Journey of Colorless

This will be a kinda short development blog, where I will talk a little about the game I made, Colorless. Colorless is a very simple 2D, beat em up game. In Colorless you play as a Monotone and Colorless Human, having little to no color. Why is the player Colorless? Why is the title Colorless? Well it is because of AI, specifically Robots. The Robots have evolved and developed to the point where anything is possible for them and to get back at the human race’s endless greed they robbed the world of its color making the whole world monotone and colorless, however they themselves have vibrant colors. Well to get back the colors you have to basically destroy/ kill the Robots and the more you kill the more colors you return to the world. 

Enough about the game’s story, about the development process of the game. First of all I used Stencyl to create this game, and with limited resources online compared to famous engines such as unreal engine or unity, it is basically just trial and error for me. The main problem that I found in this game is the collision. For a beat 'em up game, collision is key to a proper gameplay and during the development of the game well I faced a lot of collision problems. 

First is the player’s attack, I tried to make it so that only when a certain frame hits the enemy it would trigger a hit animation, however after tweaking and playing around with the code, the best I could do was when I hit the target it would appear hit no matter what action I do, as long as I collided with it. After some research on reddit, youtube, and the Stencyl community, I found that there are extensive guides on Stencyl's own website. After reading it I thought I found a way to solve the problem. I followed it’s suggestion and made a different collision shape for the attack frame. As shown in the picture the box is the player’s collision box and as for the circle it is the fist.  

That essentially solved the problem with the frame and collision part. However, to make it as accurate as possible, that was the hard part. After some tweaking I was able to do it so that when that circle hits the target it would trigger the hit animation. That was also when another problem appeared. I set up health for the target and it would decrease when the player is doing the hit animation and that the fist was hitting the target. I placed down a few targets on the level to test out, and when I hit just 1 target all of the targets were affected. Not only that, another problem was that even after playing with booleans and the codes, something regarding the health of the target was still wrong. When I hit the target I expected it to only decrease 1 HP however upon testing the target dies in 1 hit. To further explain this, the hit animation is around 0.5 seconds long and the code I did was as long as the player is in the hit animation and the fist collision circle hits the target it would decrease the health, however during this 0.5 seconds it would trigger a hit boolean which will then decrease the health of the enemy and well during the 0.5 second it was constantly taking damage, well that is what I assume. After playing and tweaking around the codes I basically gave up on going with this method. 

Asking around my friends, the majority of them use a bullet system where as long the bullet hits the target it would kill itself and trigger a hit event. So I tried it and well I wouldn’t say it worked wonders straight away, however it did solve a major problem which is the 1 hit KO. So I decided to just go and focus on this bullet route. This bullet method was provided by my lecturer and it was a very smart way to go about a beat 'em up game in Stencyl where collision was a very limiting factor. It basically uses an invisible bullet that essentially you line up with the fist of the character. To make it so that it looks like the fist is doing damage however it was the bullet that was doing the damage. 

Well that is all from this development blog, it is basically a learning process of me getting around the collision shape in Stencyl. Don’t be afraid to ask your lecturers or online if you need any help trying to do something you are not too sure about is inefficient in my opinion, ask around and get help. That is the best way to improve yourself and whatever you are doing.