a single opposing wall into your own color
    - Laser Beam (8 charge blocks) - destroys all opposing walls in its path
    - Wall Bomb (5 charge blocks) - supposed to place 16 walls around the player but doesn't work yet

Controls:
    Red:
    - WASD - movement
    - left shift - normal shot
    - left control - laser beam
    - left alt - wall bomb

    Blue:
    - IJKL - movement
    - right shift - normal shot
    - return - laser beam

    General:
    - R - reset players and walls
    - esc - Quit the game


I want to add some kind of acceleration back into the players movement code up to a certain speed. This is because it's currently impossible to simply drop off the edge of a wall. You always go at full speed and it feels kind of clunky and gives the player less control of the characters (which often leads to frustration).

Known Bugs (other than the wall fall thing not working properly):
- walls rapidly switch between stuck and unstuck when next other rapidly switching walls (I think I know why but I haven't found a working solution yet).
- when both characters try to shoot at the same time it can cause one of them to not work (Might be fixable by simply changing the control scheme. Something to do with both shoot buttons being different shift keys?)
- Wall bomb doesn't work. Something to do with it not wanting to be in the same place as other walls I think.

Scans

These are basically images of the visual representation of my initial ideas. I just scribbled them all down as fast as I could.

I decided to go with the Player vs Player idea.

Land connectors were quickly replaced with sticky blocks because I wanted the player to be able to easily place them in the heat of the game and sticky blocks seemed simpler and easier to perform by the player.

 Super shots are now Laser Beams. This is to differentiate the two weapons (normal shot and laser beam)  since they both have very different underlying uses. The normal shot changes the color of an opposing colors wall into the shots color. The laser beam on the other actually destroys the walls meaning the only way to make land in that area is to make it fall from above or to place wall bombs.

 Early thoughts on how I was going to execute the falling walls idea.

The initial idea didn't work so from here on out I am trying to figure out a solution.

02 - Land Control Game 0.2

Link to 0.2
I spent a whole day making version 0.1 into a buggy mess so I've reloaded a previous version of the game and now I have a working version of the game (even if it still does not play exactly how it was intended). This version probably doesn't look like a big big change but it will change game-play A LOT (especially when it works how I want).
I've been thinking very hard about how to make a group of blocks which aren't connected to a sticky block on any vertices to fall like the blocks do currently when they're not connected to anything.
So far I am unsuccessful.

I've changed how the characters play a little bit but I honestly haven't spent that much time perfecting their movement. They still control quite jerkily and it's too easy to throw yourself off the edge at the moment.

The falling blocks problem is my priority at the moment because it's the mechanic that all the other secondary mechanics rely on to work so I cannot make any progress until this is fixed.

I could technically release this version of the game now and it would actually be quite fun. This is a very good sign so despite the lack of programming skills I am rather hopeful.

I think a change of genre is important to keep me creative and enthusiastic so I'll probably give this game a break next Tuesday but I'll probably come back to it at some point because I think it has a lot of promise.

cya tomorrow probably. I still need to upload my sketchbook scans.

02 - Land Control Game

I said I was going to make a card game. I lied.
I was unable to get to sleep last night because I was so exited about all the new ideas I had for an arcade version of Momentum Jump. I cannot wait a whole week to try these ideas out so I'm postponing 'Card Game' until next week.

Land Control Game 0.1 - This is the link to my progress so far.

Control the red character with 'WASD' and shoot with 'left shift'
Control the blue character with 'IJKL' and shoot with 'right shift'

The characters currently play quite differently because I am still in the process of figuring out the best control scheme so have fun experimenting with both.

I'll upload some sketchbook design scans tomorrow and hopefully I'll have another prototype to upload too.