Flare the Lizard v1.9 - Simplified

DISCLAIMER: This mod is not associated with any other Flares in SRB2.


A new face joins the battle to stop Eggman!


A Disastrous Beginning
As far as the public is concerned, Flare isn't a hero. Supposedly, he's a monster. After footage leaked of an underground experiment that he sneaked into, his reputation went south, leading to him being ejected from his hometown. With no means of survival on his own, he fled to another town to hide in safety.
Now, the mysterious Black Rock has returned to the planet's orbit, and news spreads of Dr. Robotnik's conquest of it. The opportunity to turn his life around has finally arisen for the young lizard!
Will he be successful, or does fate have other plans? Find out next time, on Sonic Robo Blast X!


Abilties

Flare's jump strength is second to none, and he gets up to speed fast!
Of course, that's not all he's got:

Fire/Spin - Flame Shot

With the press of a button, Flare can launch a ball of fire. Blast Badniks anywhere, anytime, at almost any distance!

FireNormal - Flamethrower (Classic only)

Need something a little more aggressive? Hold FireNormal to torch that pesky blockade! You can't move while using this, and jumping will stop the stream.

Double Jump - Tail Swipe

Those plates aren't just for show! Take Flare for a spin with the Jump button - press multiple times for a rapid rotation!

Spin - Spindash/Roll (Classic only)

While standing still, hold down Spin to drop to the ground and rev up, then release to shoot off with a burst of flame! Alternatively, tap it while moving to curl up and knock down anything in your way.

Passive - Fire Immunity

For better or worse, the experiment Flare was caught in changed his life forever. A side effect of this? Fire and lava can't hurt you! Watch out for some lava falls, though - if the falls don't kill you, the void will.


Other Features

• A fully sprited and stat-tweaked Super form - make sure you get those Emeralds!
• Firing animations for several situations!
• Kirby and Dirk compatibility!

Special Thanks

• Logan8r - for providing the Fire Immunity code!
• NARbluebear - for putting up with my coding questions prior to me joining the official SRB2 Discord.
• Monster Iestyn, Mars, Tatsuru, Zipper and SMS Alfredo - for coding help.
• #spriting - for opinions and critism on the Tail Swipe and fireworks sprites.
• So2ro, Scrungus, the Vibe Server and the SRB2 Discord - for their support and suggestions!
• Everyone on the Discord and here for feedback/bug reports!
• Katmint for the original Revised Ability code used for fixing Tail Swipe.

As my first vanilla SRB2 mod, it was certainly a far cry from making a Kart mod. I definitely feel like I've learnt a few things about the spriting process, Lua coding and matching the SRB2 artstyle. I hope you enjoy playing as Flare!

From 1.8 onwards, the download features two versions: The main file, which simplifies Flare's moveset down to Jump and Spin to make him more inline with the vanilla cast; and the "classic" version, which uses 1.7's control scheme. Hopefully this will please everyone. Let's be realistic, though: it won't.

Currently known bugs

Spoiler:

• The shooting sprites for riding ropes / Tails Call only show up for a split second. Apparently this has more to do with their programming and not Flare's. This also allows Flare to shoot much more rapidly while hanging or riding minecarts.
• Brak Eggman cannot hurt Flare while invulnerable just by touching him. This is due to Brak's electric barrier having fire-related flags. He can, however, deal damage when the barrier is down.
• Due to an oversight, twinspin characters with a secondary jump ability will have said ability overriden. Similarly, characters who don't curl into a ball while jumping can use their aerial ability multiple times.

CHANGELOG

Spoiler:

1.0 - Debut

• Initial release

1.5 - the "Why Wasn't This Already A Thing?" Update

• Brought top speed up for both forms - base form now matches the vanilla cast's speed
• Changed camerascale while Super
• Added fuse time to the roll's spintrail
• Moved Fireball to Fire
• Disabled shield abilities to prevent Tail Swipe interference
• Changed Tail Swipe hit particles
• Fixed Tail Swipe not repeating on Jump - thanks to Katmint for the Revised Ability code
• Changed skinname to flarethelizard due to most people trying that
• Re-added Dirk compatibility after removing it early in development
• Several sprite-based tweaks, mainly to fix features at certain angles
• Several audio tweaks to add some extra flare

1.7 - the SIGSEGV Removal Update

• Fireballs revamped - they now use Brak's flamethrower object, which are far less likely to SIGSEGV or cause visual glitches
• Added Flamethrower ability
• Various extra sprite tweaks
• Moved Tail Swipe completely to Jump and brought over missing code from Katmint's Revised Abilities
• Re-enabled shield abilities
• Fixed audio bug from 1.5 where the music would suddenly start or stop instead of fading in or out

1.8 - streamlining

• Simplified Flare's moveset and removed Flamethrower and Spindash from main file
• More sprite tweaks

1.9 - minor fixes

• Fixed a bug where Flare's super form would default to base form's RunShot sprites
• Cleaned up unnecessary sprites in main file
• Fixed an inconsistency in the main file's CSS

[Zipper]

Welcome to Releases!

