Heroic Fisticuffs!

Here's a place where I talk about games, applications, websites, and other things that I make for fun. Mostly roguelikes. And robots. Since my domain is hard to spell you probably came here on purpose.

Hardpointe still alive

Despite my lack of posts and entire blog going offline for a bit, I continue to develop Hardpointe in my "free time". Progress did stall for the last half of 2018, but seeing all of the posts around 7DRLs earlier in Feb really pushed me to get back into making progress.

A lot of work has been behind the scenes since the last version. I did a lot of work to add a 'radial' menu. In an effort to reduce on-screen distraction and the number of button presses, when there is an ambiguous action, the radial menu pops up, and the available options always show up in the same spot. (e.g. 'Heave' is always the up key) It makes for much smoother gameplay.



Enemy AI was also changed to make them less omniscient and more cautious about doors. There was an annoying habit for  enemies to "wait" behind doors and punch you right as you walked in. This wasn't really by design. Now enemies take a turn to go from non-alert to alert statuses. So if you walk into a room and they DO happen to be behind the door, they will act surprised for a beat. That gives you an opportunity to attack, back away, or do something else.

I didn't do any power switching in this video but that menu has been streamlined as well. You can now just hit space + <slot to replace> and not have to page through multiple screens or even read anything if you don't need to.

Here's me dying on the 1st level because I messed up a dash somewhere and got hit. In a 3-hp game you really need to pay attention to every single hit. Apparently I'm a bit rusty.

2 comments:

  1. I absolutely love your work so far, but for some reason lately whenever I try and play any of your games it looks like the site is down? Tank Control is still accessible since it is on itch.io but it doesn't look like I can play any of the ones hosted on your site. I hope everything gets worked out, I am excited to try out hardpointe!

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  2. Hey, thanks for checking in! I really enjoy hearing feedback like that. My site crashed earlier this year due to mostly me being a dummy. I lost everything but have most of it backed up. I have been slowly rebuilding. Prompted by your comment I just went ahead and pushed out the new site. It's still a bit of a work in progress, but all the essentials are there.

    I've recreated the pages for 2 older games, RoboCaptain and Heavy Axe, which you can play on the new site:
    https://heroicfisticuffs.com/pages/robocaptain/index.html
    https://heroicfisticuffs.com/pages/heavyaxe/index.html


    I'm still working on a (massive) changelog, but you can play the latest version of hardpointe (possibly now called 'Warning Call' - something I'm trying out) here:
    https://heroicfisticuffs.com/hp/
    https://heroicfisticuffs.com/pages/warningcall/index.html

    Enjoy - and let me know if you run into any trouble. Either here, reddit, or any of the various e-mail addresses I have lying around the site. (me AT heroicfisticuffs.com works too)

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