[WIP] The Adventures of Tacheman- Development

NOTE: The game has changed a lot from these first few posts.

'The Adventures of Tacheman' is a 2D platform game with a touch of quirkiness to its fun gameplay.

Tacheman jumps, and when he collects a moustache coin he is able to shoot tache ammo at enemies. There are a variety of them, some can be jumped on to destroy, whilst others are immune to this and can only be killed with death by tache.Some are fast, requiring your quick reflexes, some fly, some follow you round and some shoot at you.

Note: One tache usually only stuns the harder enemies and you need a few more to outright destroy them.

Here's the trailer:

Story
You start off by playing the eponymous Tacheman, a retired moustache mode and former private investigator. He is sleeping on the Copacatache Beach when he get's a call warning him that his old nemesis King Onetooth has been kidnapping the residents of Motropolis and stealing their moustaches!

Feedback is more than welcome as we go along! If anyone is interested in trying out the beta version let me know!

So it's easier for everyone to play it, we've exported a test demo of the game in this link: http://bit.ly/1LpbaYl

 

And here's our hero:

 

mustache! Good to see other people who appreciate mustaches.
The art looks great, really enjoy the animations and enemies.

 

Cheers! Yeah what's not to like about moustaches!

 

Here's the jumping animation for one of the unlockable characters, Grandtache:



Each character has their own unique animations to give them each their own personality, (note: a reason why Fliptache is called 'flip' nudge nudge wink wink...)

 

One thing we're tried to do is to have a bit of fun with the death animations - instead of just the same one for everything, we're trying out context specific death animations. For e.g



Also just noticed the cannon animation is out of sync...so easy to miss these things....

 

Throughout the game we've been trying to add some interactivity with the environment e.g:



Here's a victim of King Onetooth sharing their views on him with Tacheman.

 

We're also working on expanding the gameplay of the levels, so adding more platform puzzles, more secret areas and more collectables.

The new bowler hat collectable- a few of each are scattered throughout each level and their accessibility depends on which character you are using. Areas of the maps can only be found via certain characters abilities.

 

We'll be hosting a browser based demo of the first two levels next week. Will post the link once it is live!

 

We have decided to put a live browser hosted demo of the first two levels here: http://bit.ly/1LpbaYl We're looking to get some feedback from the wider community, so any comments are very welcome!

 

This is super fantastic and inspiring! Keep it up.

 

Thanks!

 

Cleaned up the life/score UI. Will work on animating it whenever life/ coins are collected. Anyone have any suggestions?

 

Is there a purpose for the "x" at the start of the lives counter? It seems sort of extra/unnecesary. (not like it's a big deal, just something I noticed/am curious about)

Is it to signify that the counter shows extra lives, rather than the total left (i.e. including the currently active life)? (I know that's how some games do it)

 

It's just to signify the number of lives, i.e you have times this many lives.

 

There's been more than a bit of a development snag but we've decided to ditch away as much of the physics as possible and rebuild it using raycasting instead. Let's just say this was a lesson learned.

Will hopefully be able to update with news soon.

 

Relying on canned physics systems can provide as many problems as it does benefits. I hope you stick with it and work through the issues because it does lool like a very interesting platformer and you've obviously put a lot of work into it ao far.

 

Yeah it depends on what you need. So far so good. Been using the Corgi Engine as a base and building it from there. Performance on mobile has been good.

Did have a slight hitch were the frame rate dropped massively but realised a few moving objects did not have rigidbodies. Least I know first hand just how bad moving static colliders are...

 

Ok, so finally here's some updates. As mentioned before, thought it would be nice to not have the same death animations for every enemy, and since Tacheman is a relatively simple character to animate this was quite easy to do- and quite easy to implement through code.


The UI has also been revamped. Instead of lives, there's now a bar for both health and ammo. You can play as many times as you want, it just means you won't get the maximum amount of points. Felt that this would be less frustrating than it was before, and more fun to just pick up and play.

Also, particles! Particles just make things look better. They're from the asset I mentioned earlier so will be tweaking them further. Much fun to play around with though!

