Not a complaint by any means, but I feel it's almost a huge missed opportunity not to have Proto absorb animals from defeated badniks for fuel, I mean, they're powered by animals and all.
I gave it a passing thought while implementing the fuel system, but I decided against it for two reasons.
1) Adding a new item specifically for Proto is more intuitive. The moment the player sees it, they know that it's going to power up Proto in some way and that they should collect it immediately. Simply making the animal a powerup makes it easier to overlook.
2) Animals acting as powerups would be difficult to balance. For instance, low-level enemies like crawlas don't always drop fuel in Single Player, and if I were to use animals instead to replicate the same effect, I would either have to make some crawlas not spawn animals, or I would have to make the animals drop lower fuel amounts and Proto would have to spend more of his time collecting the drops. Also, animals have their own eratic movement and their own timers which I didn't want to interfere with. A stationary powerup doesn't work against the player in any way, and I can easily modify the fuel coin to have a disappearance timer of my choosing.
Also to answer the questions earlier:
I know I'm being nitpicky considering this is just a character and all... But wouldn't a prototype BADNIK still have actual health? Like Hit Points or something? It seems like it would be really worth all the badnik exterminating in my opinion.
EDIT: On top of that, could the ball mode charge move maybe be mapped to the jump button as well?
EDIT2: AND ON TOP OF THAT, a robot that isn't Space-Proof?
I only wanted to make the character as complex as necessary to make him whole and balanced. A custom health system didn't serve a useful purpose in Proto's game design, and breathing in space would have been an unnecessary buff which doesn't solve any core issues with the character. In short: Proto's complex already, didn't want to fix what isn't broken.
Dunno why you'd need the charge move mapped to jump. Fire would honestly be easier in any situation.
Isn't Jetty-Proto suppose to be a good guy? Like E-102 Gamma.
Who said Proto was a
good guy? He's just not on the same side as Robotnik... ;)
---------- Post added at 02:31 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:00 AM ----------
So, I just figured out how you can change the player's height dynamically. The whole reason I made Proto small while in ball form is because the game rejects any changes you make to the player object's height through lua, as it's continually reset and then checked all in the same event. However, by dynamically changing the object info instead of the height value directly, I can completely bypass these checks, therefore allowing Proto to fit through holes without making him smaller.
This is good news, because I never wanted to make Proto small -- it was just a design choice that evolved out of necessity. Next release I plan to make ball normal size, which will prevent him from squeezing through cracks any longer, but it will improve his stability around sectors and allow scale-modifier sections to work properly. I'm actually surprised I didn't figure this out sooner, but I suppose late is better than never.