My problem is not having the game remember whether it's paused or not. My problem is having the pause affect everything except the text box.

It is every tick. Slight typo in my first post.

I know about the pin behavior, but I'd like to keep objects (like guns or shields) attached to a character's hand which moves as he animates. Oddly enough, simply using "Set position to object" every tick will make the gun/shield lag behind the character. Why is this, and how can I keep it attached?

I have a message box that will pop up every once in a while, and I want it to pause my game when it appears. The trouble is, setting the global time scale to 0, and its own time scale to 1, will still prevent its text from appearing (triggered by "Every X seconds").

How do I set the time scale to 0 to pause the game, but still allow this textbox to continue adding text and calling the un-pause event?

Update: This also occurs with another tune, which will only work correctly if this is the first level you visit in this session... despite the fact that one other tune (title/menu) will always play before it.

One of the music tracks in my game will sometimes not play. That sounds bizarre, because it is.

It worked perfectly before, and I haven't changed anything in the audio since it did. Sometimes the track will play correctly (the existing background music is stopped before this plays), but now most of the time it will not play at all. The debugger informs me that the track progress is 0 out of NaN (Not a Number) seconds. The other music tracks all work as they should.

What's up with this?

It seems to get confused when I type too quickly and it says I missed. And I'm pretty sure I didn't type every single quickly-typed word incorrectly.

Otherwise, it feels like a great casual game.

Carnage in Space II

Official website and demo

CARNAGE IN SPACE II!

This is a crazy-awesome action platformer inspired by the MegaMan Zero series. It involves an over-the-top-awesome hero slashing and blasting his way through 9 unique levels, blowing up hundreds of baddies, and taking down ferocious bosses while telling his own little story along the way.

Story

Our hero, Nightmare (yes, that is a name if I say it is), is dispatched by the galactic peacekeeping force AIO to a lonely frontier planet to put down a force intending to conquer the planet. When he gets there, not all is as it seems, though. Perhaps something even more sinister lies behind this simple little uprising...

Gameplay

As a player, your goal is to pick out the right combination of weapons and gear, all with unique attacks, to fit your playstyle, and then fight your way through each level while keeping the unique mission objectives in mind to get a perfect score on every level. Ha, ha, just kidding. Your real goal is just to blow things up in the most ridiculously awesome manner possible!

Impaling a tank on a double-ended lance? Sure.

Taking down helicopters with a rocket launcher? Naturally.

Flying over a boss, shooting an assault rifle down on it? Well, yeah!

Smashing that pesky turret with a gigantic sword! YES!

What are you waiting for? Go play it now!

I'd hope it goes without saying, but all feedback, positive and negative, is welcome. Well, mainly positive.

Screenshots

This game is already taking massive amounts of effort on my part - it's a very ambitious project. Can you blame me for trying to find a shortcut?

Ah, well. At least making animations is fun.

That's too bad. Looks like I've got a lot of work ahead of me.

(Note that I never wanted to use Spriter to rotate those images - I was gonna draw separate sprites for each rotation).

The reason I want something like spriter is so that I can a) easily put together new sprites from a set of smaller parts, and b) update the design of these parts without a ton of effort in updating every single resulting sprite.

Right now, I'm considering re-coloring the entire character to a new 8-color palette for better contrast, but that will require recoloring every "part", and then updating that part in every single Paint.NET image for several dozen frames of animation.

Hmm, seems I need to give Spriter another try.

So, my question is how do you work with pixel precision? Everything here is set up for "smooth animations", where you're not supposed to see individual pixels. How do I snap objects to the right pixel positions? Or is this even possible?

Edit: On a related note, is it possible to not blur the sprites when I zoom in? Because I don't want my sprites to be tiny when I'm trying to get the placements right.

Edit 2: This nonsense is why I'm still not sure Spriter is the right tool for me:

The sprite is blurred, and there is no snap-to-grid that I can see anywhere.