 

Here's one of enemies that you face. I gave him the very original name of 'Red Teeth', or maybe it should be 'Red Teeth On Fire'? Anyway, as you an see it's still dangerous even after you defeat it. So make sure you always keep your distance.

 

Collecting coins is not just for fun and points. Get enough of them, and you unlock this nifty little ability as long as you have at least the number of coins required. Every time you die, you lose coins i.e it resets back to the last checkpoint, so if you had less than the required amount, you lose this ability.

It allows you to reach difficult to get to or previously unreachable places. And yes, he is 'jet-packing' from his moustache!

 

And finally, here's an extended look at a preview of the gameplay. Some of the particles are still out of the box from the asset I used to rebuild the game, so will be changing them over time.


Excited to finally show you guys some new stuff. Let me know what you think and whether you would be interested in testing it out! The beta currently just started internal testing so will be doing some more external testing in the near future.

 

There will be four playable characters, each with their own individual abilities. For example, this is FlipTache who can double jump and get to places the others can't. As well as which, he shoots his tache ammo in more of a machine gun like manner.

 

Another character, AngryTache, has the ability to destroy multiple enemies at once with an explosive tache ammo. The different abilities of each character means you can play around with some more creative ways of destroying an enemy. For example, check out below:

The blue enemy needs two hits to be killed and this was a pretty cool way of doing it. I in all honestly did not quite mean to do this, but it's been a fun process playing around with the game and figuring out stuff you can do which you did not directly intend.

Also been playing around with some rain effects, to give the levels something a bit different. And I suppose another reason for AngryTache to be angry...

 

Sometimes I really do overcomplicate things. For some reason I was thinking of a way to transition from an 'idle state' to an 'idle too long state' using countdown timers, maybe a coroutine, and the stop and reset when going into a 'walk' or 'jump' or 'shoot' state. Nope, just do it in the animator, stupid...

 

Working on polishing up the artwork on the levels.





Currently looking to make the water more dynamic.

 

Take that cannon!

 

*adds to watch list

I like the art... very visually appealing game.

 

Thanks @SkyTech6!

 

Doing a little more work on the backgrounds. Should be closer to the final look.

 

Been working on a few boss battles. Here are the Golem triplets, King OneTooth's trusted henchmen. Each are equipped with their own unique attacks which I've tried to match up with each character abilities so it makes sense gameplay wise. Try and guess which is which!

I've tried to keep it simple, but different enough so it's still fun and works with what each character can do (e.g double jumping, being able to shoot into spaces below- these are taken into account with each unique boss battle). Will see what I can to show what I mean here.

So it's getting pretty close, anyone interested in trying out the alpha?

 

Here are some of the enemies that you come across:

 

Working on decorating the levels. In this level, one of the last, looking at getting some parallax into the stars. There's also an intractable N.P.C just to the right of the bottom.

 

Snapshot of a small section of one of the levels. In the levels design I'm trying to provide multiple different ways in which you can play through each level. As you can see, there's still a free more bits and bobs that need can be added so, slowly but surely getting there.



Different areas can only be accessed by certain characters. For example on the top right there are a bunch of red boxes, which through a couple of shots can mean a quick escape from that little area instead of having to up and around. In other places they entirely block certain that particular part of the map.

Here's a close up:



Certain objects or paths are marked out by a particular moustache icon to show which character can interact with what. These are different from the normal boxes such as:



These cannot be damaged in any way and are just obstacles. This was based on feedback to make this more obvious (especially as this will be a mobile game at first).

 

Originally, the fireball was animated from a spritesheet and I couldn't get the timing synced up with it's y position and the sprites. It was either one frame was added or subtracted and eventually the fireball would make it's 'turn halfway' through it's fall/rise.

This was rather frustrating so ended up using the particle system instead paired with a simple itween. Suffice to say the results where much better in terms of how it looked and behaved.

 

Finally got the water working with the raycast engine!



All of the tutorials/assets I found were physics based so just had to take out the necessary code. It still needs a bit of tweaking. Not sure whether to leave the 'back' still or have it dynamic too (is it worth it?) Also thinking of slightly offsetting it along the y axis to keep it consistent with the illusion of 2.5D.