Wishlist Stuff for Future Releases


#1

Starting a catch-all list for odd tidbits:

Miscellaneous:
- set up all current objects with platform-areas to have material types corresponding to the same set of tile material types; for sound effects.

  • finish that one slope-into-wall transition that isn’t done for the current house interiors, basement tiles, and dungeon tiles, since it would be quite useful for level-design.
  • adapt the current metal shelves in the dungeon to function as metal catwalks (i.e. replace the current dungeon stairs with them).
  • Implement a separate “railing” tileset to optionally go on top of this.
  • possibly finish those metal-grating tiles I’d hashed together a few bits of a long time ago
  • draw some kind of thick, vertical wooden beams that could be used as supports in several tilesets
  • draw crumbling edges, like we have in the dungeon tiles, for the basement tileset.
  • draw an overlay tileset for the basement tiles which looks much more crumbled/collapsing.
  • Figure out some way to reconcile having both clean, masoned edges for wall tiles, and collapsing, exposed-brick edges, for both the basement and dungeon tilesets.
  • optional perspective for water objects

- create some halfways point between our current foliage, and bare rock. The transition is a bit abrupt.

  • we don’t need to justify the gold treasures - their express purpose is as a placeholder reward for difficult level sequences. We can make them do something later, but they don’t need to do anything right now. Likewise and most important, we don’t need to give out the whole set. It’s okay to ship with just one or two.

  • droppable, bounceable 1 and 5 value coins

  • a justification for dropped gold; purchasable, consumable items which recharge mana or health or give some sort of effect.

  • this requires an inventory screen to trigger these items from

  • an inventory screen would be a great place for viewing achievements on platforms that don’t have some native system for that, like gamecenter/steam/openfeint.

Forest:

  • Draw the forest house interiors
  • Draw “mount points”/“pulleys” for the rope winches.
  • include the new first stretch of forest levels (conveyance, rocky road, tempo outskirts)

Wishlist:

  • implement circular shadows underneath the main character and monsters, which match their position along the ground, and change size by getting bigger as they get closer to ground (this will require all tilesets to be fully converted to perspective, which is now down to just the seaside-interiors).

  • some sort of mini-map for the inventory screen

  • Implement some way to do arbitrary blending modes so we can do proper shadows

  • Get our random-level stitcher working again and make some mainline levels with it.


#2

It’s nice that, because of ActionJack, we’re way ahead of schedule on this part. :slight_smile:


#3
[2:05pm] jetrel2: DDR: the other thing I'd like to do is add about 2 additional mana abilities for frogatto, like I'd mentioned. One I've got pegged to be a ground-following "acid spew". [2:05pm] jetrel2: the other, I have no idea. [2:06pm] jetrel2: There are a lot of possibilities. [2:07pm] jetrel2: I'm a bit remiss to do a basic damage ability - it might be very interesting to do some indirect ability [2:10pm] ActionJackalope (~ActionJac@205.178.39.125) left the chat room. (Quit: ActionJackalope) [2:10pm] jetrel2: I'd also like to have a shop in tempo-village; I'm thinking it ought to be easy to stock it with a few pretty simple purchaseable upgrades (we really want to hold off on doing purchases which require an inventory screen until 1.5). [2:12pm] jetrel2: What I'm thinking right now is: a medium mana-talisman, between the two existing ones, and a mana-bar extension which gives you a deeper mana pool to draw from. [2:13pm] jetrel2: Finally, one idea I'm batting around but haven't fully committed to in 1.4 is of having "super attacks" for your basic abilities. [2:15pm] jetrel2: I've decided the best way to do these is to introduce a new kind of ammo, because this gives us a great consumable to sell in shops, which won't yet require an inventory screen, and also it's a *super* addition to have as monster drops - to give players *some* reason to farm enemies (like the missiles in cave story). [2:16pm] jetrel2: We genuinely do want one or two extrinsic motivations to go around killing enemies; intrinsically I find them pretty fun to kill, but some extrinsic one would be nice to have. [2:16pm] jetrel2: The intrinsic ones I think are just that they're fun to kill, and also that more troublesome ones often are good to "get out of the way". [2:18pm] jetrel2: A third possible upgrade for the forest shop would be an "acquirable item magnet" - shantae did this and I thought it was a pretty clever trick; if you walked within 3-4 tiles of an item you could pick up, it would get pulled towards you like you had your own gravitic attraction to it. [2:18pm] jetrel2: It would be a big convenience upgrade for mana cubes and such. [2:29pm] DDR: Agreed. [2:30pm] DDR: How about an ability, an attack, that when used freezes all enemies on screen for a few seconds? [2:31pm] jetrel2: DDR: that sounds like an excellent "super mode" of some power [2:31pm] DDR: Mosquitoes rain down to the ground, eg. :P [2:31pm] jetrel2: actually [2:31pm] DDR: But it doesn't actually kill them, they defrost. [2:31pm] jetrel2: actually, that's kind of a rad idea for a lighting ability? here's a thought.. [2:33pm] jetrel2: We could include some lightning ability which deals "electrical" damage; the catch would be that most enemies would gain a special-case response to electricity that would actually cause them to state-change to their thrown state. [2:33pm] jetrel2: So maybe on the short-range, this lightning ability would work like in kirby and do a short-range area of effect around frogatto [2:33pm] DDR: oo, I like. [2:34pm] jetrel2: But on the long range, it would "shock" everything onscreen; doing a kinda piddly amount of damage, but stunning everything [2:34pm] jetrel2: so e.g. all sorts of fliers would fall out of the air when you did it. [2:34pm] DDR: btw, if we wanted to do 'ice' I think one could whip up a /mean/ shader effect for it. And make a resizable ice-cube object. [2:35pm] jetrel2: Yeah [2:35pm] ? DDR nods. [2:35pm] jetrel2: Ice is a great idea, but we need to put it off till later because of potential issues with shader support. [2:35pm] DDR: Yeah. Hence the ice-cube object... it just wouldn't refract without shaders. [2:36pm] jetrel2: Yeah. [2:36pm] Maketwo: 3D is so boring so I made a 2D raytracer: http://xob.kapsi.fi/~makegho/trash/flatland03.png [2:36pm] DDR: If we can arrange for shaders to just not happen if they're not supported, it would work. [2:37pm] Maketwo: (joking of course, it's part of analysis for understanding another problem) [2:37pm] DDR: Maketwo: I'm doing that too, but mine only shoots rays downward, through the plane. [2:37pm] jetrel2: Another idea, though more troublesome, is re-doing the "slow time" power - the question lies in how to trigger it. [2:38pm] DDR: When, and only when, the player holds the attack key with the slo-mo ability on? [2:38pm] jetrel2: Since the most sensible way would be to have it be a channeled ability (c.f. the "staff of somaria" in zelda"). [2:38pm] jetrel2: DDR: yeah, see that would preclude any other attacks. :( [2:38pm] DDR: Yes. [2:38pm] DDR: Plus, there gets to be a lot of abilities to switch through. [2:39pm] jetrel2: It leads to a totally natural "super version" where time completely stops, though.

