Schoolyard Snodown

Hello everyone! I'm a part of a team that has spent our nights and weekends working on a little project of ours. We finally got to the point where we felt confident enough to share our progress, so we posted it to the Arcade!

Schoolyard Snodown is retro-inspired beat 'em up that will ultimately take Cody across six levels with thirteen boss encounters, hidden paths, dynamic levels, and hopefully support local co-op for two players. We hope to release a finished game sometime towards the end of the summer for OUYA and PC, after taking a second shot at Kickstarter.

But before we got too much further in development, we wanted to make sure that the game we have right now is fun. If we can't create a solid single player experience then we have some real work to do before we even think about multiplayer.

So, to that end, we'd love to hear your feedback - what do you think works really well? What doesn't work well? What could be better? How could we better leverage Construct 2? How in the world do we get rid of those lines between the snow tiles? <font size="1">(they don't appear when you run the layout in Construct . . . )</font> And most importantly: is it fun?

Obviously, there's still a lot of work to be done, but we're looking forward to hearing what you guys think. If you have any questions about the art, sound, story, music, or game design, please feel free to ask. We're here and will be regularly updating the demo and posting on the forums from here on out. Thank you so much!

-The Scoundrels

facebook.com/SchoolyardSnodown

@Snodown

I got a 404 error. :(

Nevermind... I got it.

Also, I think I've posted this in the right subforum, but let me know if it would be more appropriate somewhere else!

Game is pretty sound, well done all round, one major flaw for me is the z order / Y plane needs attention, what I mean is you can be at the bottom left of the screen throwing at an enemy on the same y coordinate, at the right but an enemy mid screen higher up (lower Y) can be hit by your snowball, when he is clearly not the target...

I think a shadow showing the flight path of the throw would help too...

Apart from that it's pretty cool... <img src="smileys/smiley36.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

MrFrettz

awesome

for the lines issue

are you using tiled background for the snow tiles? or each individual sprites next to each other

Game is pretty sound, well done all round, one major flaw for me is the z order / Y plane needs attention, what I mean is you can be at the bottom left of the screen throwing at an enemy on the same y coordinate, at the right but an enemy mid screen higher up (lower Y) can be hit by your snowball, when he is clearly not the target...<img src="smileys/smiley36.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

If I'm hearing ya correctly, you tried to hit an enemy who was in a certain horizontal lane, but a nearby enemy in a slightly different horizontal lane took the hit, right? This is tricky! If we limit collision of Cody's snowballs to a very small window based on Cody's Y coordinate at the time the snowball spawns, hitting enemies could be very hard. I think I'll approach it by reducing the vertical height of the enemy hitboxes, so it starts at, say, their thighs instead of their knees, and see how that works. Does that sound like it would make hitting your intended target better?

I think a shadow showing the flight path of the throw would help too<img src="smileys/smiley36.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

That's actually something we had talked about, but forgot to do! Thank you! <img src="smileys/smiley32.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

for the lines issue

are you using tiled background for the snow tiles? or each individual sprites next to each other

We're currently using individual sprites, but using a tiled background would probably make sense, wouldn't it? <img src="smileys/smiley9.gif" border="0" align="middle" /> I'll start working with that to see what I can do.

One feature that we're working on is having a snow tile disappear after you make a certain number of snowballs from it. So, the trigger for adding 1 ammo to Cody's bag would also trigger subtracting 1 ammo from a snow tile. I assume that would work with a tiled background?

Thanks for your feedback, everyone! I'm really glad you're enjoying it.

MrFrettz I am assuming based on the animation that cody is supposed to be throwing directly to the right, and there is no aiming up down?

if so what I said stands, think final fight, which your game is...with snowballs...

if a character gets a certain height above or below you, your attacks start missing..basically if your feet are within a certain Y height of the enemy you are face to face with them, to high and too low they are to your left and your right respectively...

regarding the snow sprites, a tiled background would be much better and give better performance,also will remove the lines, only trouble is you cannot animate them...

what I would suggest is a tiled background for the snow, and if snow is used in a certain area add a sprite that can then turn into snowless patch on top of the tile, as there will be less patches than snow it will reduce your object count considerably...

MrFrettz I am assuming based on the animation that cody is supposed to be throwing directly to the right, and there is no aiming up down?

if so what I said stands, think final fight, which your game is...with snowballs...

if a character gets a certain height above or below you, your attacks start missing..basically if your feet are within a certain Y height of the enemy you are face to face with them, to high and too low they are to your left and your right respectively...

regarding the snow sprites, a tiled background would be much better and give better performance,also will remove the lines, only trouble is you cannot animate them...

what I would suggest is a tiled background for the snow, and if snow is used in a certain area add a sprite that can then turn into snowless patch on top of the tile, as there will be less patches than snow it will reduce your object count considerably...

That sounds like a great place to start - thanks Perfick!

if a character gets a certain height above or below you, your attacks start missing..basically if your feet are within a certain Y height of the enemy you are face to face with them, to high and too low they are to your left and your right respectively...

I've taken a shot at this and uploaded a new version. Is the vertical window too small, or does this work?

MrFrettz Yes that is much better, I think you have it about right there, certainly adds a layer to the gameplay,does not feels as fire and forget, you have to focus more on a single opponent, how do you think it works?

MrFrettz Yes that is much better, I think you have it about right there, certainly adds a layer to the gameplay,does not feels as fire and forget, you have to focus more on a single opponent, how do you think it works?

I think the hit window may be a tad too small, but think overall it's going to work really well. There are more pressing gameplay matters to balance <img src="smileys/smiley36.gif" border="0" align="middle" /> (e.g., the Block is completely OP).

Thanks for the suggestion! We'll be posting frequent updates, so feel free to keep checking back for more. :)

Oh I like the snowball shadow too, helps bring it to ground better...

The game looks good :)

Link to your facebook page is wrong.

Oh I like the snowball shadow too, helps bring it to ground better...

I think so, too. :) Also, I managed to fix the lines in between the snow tiles. Under Project Properties, there's an option to turn Pixel Rounding on. That did it!

The game looks good :)

Link to your facebook page is wrong.

Thank you! And really? Hmmm it seems to work fine for me.

facebook.com/SchoolyardSnodown ?