[Open Assets] Vampirism Challenge (R3 + R2a)

This is heavily inspired by Puppyfaic's 2014 Super Sonic Challenge, in that you become Super and must fight against a rolling timer. However, rather than rings, you have a power meter. (In fact, your ring count is now gone.) This is filled by collecting rings and Special Stage tokens, defeating bosses, killing enemies, and finishing stages, with relatively heavy emphasis on killing enemies. Can you MAKE IT TO THE FINISH?!?!

VC is disabled in all modes except for co-op and single player, and can be disabled even there by setting the consvar "vc_enabled" to No.

This version is still relatively rough, and I plan to continue working on this, but all of the basic features work. There may be some balance issues.

New in R3

• Power amounts scale based on how much power you have. The more power you have, the harder it is to get power.
• Rings are worth more again.

New in R2a and R3

• Internal restructuring and bug fixes.

R2a and R3 are the same script, just with a flag checked that changes what version the script displays and how power works (R2a uses the same rules as R2, R3 has the changes mentioned above).

New in R2

• Somewhat easier-to-read and less cruddy-looking meter, including a digital readout of the amount of time you have left.
• Difficulty adjustments, generally making it easier. I'm bad at SRB2.
• A combo system. If you pick up an invincibility monitor, you get more power for each enemy you defeat while you are invincible.
• You don't rocket into the sky when you die from running out of power. Thanks to Zappy.
• You don't get ring bonuses anymore.

Wow, this is really cool. Welcome to Releases!

Pretty sweet script you made! Adds a lot onto the Super Sonic Challenge concept, which is pretty cool!

Of course, it comes with its own fair share of issues. When the player dies, their corpse rockets off into the sky, which shouldn't happen. I fixed this in one of the dev builds for HMS but could not replicate it for the life of me with your script. Not sure why. Another thing to keep in mind is that the HUD can kind of be hard to see since it's drawing two different shades of red over one another. I think you should make it a little easier to see, just so the indicator is more clear.

With that said, I couldn't find any other bugs with the script. Keep up the good work!

Wolfy said:

- Of course, it comes with its own fair share of issues. When the player dies, their corpse rockets off into the sky, which shouldn't happen. I fixed this in one of the dev builds for HMS but could not replicate it for the life of me with your script. Not sure why. -

Click to expand...

As in why you couldn't fix it here, or why it happens in the first place? If the latter, it's related to having more than 0 health (or more than -1 rings) while dead. (I've even accomplished this in vanilla singleplayer with Sonic and Tails by having Tails collect a ring after I died.) It should be fix-able by having the player and player-object have 0 health (or -1 rings) when in the dead state.

Okay, I fixed all of those problems and added some new stuff.

Ooooo, I'm liking this a lot. The combo system is a lot of fun.

This is pretty neat, but to be honest I don't like how you've devalued rings so much. Most of the game's levels are actually pretty devoid of enemies, so there's no way you could balance the script on that alone.

Also, the game stores your power amount upon reaching a checkpoint and gives you that amount when dying. This is obviously a problem when the player reached the checkpoint with only 2 seconds left.

The problem I've been having is finding a way to actually make enemies worth hitting, simply because there are so few of them compared to the number of rings there are. I was testing with rings being worth about 0.5-0.6 seconds and at that level they were still quite helpful, while still dealing with problems like the absolutely massive ring load that you get from GFZ. That was before the combo system though, and I feel like that should probably encourage going for enemies.

I'll probably change the script so it gives you at least the base power (I think that's 20 seconds) when you die.

EDIT: I tried these changes locally, it turned out pretty nice actually. I'll upload it later today.

One thing I was wondering was if you could make the power gain disproportional to how much meter the player has -- aka rings and enemies would fill up the bar more when the player is low on power. I don't know if this would be too much rubber banding, but it would make the mod more effectively balanced for boss battles and the like without breaking the really easy levels like GFZ2.

You mean as how a "level up" system might work? As in, easy to level up in the early levels....but harder the higher/further you are?

CobaltBW said:

One thing I was wondering was if you could make the power gain disproportional to how much meter the player has -- aka rings and enemies would fill up the bar more when the player is low on power. I don't know if this would be too much rubber banding, but it would make the mod more effectively balanced for boss battles and the like without breaking the really easy levels like GFZ2.

Click to expand...

I could probably do that. I'm thinking of both making it easier to get power at low power and also making it harder to get power as you get more power. This stuff is kind of making me miss floating point math, though.

EDIT: Finally actually updated it.