[Kwiin]

This past week has been fucking amazing for high quality mods. Glad to see this trend continue.

[So2ro]

This week has been pretty crazy huh

Spoiler:

lmao get gulped lizard boy

[Lolour]

2 Characters named flare on the MB already but my boy Flare The Speedrunner seems to be dead

[tealsummernights]

He's really fun! Though there were a few things that bothered me a bit.

• The flames from his spindash never seem to go away?
• There's some inconsistency with his Tail Swipe. If you keep pressing Spin, you'll keep Tail Swiping, but if you try it with Jump he'll only Tail Swipe once. Maybe the intention was so he can only Tail Swipe once when he has a shield? In addition, after hitting a spring you can Tail Swipe with Spin, but Jump does nothing.
• In his standing frames, going from side view to back/side, his tail appears to get shorter. Of course his tail would be foreshortened, but here it doesn't quite look like it'd be the same length when rotated.

[CyberKnux]

Originally Posted by So2ro

This week has been pretty crazy huh

Spoiler:

lmao get gulped lizard boy

Hey how did you get yoshi to be really THICC

[DrStephen]

It's been real fun to see this lil guy progress in discord, and I wanna congratulate you on the official release! Flare's a great new addition.

Honestly, my favorite part is the amount of work put into the detail of this character. It's already a pain for me to make unique rotation sprites up to 5, and you went with 8 for most if not the entire character. That is so much more, extra work that I feel would go unnoticed by a good chunk of the playerbase.
Flare is cute, his animations are pretty solid and all the custom rotation work is phenomenal.

As for gameplay, it's pretty good. Simple and fun! It's not as barebones as a simple S_SKIN character, but not overcomplicated and overwhelmed with fifty thousand different buttons and abilities. It's a balanced mix.
His fireball is the one i used the most. No complaints, it does what it needs to do. Just wish it was moved to Tossring, honestly.
Combining a Twinspin like move plus the spindash was weird, but a very cool inclusion - kinda like having Amy spin, but also her hammer can be used multiple times.

All in all, a really fun and solid character.

As for some feedback...

Spoiler: Feedback

• Firing a fireball doesn't work with Directionchar/Standard Gameplay mode. The fireball will shoot towards your crosshair, but Flare could look anywhere.
• Using his tail attack, in any way, will cause some green particles to appear. My best guess is that those are the remnants of the Twinspin hearts, maybe try changing them to MT_NULL.
• Flare's snout on the A4A6 rotations look... deceptively short. It's a pretty noticeable difference from the diagonal to the side transition. It's only issue is with the Standing/Walking frames though, i'd just make his snout slightly longer on those.
• bro that super form is MASSIVE. I love it but also i can't see anything at all, also his speed feels rather sluggish overall, like he never goes into running frames.

[Daviroll_Limit]

the shield abilities still works even if they shouldn't, so it makes hard to use the tail swipe

[MADVAL2]

Who need Vector when you have Flare

instead of forcing you to go to the computer room,he forces you to the console room





it's a joke,dont take this seriously

[Sinny33]

Originally Posted by MADVAL2

Who need Vector when you have Flare

instead of forcing you to go to the computer room,he forces you to the console room





it's a joke,dont take this seriously

Honestly I almost did

[Claudiadoe]

This is a really great character, i enjoyed my time a ton with him, his design is cute, his abilities are fun, and it's rare to see characters that experiment with stats, so, this is good, the perma fire caused a bug? exploit? whatever you wanna call it, to me right away, it's with golden monitors, the fire would constantly break the monitors, otherwise, this is a really great character

[SpinSlash165]

Originally Posted by Claudiadoe

This is a really great character, i enjoyed my time a ton with him, his design is cute, his abilities are fun, and it's rare to see characters that experiment with stats, so, this is good, the perma fire caused a bug? exploit? whatever you wanna call it, to me right away, it's with golden monitors, the fire would constantly break the monitors, otherwise, this is a really great character

Yeah, I've found that the same thing happens with the Elemental Shield due to both that and Flare's fire particles not remaining.

---------- Post added at 06:29 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:06 PM ----------

Version 1.5 is here! Or as I like to call it: the "Why Wasn't This Already A Thing?" Update.

