I added death call outs to the green guys as they die. I came up with mostly movie quotes, I posted some examples here. In addition I tweaked some functionality.

1. When hovering over a guy, you can now select the base to drag around your character. This was annoying when moving/firing quickly, sometimes you would think you would have your character selected, and he/she wouldn't move. Ahhh...much better now.
2. Dodges and Throwbacks are more random instead of guaranteed. So these guys are less predictable. But still pretty easy to beat. Wait til you have health and 20 green enemies. Its impossible.
3. Call outs! A Green Guy's death is more comical. I'll probably add more quotes later, but these funny quotes were what I came up with first. That's the whole point of this, comedy. And fun.

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Here is what I worked on tonight, the Green Guy had two different death sequences, so I made a new one where he spins and breathes his last. I should really convert these into PNGs sometime. Be sure to check out my website to play the game in HD!

Minor things that were bothering me:

1. Snowball shadows were way off. This has been fixed.
2. Hovering over the health section will turn transparent so you can see what's going on.
3. Only active (ie: outside the snowfort) characters will have their health displayed. I cannot tell you how annoying it was to get the health displaying properly, including when you removed characters one-by-one from No-Man's Land, the shifting of the health faces was tedious.

Nothing else has been updated. Although this was a lame update, it was a massive VICTORY for me. Be sure to check SnowFare.com to play the game as it was meant to be played, in beautiful widescreen jaw-dropping IMAX format.

This is the playable version of the last two posts. In addition, I have disabled the bomb throws from the greens, and removed regenerates, it just was too frustrating to have to replay basically the same formula. No more health updates either, once a green guy hits the snow, thats it, hes gone. Be sure to check out SnowFare.com to play this game as it was meant to be played, in beautiful HD!

Developed the SnowFort, which made sense since you simply cannot track three characters simultaneously, I can't anyway. So right now, the SnowFort blocks every shot, but I'll most definitely create a health counter for it as well, just to make you get out there. Also notice that you cannot attack from behind the fort, it just wouldn't be fair for the green guys. Have a look at the screenshot below:

And be sure to check out the game in beautiful HD at SnowFare.com!

I am updating the health system, that still needs further tweaking. It was too hard to follow percentages as health, and determining the difference between the characters via tiny icons was not user-friendly. I've updated it to look like the screenshot below, which is the traditional heart system, each hit taking a quarter of the heart.

I've updated the code to include the two new additions to the team, so far this is just an update to include them. In addition to this, I added a health meter, although this will change eventually. I guess see how difficult it is, the idea is that you have a few lives per character and you only have a set few for the entire game. Don't forget to check www.snowfare.com to play the game in beautiful HD.

Finally got around to animating the Jump Dodges, so once you attack, watch out for the counter attack. Hopefully it looks smooth enough, I wanted to add some animation fixes (ie: the bomb throw), but I figured posting this would be better. In addition, I will add dodges on the ground, and *maybe* ill create the giant snowball. Stay tuned!

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So after getting a copy of Pete Rigby’s TimeLineFX, I started to have a little fun with the particle generator. Then after exporting some explosions, I realized that I should be blitting my animations to ease the animation/drawing process, and in turn improve performance. Took quite a while to convert most of this via Blitting methods, and it turned out pretty good. Anyways, I have a few things left to incorporate for this level, so stay tuned.

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COMING UP: Just a few things to improve the AI for fallen enemies. Mainly some more dodging techniques. I’m more or less pretty complete with the enemy AI…except for when I introduce items and what not.

Things to check out: There’s 3 directions that a green guy can throw, he is way more accurate whenever there’s danger (both when red guy is loaded and when a ball is already mid-air), he can catch balls every so often, and I use Grid-Collision Checking. Yes, this Grid-Collision checking became an obsession and it will benefit me.

Yup, efficiency took preference here again, mainly because for the sole reason that I was increasing in different collision checks, and it was really taking a toll on performance. So I implemented/modified Keith Peter’s Grid Collision method, which is great since it really cuts down on number of collisions.

Basically the concept here is that two objects far away shouldn’t be checked for collisions. You create a grid and plot every element in an area, so that you only check the grid spots around each element, and perform collision-checking on those. It’s a fairly interesting concept, I cut down the checks (the bottom left number was used for testing purposes - ignore it) and thus optimized the game. Grant Skinner also has a great article and full source code of his implementation that you should also check out.

COMING UP: This is part 1, I wanted to include some dodge-jumping tactics, onfloor danger detection/dodging, and more importantly, explosions.