Since releasing the v0.4 demo I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback. I’ve recently been busy adding in as many nice little touches as I can and creating a few more levels for your precision platforming pleasure. So, what’s new:
New Player
The protagonist has been recreated fully in vector format for a cleaner profile and easier scalability. He has a different shape to look a bit more like what he’s meant to be, a beanbag.
New Look
With a new player comes a new look for the level tiles. The tile overlays are now themed according to which world they belong to and follow a more abstract art style instead of the generic noise overlay from before.
New Features
The bulk of new stuff here is basically new options for controlling Beanie. You can now remap controls for each direction and action. Also to make the menus easier to navigate; jump, run and restart buttons are now also the accept, back and misc menu actions respectively. An auto run toggle and adjustable auto respawn timer has been added to the options. Beanie also finally has a death animation. It’s not completely finished but the eyes, boots and bits flying everywhere add a nice satisfying way to fail.
New Videos
As I said as the start of the post, I got a fair amount of amazing feedback. Some of it was also in gloriously helpful video form! Be sure to check them out.
New Framerate
Second to last but certainly not least is a hefty performance upgrade. Many objects have now been given a circular bounding area for visibility testing so they won’t render off screen, taking up valuable vertex data space. This helps a lot on bigger levels but has also given a noticeable boost in FPS on smaller ones.
Another area that bogs down the framerate is the lighting system. Each light renders to it’s own target and then that is rendered to a final light target. This is done every frame but any lights that don’t move are now only rendered once and saved for when it’s needed to render to the final light target. While it’s a lot faster than it used to be, the lighting system could still be optimised further. It’s acceptable for the time being however and together with the new visibility checks, the game is a little bit smoother.
New Fixes
No update would be complete without a whole host of bug fixes. The most notable changes were to the physics involving moving platforms such as:
- Fixed not being able to jump off a fast downward moving platform.
- Added a sweep collision test for the player to prevent tunneling through thin obstacles and to prevent death when getting stuck inside the world tiles.
- Removed killing the player from moving too far in a single frame (it was a check for detecting a rare case when a moving platform should’ve crush the player but didn’t). The collision changes may have fixed the issue as far as I can tell.
- Enemies can now collide with moving platforms.
- All control inputs are fully configurable.
- Removed vertex displacement for the world tiles to stop thin gaps from appearing on them and to also remove the overlap sometimes seen when behind the front tiles.
All in all the game is becoming more refined and polished and with less of those essential details out of the way, I can plough though some new levels as interesting ideas come to me.
Cheers,
Marios.
Gemi Games 