Here's what's new:

• Brought top speed up for both forms - base form now matches the vanilla cast's speed
• Changed camerascale while Super
• Added fuse time to the roll's spintrail
• Moved Fireball to Fire
• Disabled shield abilities to prevent Tail Swipe interference
• Changed Tail Swipe hit particles
• Fixed Tail Swipe not repeating on Jump - thanks to Katmint for the Revised Ability code
• Changed skinname to flarethelizard due to most people trying that
• Re-added Dirk compatibility after removing it early in development
• Several sprite-based tweaks, mainly to fix features at certain angles
• Several audio tweaks to add some extra flare

Thank you to everyone for providing feedback! I wanted to fix as much as possible to make this a more enjoyable experience.

[Daviroll_Limit]

found something out of place here
https://i.imgur.com/xOSlIQz.mp4
nevermind, found another one

[Simon_T]

It's a bit annoying to being unable to use the shield abilities

You should make them work again and restrict Tail Swipe to Jump, like Amy does with her airborne hammer swing while using shields

[Pyrakid Wolfo]

It feels like every mod maker just hates shield abilities, or thinks that they're stupid or dumb. Like 5 character mods disable shield abilities.
- Modern Sonic
- Kirby
- Werehog (he can at least use armageddon)
- Yoshi
- Flare

I probably missed some but idk, I guess some people just don't think they're important.
Or they're just "special people", like Modern Sonic is def OP, but they probably can't use shield abilities because BALANCE??? I don't get it, maybe its the same reason Cobalt or maybe Katmint want to make Tails' flight slow as hell because "he can skip portions of levels." like nobody cares about character balance, if flight becomes not fun to use, then...
that's a WHOLE different topic though.

[Simon_T]

Originally Posted by Pyrakid Wolfo

It feels like every mod maker just hates shield abilities, or thinks that they're stupid or dumb. Like 5 character mods disable shield abilities.
- Modern Sonic
- Kirby
- Werehog (he can at least use armageddon)
- Yoshi
- Flare

I probably missed some but idk

Modern and Werehog are understandable, 'cause there's no shield abilities in post-Adventure games

Kirby can inhale things and Yoshi can eat while airborne

Flare is the only senseless one...

[Crum]

Originally Posted by Pyrakid Wolfo

It feels like every mod maker just hates shield abilities, or thinks that they're stupid or dumb. Like 5 character mods disable shield abilities.
- Modern Sonic
- Kirby
- Werehog (he can at least use armageddon)
- Yoshi
- Flare

I probably missed some but idk, I guess some people just don't think they're important.
Or they're just "special people", like Modern Sonic is def OP, but they probably can't use shield abilities because BALANCE??? I don't get it, maybe its the same reason Cobalt or maybe Katmint want to make Tails' flight slow as hell because "he can skip portions of levels." like nobody cares about character balance, if flight becomes not fun to use, then...
that's a WHOLE different topic though.

No one hates shield abilities. It's just difficult to create a cohesive moveset in a two button game, especially when shields are taking up that button in midair. It would be preferable to avoid having to use custom buttons if at all possible since a lot of people can't comfortably fit them into their control scheme. You'll notice most of these characters at least have abilities in their kit to make up for the moves they lose out on, like double jumps or just jumping higher in general, for example.

I'm not touching the rest of your post.

[Icarus]

@Pyrakid Wolfo you should make a new thread for that.

[SpinSlash165]

Thank you for the further feedback! With all this in mind, I'm happy to bring you the 1.7 update! This should hopefully remove any SIGSEGVing that the prior versions had.

What's New:

• Fireballs revamped - they now use Brak's flamethrower object, which are far less likely to SIGSEGV or cause visual glitches
• Added Flamethrower ability
• Various extra sprite tweaks
• Moved Tail Swipe completely to Jump and brought over missing code from Katmint's Revised Abilities
• Re-enabled shield abilities
• Fixed audio bug from 1.5 where the music would suddenly start or stop instead of fading in or out

---------- Post added at 12:51 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:29 AM ----------

It's been like an hour and it's become clear that some changes weren't right. So, I give you 1.8, which should hopefully appeal to both groups.

The new zip file contains two versions: one with the streamlined control scheme, and the "classic" version with the full arsenal.

• Simplified Flare's moveset and removed Flamethrower and Spindash
• More sprite tweaks

---------- Post added at 01:01 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:51 PM ----------

okay so theres still a few bugs lying around. i'll put 1.7 back up until i fix everything

---------- Post added at 01:16 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:01 PM ----------

Fixed the bugs (hopefully). 1.8 is safe to use again.