jetrel2: DDR: regarding other abilities…
[3:37pm] jetrel2: I’m thinking the super-versions for the existing abilities? we have several possibilities:
[3:38pm] jetrel2: Fireball: 1] could be a “ring of fire” which expands from frogatto, filling ~ 1/3-1/2 of the screen, acting as a local “screen clearing” ability 2] could also be a very deadly direct shot foward (which of course passes through terrain)
[3:40pm] jetrel2: Energy Shot: 1] could be an omni-directional “flurry” of shots in all directions 2] could be the aforementioned “super shot” 3] could be a sudden “zap” to everything on the screen
[3:41pm] jetrel2: Homing shot: 1] could be the old dorky “ring of projectiles” around the player, acting as a shield
[3:42pm] DDR: The homing shot also lends itself to simply homing in on multiple targets. More interesting alternatives might be a very fast, long-lived homing shot that didn’t die on contact, or a steady stream of homing shots.
[3:42pm] jetrel2: 2] could be a special homing shot that doesn’t die right when it hits an enemy, but instead persists and keeps doing damage over time, potentially hitting multiple
[3:43pm] zookeeper (~lmsnie@wesnoth/developer/zookeeper) left the chat room. (Ping timeout: 256 seconds)
[3:43pm] jetrel2: 3] another idea is to have a whole flurry of “mini” homing shots, evenly distributed amongst all the different enemies on the screen.
[3:43pm] DDR: And suddenly, no more mosquitoes.
[3:44pm] jetrel2: Well, this would differ in that it would be fairly effective against a single enemy as well.
[3:44pm] DDR: oo, steerable homing shot
[3:44pm] jetrel2: Steerable is a cool, but difficult idea.
[3:45pm] DDR: Mm, could be pretty easy… if we had a way to pause the player.
[3:45pm] jetrel2: We’d balance it so the electric zap was more powerful against some enemy types than the multi-homing shot
[3:45pm] DDR: Steering-wise, all we have to do is read level.player.ctrl_left and ctrl_right.
[3:45pm] jetrel2: i.e. if you attack flying enemies and toss them all to the ground (and into water or something), it’d be more powerful.
[3:46pm] DDR: And make level.player not respond to those controls.
[3:46pm] jetrel2: But if you are just facing a few enemies, the homing one would be better.
[3:46pm] DDR: Perhaps possible via a set event handler swallowing the event?
[3:46pm] ? DDR nods.
[3:46pm] jetrel2: Yeah, the problem lies in “make player not respond to controls” - and it’s not an implementation problem, it’s a gameplay problem.
[3:47pm] jetrel2: I.e. it’s kinda horrible to freeze the player in most circumstances.
[3:47pm] jetrel2: I’ve seen powers like this in e.g. kirby, and they’re pretty much a useless novelty.
[3:48pm] DDR: Hm.
[3:49pm] DDR: OK, scrap that then.