Accompanying music ( courtesy o’ Video Game Music HQ ):

I just happened to set my Wii-U screen controller thing to the side, on my blankets, & PJ ( Patches Jr. ) decides to curl up in front & watch.

Not to brag, but I deserve props for being able to beat that minigame while holding a camera up to PJ.

Accompanying Music:

Accompanying music:

Mind Your Manors

I spent all month working on just this 1 level & still wasn’t sure I’d get it all done, including recording playthroughs o’ the level, by the end o’ October. But I did.

This level idea started out as just some kind o’ vague HalloweenMuertoween-style mansion with this basic wallpaper & floor graphics, but all the layouts I came up with seemed empty & boring. Originally, I had bottomless pits in the mansion, which made no sense.

So then I came up with the idea o’ giving the player a flashlight in this level & challenging them to defeat all the ghosts to beat the level, & the 1st thing I did was prototype the programming for this to see if I could implement it in a way that didn’t feel awful. ’Twas tedious tinkering with pixels to get the rotating flashbeam & flashlight arm to align with the collision lines, but it seems to work all right. Since I knew this gimmick would have a risk o’ being janky, I deliberately made this level laid back & easy ( this also made recording easy & fast ’nough to do in less than an hour, as opposed to, say, “Brier Flier”, which took multiple days ).

Unlike almost everything else in this game, the flashlight collision isn’t just a box, but is 3 lines tested gainst the ghosts’ hitboxes, using some algorithms I found online, as well as some extra algorithms I had to fudge up to handle rotating the lines.

I remember 1 decision I hedged o’er was whether to allow the player to duck & slide down slopes ( in this case, the stairs ). I felt that having the down input make the player both duck & lower the flashlight, making it impossible to do either by itself, would be annoying¹. Originally, I had the camera-up & camera-down imputs move your flashlight, which fixed this problem; but I found that too awkward & feared it might be hard for players to figure out or adjust to & thought adding a message box to mention it would be lame². On a keyboard a’least ( which I still use for testing, e’en though I added controller support probably a year ago ), you have to use the same fingers for jumping & running as changing the camera, which is fine for the camera, since you rarely need to move it, anyway — I considered it a bonus mo’ than anything else. But for moving your flashlight, it’s far more o’ a hassle. ’Ventually, I judged that ducking & sliding wouldn’t be all that useful in this level, so I just cut them out. This had the unfortunate, but not dire, downside that it made the Flashlight Player’s code less clean & concise as, rather than just calling the general player update function, I had to copy parts o’ it with the ducking & sliding code removed. The biggest annoyance for a programmer is code that is very similar, but slightly different, so you have to debate whether to have copypasta ( which can make changing this copied code harder or risk adding bugs if they diverge ) or complicating the code & making it run slower for all with conditions.

I’m embarrassed to say how much time it took just doing the graphics for this level — as is common. All the slight adjustments needed for the staircases transitioning into ceilings & walls bloated the tileset ( which is already rooming with the forest tileset ) so that it almost took up all the tiles I have reserved, when most tilesets take up less than 10% o’ that space. All the lines & ridged shading kept misaligning, so I had to readjust tiles, only for this misalignment to cascade down all the tiles next to that tile, & so on.

Boskeopolis Land “woods” tileset.