So, yesterday the idea of another trailer was kicked around. I said I’d be interested in doing it, but I believe a little more thought needs to go into this before attacking it.
For one, we should make sure we want to know exactly what we’re going to show off. I have a general sense, but I’m sure someone will think of something that’d be good to include. Thus far, here’s what I’ve got:
-General gameplay capabilities. Running, swimming, wall-jumping, some of the cooler moving platforms (like the swinging logs). Making sure gameplay scrolls in all four directions to convey variety.
-A highlight of various attacks. Spitting/throwing, but also a few of the powerups found later, and the modular nature of the attacks changing when an enemy is in the stomach.
-All of the various environments, indoors and outdoors, and some of the cooler enemies.
-Some dialog. The fact that there are branching choices in some conversations will be a major turn-on for some people. Not a lot of talking, but enough to convey that there are peaceful interactions in addition to fighting.
-The editor. Both the precision that it allows, and the fact that this Frogatto isn’t afraid to let you truly ruin it if you want to. There should be something silly and broken, like Marcavis’ video where he made squirrels stop throwing acorns and start throwing squirrels that would then get up and throw even more squirrels. I’m not too familiar with the true power of the editor, so some suggestions/assistance would be helpful there.
-It’s debatable, but I think we should even have a quick shot of the debug console. Some people will flip for that.
That’s the exciting stuff, but I’ve also got a few concerns. Mainly, my current (Mac) build doesn’t show the game in all of its glory. The most serious issue is that I’ve got some pretty glaring transparency problems, and many objects are surrounded by blatant brown squares. And my debug console doesn’t work unless I paste something I’ve copied after typing it in some other application. There are also some things that we probably want in the trailer that aren’t quite finished yet; the mushroom boss has an attack that has placeholder art, and I still need to come up with a bunch of sounds for the moth boss.
That said, any of these other than the transparency troubles could probably be worked around with a bit of savvy editing. So I’m just wondering, when’s the time to start?
Also, I don’t currently have a screen-capturing program, so if somebody’d like to suggest a good one for Mac that’d be useful to me.