Hello again, internet! Despite this being my first post of the new year, I've actually been working on the game quite a bit. Here are several screenshots from the demo: I want to build out the game world and add a little more content before I open it up to people who are more experienced with platformers. For that reason, I'm not releasing this demo online yet. I also cut several levels and combined elements that should be separate. I was rushing to meet the deadline, so I didn't really create the non-linear world I was hoping for. So, feedback-wise, that was encouraging to hear, but the majority of the demo wasn't actually seen – including the boss fight and new skeleton enemies. One girl said it was addictive and that she would play it on her phone if she could. Despite the high body count, no one seemed to think their deaths were unfair. I was also preparing food, so I might have missed it if someone else did. I only saw one person successfully complete a level. Most of the folks who played the demo weren't really gamers, and certainly not hardcore platformer fans. It was really cool for me to see it played on a tv and it only took a few minutes to set up. I downloaded some keyboard mapping software for a controller and hooked my laptop up to the tv through the HDMI port. I showed off a small demo of the game over the weekend to some friends. It doesn't look all that different, but I assure you, it's a significant upgrade: I also did away with the depth change and simply added the player sprite to the animation and made the player invisible and immobile while doors open and close. Less data is saved in memory and repeated room transitions are no longer an issue. Performance-wise, this seems to be a solid upgrade also. This allows for working rooms with more than two doors – which couldn't be done simply by persistent rooms. Once that room starts, it uses that destination variable to move the player to the correct door on the other side. Instead, when the player activates a door, it writes the destination to a global variable and changes to the appropriate room. It was painful to throw out most of the code, but I was able to simplify how the doors work and avoid using persistent rooms altogether. There was also a nasty memory leak that could be induced by repeatedly switching rooms. I was also relying on Game Maker's use of persistent rooms which was causing inconsistencies with depth (the original doors actually changed depth at a certain frame to literally cover up the player). Connecting two doors across two levels wasn't intuitive and made level design a chore. The original code was sloppy and inefficient. After several weeks of procrastinating, I finally dedicated a few hours to redesigning the door system.
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