SNAKE

?!

OTACON

No, Snake! Not that kind of Snake!

shoot a snake by ~ThePodunkian on deviantART

TU in 2010? (say this “Tee You in Twenty Ten”) That’s what I’m gunning for.

Peace out, guisanos!

I’ve been adding some more features to the Lua system, the specifics of which are kind of too much to remember in its entirety. From the top of my head, I’ve added the ability to interact via button-presses with scripted sequences (for QTE style stuff, if, for some reason, you want to do something like that in a mod). It’s also possible to change the number of consecutive jumps the player can pull off without touching the ground. While this can most traditionally be used for things like double jumps, I can imagine mod authors also playing around with the game physics to do things like swimming or flying (like Joust/Balloon Fight).

The game also supports external parallax maps, which for some strange reason, wasn’t really possible to do until just recently.

Contentwise, I’ve completed the majority of Ladder World, but I’m thinking of expanding it a bit as it takes an awfully short amount of time to get through it all. I also just completed a new cutscene (which is why the aforementioned Lua changes were made in the first place), and I’ve got to say it’s pretty cool how complex I’ve managed to make it considering the primitive nature of the scripting tools. The new cutscene also required me to write two new songs, but it was well worth the effort.

Some things to take note of:

• The new tileset. I’m not exactly 100% happy with it, nor am I too happy about the work-in-progress level design of this new area, but I’m sure I’ll get it to a point that I’m happy with it after another couple of hours worth of revising.
• The new HUD, which is a lot more compact, and a lot less obstructive than the old one (I hope?). Its design comes from a suggestion made by forums member DOUGLAS.
• Ip is also holding a custom weapon that’s running off the new weapon code. What’s not apparent here is how the bullets move — the two squarish bullets move in a sine-wave pattern while the narrow bullet fires straight. This demonstrates the customizable bullets, which go beyond simply setting graphics/damage/speed values. One example weapon I’ve made fires a bullet that is affected by gravity and hops along the ground.
• How adeptly I have avoided those fireballs.

In addition, I’ve also finished up the majority of the new shoes equipping system, which allows modders to modify the player’s movement. With a little bit of clever coding, you could also get shoes to do other things — for example, double jumps, wall kicks, etc. Hopefully this’ll allow modders to come up with unique gameplay mechanics for their mods.

Speaking of mods, a couple more great mods have come out in the past month:

Space Mod, by Kenju launches Ip into Outer Space to investigate a giant asteroid. Though the mod is considered a demo, there’s an incredible amount of polish in this mod, including new characters, great dialogue, and really well designed levels.

A New Game, by Youhr, which is a little rougher around the edges, but makes up for it with a lot of really interesting design choices, like, for example, a single level that you can revisit throughout the game where the majority of the game’s Life Toast can be found. This mod is also a demo, but it contains more than an hour’s worth of gameplay.

As always, if you’re interested at all at modding the game, be sure to check out the forums, as there’s a small community of people who’re willing to help. In the coming months I’ll be uploading updated versions of the engine for modder, as well, which’ll allow them to use these new features in their mods.

After hours and hours of relentless working, I’ve got a system that allows for (drumroll, please) moddable weapons!

You can customize bullet movement with LUA code, change how much damage they do, change how a weapon looks, sounds, feel, whatever. It’s a pretty robust system, and after messing around with it for a few hours, I’ve come up with some simple, but interesting weapons.

Hopefully, this, coupled with the new inventory system I introduced not too long ago, will allow for a much more diverse range of weaponry and play styles. I’ll probably be releasing a preview build with the new inventory/weapon/achievement systems soon — though the preview won’t really contain any new content, as I intend it to be a tool for mod makers more than a new version of the main game for people to play through.

Who is this mysterious man?

So I’ve spent the better part of today working out the new inventory system for The Underside. The old system was a bit impractical because it didn’t really allow any sort of items besides “key items” as they would be called in other games. The new system is different in that it allows multiple instances of the same object, so you could, for example, make a potion type object, and allow the player to carry more than one of them. Additionally, the new inventory lists all items in one menu, instead of separating the weapons and items separately, and is also constrained by the size of your inventory, which means you’ll have to balance the number and type of items that you carry along with you.

A problem that arises with this is that it breaks compatibility with existing mods (and any mods in development, sadly). On the flip-side, however, porting old mods to this new system is not terribly difficult (there are only a few special cases to look out for — for example, handling what happens when the inventory is maxed out on, say, an “item give”).

With that said, though, I’m excited to see how this new system will factor into how the game is played. For a start, coins will become more valuable, as shops and things of that nature will be more accessible. Secondly, you’ll be able to select which weapons to take with you, and additionally, you’ll be able to rearrange their order on the next/previous weapon hot keys.

This system also makes it a bit easier for me to implement the “equipping” system I’d been planning to do, but I won’t be giving that away in this post (^:.

Another significant addition to The Underside is the addition of achievements, which work just like they would on, say, XBOX. What’s more is that triggering achievements also unlocks in-game rewards (though not all of them do). The plan is to create a redemption system, where the player earns ‘badges’ (like boyscout badges) for doing certain tasks, which can later be redeemed for prizes at a certain location in the game.

Anyways, lots of exciting work, I’m still hacking away at this inventory system, and hopefully people won’t get too upset about it!

There’s nothing that makes me feel more inadequate about myself than getting some really great fan art. There’s nothing that make laugh more than fan art about Johnny Five Aces. As such, there’s nothing that makes me laugh at my own inadequacy than this piece of fan art by JoeSlob. The picture is called JOHNNY FIVE ACES, which is more or less a perfect title for it, as it more or less encapsulates everything that is going on in the picture, which is below:

I’ve also added another piece of fan art to the The Underside’s Fan Art section. This one’s done by the ever talented, Annabelle Kennedy. It puts The Underside’s Ip in the company of many of indie games’ iconic characters:

If you’ve got any fan art related to any of my games, please, by all means, let me know about it! Any feelings of inadequacy will subside, but the feelings of love and care will last FOREVER.