Tried a pass at removing ghosting from the game…
And I think it works well

for beginners

• easier, more-familiar movement

for advanced players

• can no longer just hold down ‘ghost’ button and pass through the entire level
• –> understanding a level’s structure is now much more important

implementation

• as before, dynamite-carrying characters can’t pass through any dotted lines
• characters can jump upward through platforms – like a lot of platformer games
• characters can fall-through a platform with, the somewhat standard, down + jump
  • or, instead, a custom button can be mapped to fall-through
• falling through a platform causes your velocity to reset to zero
• –> so there is an advantage in avoiding fall-through when you can – to preserve your momentum

improvements to movement

Recently, a bunch of work has gone towards making non-ghost movement better:

• more intuitive/forgiving dash, bounce, wall-jumps
• dashing from still –> a more noticable boost
• no collisions with platform sides: instead, you only either land on top of the platform or fall below it. This allows characters to more-fluidly move through a level.
• because there are less opportunities to jump off platforms as you move upward through them –> the boost jump is a bit more powerful

other changes

• dropping a dynamite while in dazed now sets the character back to the correct physics layer
• improved legibility of some expressions while on bright backgrounds
• adjusted some levels for no-ghosting

• fixed a bug that sometimes zeroed momentum
• made dashing easier: the game is now much better at interpretting the player’s intended dash direction

more

• now online characters can’t die after the round is done
• fixed a few objects that had wrong labels, affecting jump logic
• a bit of polish on secret levels
  • also fixed one that would fail out if there were 4 or 5 players
• caught up the Practice Mode settings to those in battle/inferno
• matched local to online behavior: characters don’t collide with eachother
• movement on ground made more consistent
  • previously, if you ran and then brought the joystickX to 0 –> the character slowed to a stop over a brief duration
  • or, if you ran and then quickly moved the joystick to run in the opposite direction –> the character instantly got 0-xVel and then began to accel in the opposite direction. This allowed a nice convenience – fast turning
  • but… if you ran and then released the joystick (intending it to go to 0) –> depending on the gamepad/quality, the joystick may go to zero… or sometimes it’d snapback, overshooting in the opposite direction.
  • this made it hard to predict what would happen when you let go of the joystick – whether you’d come to a slow stop or a fast stop (when the joystick unpredictably overshot).
  • –> inconsistent
  • So now, when the character is on the ground and the player intends to stop, the character always stops instantly.
• fixed missing sprites, misc polish

• handled a (rare) situation where someone could fall through lava
• fixed “initialSpawnTargetMult” gameMode option not resetting properly
• Takeover Mode: # of blast zones to win now varies based on the number of teams playing.
  • inspired by a 5-team round that almost went 15 minutes and could have easily gone more…
  • also updated interface to mention the target #
  • and added an option to apply a multiplier to this #
• got the new pause menu working for online client
• improved pause menu readability

Fixed a movement glitch that could cause problems around a character entering dazed state.

Got word that Azure will be sunsetting one of the services I use for this website in favor of another that has a “simpler pricing model”.
But…it’ll cost quite a bit more… about $35 a month instead of just a few cents(!). Thankfully the switch doesn’t happen for a couple years, so there’s time to change things up.

Gah -- spent a week trying to bring lava (the new/more-beginner-friendly version) to online but, in the end, wasn't able to find a fully-consistent way to do it without, at the very least, tearing down some of the assumptions that online makes and replacing it with more complexity and some loss in responsiveness. The new lava will still be available for local play.

Aside from that, did manage to fix some bugs around lava and, I think, improve behavior around character state-switching online.

Discovered some inconsitencies with ownership, especially with limbo ownership during inferno-mode. But, with the help of lots of unit-tests… I think/hope it’s sorted.

Switched to hosting the site on Azure – saves a chunk of money + kinda fun to play with.

This site is based off Chirpy and then customized to try a couple ideas:

• ultra-short, title-only posts look okay
• ephemeral posts – unless a post is pinned or given the remain attribute (like this post has), it’ll eventually be discarded off the bottom of the page

all about making it easy to quick dash off (low effort?) updates.

Plus I get to write stuff in Emacs which is always nice.