Gable weaves her way through the Empress Spear Blossoms.
Finally got back around to working out how the empress spear blossoms will behave. I’d initially been planning to make them act as a projectile turret type enemy, but in experimenting with them, I found that their size makes them more suited to acting as a physical hazard.
Because they try to point towards Gable, they can be tricky to work around, but that also allows you to deliberately bait them into an orientation that makes it easier to maneuver around them. They’re now coded so that the plant’s desired aim direction, is an angle measured from the root to Gable. (Pink in the diagram below) The plant’s head angle (yellow) smoothly tracks towards the desired aim direction.
An interesting side effect of taking this angle from the root, is that Gable can sit at the plant’s root, and steer the head of the plant from behind, by moving a little in either direction.
The spear blossoms are also hazardous to other enemies, and so if you’re careful, you can exploit their behavior to use them as an improvised weapon.
You can see an example of this in the gif, when Gable reaches the bottom of the lower area. First she attacks a normal skellie with her sword, then she backs up behind the head of the spear blossom on her left, and hops to swing the spear head up into the spiked skellie. (Still frame of that example below.)
Finally as with most hazards, I have reduce the hitbox a little beyond what the visuals would imply, so that you can brush the empress spears quite close without officially colliding. This way, you might slip through a situation that looks a little too close, but as a result, if and when you do finally take a hit, it won’t feel unfair.
In the gif, you can see an example of this twice in a row, when Gable is at the very right side of the level, returning to the upper area. Her tail brushes through one spear blossom, and the top of her head brushes past the next one she ducks under. I was not intending to cut it that close. ((O,O))!
A related aside, in the process of recording this gif, I caught and finally solved a bug that has baffled me for quite a while, in which Gable would attack a skellie, and the ray burst effect would emit from someplace slightly different than the sword. After tracking it down, I found that somehow it got errantly set up to emit from Gable, rather than her sword. And it just so happens that they are so close most of the time, that I would only notice it in rare occasions, and couldn’t quite figure it out. Anyway, another little thing that will be patched in the next release. 🙂
As always, I hope you’re all doing well. 🙂
