lizardgirl: Thanks for the suggestion and for the comment on the website.
Halos Nach Tariff: Wow, that’s some impressive work there! I applaud you for your hard work, and I just might end up putting this on the website.
Although I need to add some information on some of those suggestions, because there’s gonna be some explanation to it.
Stage 1-1: ‘The Soil Wastes’ : Actually This is exactly what I see coming from this stage. Except the tutorial was a bit vague to me. Programming the Tutorial will be a bit of a task, might take up a chunk of time, but not that badly.
The downfall to the speed increase is there is only so much i can do with this engine. I know I could increase his max speed, but I can’t make the animation of Wall-E change from having beat-up treads to nicer ones easily (Currently I’m not sure how I’d go about doing that without doing something complex.
-Stage 1-2: ‘The Dust City’: Now THAT is what I’m looking for. I know how I’m going to do that and everything, So that idea is going to be executed, 100% sure I could do that.
-Stage 1-3: ‘The Lakebed’: Also what I’m looking for. I also know how I’m going to do that, as I’ve worked with things like that in a different fan game.
-Stage 2-1: ‘The Axiom Highway’ : Actually, I’m gonna do cutscenes to fill the unplayable spaces, so that’s all good.
Designing the Axiom stages will be one heck of a ride, looking at all the work that will go into something like that. XD
-Stage 2-2: ‘The Repair Ward’: I see that stage mostly as a “avoid enemies shooting at you” sort of stage. Breaking the glass might be made harder too or something.
-Stage 2-3: ‘Define Dancing’: Hmm… I like the idea, but that will involve the creation of a whole new engine just for that one stage. Maybe if I get to that point, I’ll do that. Right now, I’m gonna aim to get Act 1 done.
Stage 3-1: 'The Garbage Airlock: Ya, a battle against Wall-E and Auto is kinda what I’m looking for, although I’m still trying to figure out how I want to do that. I figure a mini-game of sorts will work well for this, press certain key combination’s to avoid Auto’s grasp.
Stage -3-2: ‘The Lido Deck’: Same idea basically, it’ll evolve tons of button mashing and precession. I got it planned out.
-Stage 3-3: ‘It only takes a moment’: And than that. I was thinking it would be so much easier to make a cutscene to end the game right there, but to even out the stages maybe I will fill it with some kind of Activity. But that’s so far out I don’t think I need to think about it.
We want the stages to take anywhere from 2 to 4 minutes a piece. the speed Wall-E goes max is about 1/3 of Sonic’s, and my Sonic stages usually need to be 20000 pixels wide for Sonic. so I’d try maybe 6000 to 12000 in size, although I know your working with paper.
I recommend grid paper, it makes my job easyer.
Basically you draw it so that each square is the equivalent of 32 pixels (because my engine is built off of multiples of 8, and most of my platforms are 32x32 in size.) One other thing, Wall-E can’t be more than 700 pixels below horizontally at the begining of the game (when the game enters the stage), otherwise the camera can’t catch up to him and you die. (I can fix this, but I don’t see why I should, seeing as how it does it’s job anyhow, and it would require tweaking a lot of code.)
AND in other news, the title screen is being redesigned to be a lot more user friendly. More on that coming soon enough.
I will be applying for Beta Testers within the next week or so…
One last thing, Although I like the structure that we are building, I’m thinking maybe just having the player play as a certain character based on where we are in the story (Wall-E would get the main lead though.)