Just another day.

Often in Life+, there are multiple ways around a challenge.


Did they fall in?

Some paths of action might seem like good ideas at first, like the obvious choice here is to jump over the gap safely.



Oh man, I fell in too.

But, you'll fall short with a distance this wide just a casual, every day jump.


I made it out okay, but at what cost?

This much damage usually isn't a big deal, but...



It cost dearly.

You can be ambushed at any time, so it helps to have as much health as possible. That's just common sense.

To be honest, this is the kind of thing that can be gotten through pretty easily, but to make it easier on yourself, explore everywhere. You'll find lots of helpful things. Above all others though, you look for square things that glow and bob up and down.


It's a still shot, but it does bob up and down.

When picked up, these items unlock certain latent abilities that help Double O in his daily life. This particular one lets you dash by double tapping a directional button. You move almost twice as fast while dashing, which means your jumps are equally enhanced.




The crouching is for dramatic effect.

Of course, you could always just attack everything in your path and forget about having to avoid enemies all together, so it all depends on how you want to play.



Trying to crouch while running makes you slide, too.

How's the new dirt look?

I dinked around and took a bunch of screenshots! Before I get to that, though, I'm getting a little bugged by the dirt textures, so I'm wondering which way to take it. If you have any other suggestions, feel free to say. Also, thanks a ton for the HUD feedback.


Say hi to the Appleseeds, too.

Here are the screens. Mostly in the plains, and there's a ton of them.


Title screen the first time you boot up.


Taking your first steps.


Heading back from the west.


Hold on, we have a picture of the island.

Press enter to view your files. Files are things like maps, pictures, charts, paper scraps, and so on with clues for how to proceed.


?! Well, It is a picture of the island.

From here, you can zoom in and pan the file around for a better look.


Moving on.


They're in the walls!

Here OO is using the quick throw. It's a good way to defend yourself from unexpected attacks.



There's plenty of them.


Aw jeeze.

When your hearts run out, you still have one last shot to get to safety. Take another hit when your hearts are gone though, and you're done for.


Let's dig and let's dig.

If you're in doubt of whether or not you can dig somewhere, check the toughness meter
in the upper right (next to the enemy alert). If you can dig, it'll show how strong what you'll dig up will be, or if there's something else, it'll be a question mark like here.


Grazing Appleseeds, be careful not to bump into them.

There's lots of places to go in Life+. This is the first room you can reach with 4 exits, two facing west, one east, one down.


Just a bit more!

If there's a ledge just out of reach, chances are you can grab on. I explained edgegrabbing a little bit ago, so just read back a couple posts.


This is a bad place to be.

This is the first place with an exit going straight up, accessed by climbing a vine. Since throws can be aimed in 8 directions, be sure to take out the Shimmer Buster before climbing. PS: There's something good up there.


The caves are down here.


Even though the cars are gone, there's still traffic.

Heading east brings you to a little road. A good rule of thumb in Life+ is that civilization will usually have something for you.


Getting plenty of sleep is a good rule of thumb, too.


Panning serves most of its purpose when you're zoomed in, but you can also check behind it to see if everything's okay.

A small note about file checking, be sure to do it where it's safe. Getting hit when you're reading or climbing will still hurt you, and knock you out of your file screen or off of your foothold.


I went with the prompt bubbles.

Well, that's all for now. I'm gonna take a fishing break.

I realized it's been a while since I showed anything of the underground or any indoor areas, or anything for that matter, so I'll make a small update tonight.


Naturally, it's dark underground.

The area he's in right now is the same area I showed a while back with the polkadot dirt, in the digging update. Also, there's not really a low ceiling there, but OO is crawling anyway.


When you're ducking, hold left or right and you'll go prone and start to crawl.

Oh, also, I'm working on the design for the HUD.


I changed where the game starts, it's not underground right away.
The basic idea is the blue one lights up when the ground under you is soft enough to be used, and the green one just shows you what can go on if you examine, like look or open and stuff. I dunno about it though, I might abandon the green one and go for a thought bubble above OO for different situations. What do you think?

Oh, I already made 20 posts.
Guess I'll show you what I've been up to lately.

Like this.

Mostly, it's been graphical for OO, with other 70 animations per direction to work on. A lot of them are small things like idle poses or variants like the difference between walking neutrally or walking while feeling nervous.


This too.

This here is the quick throw, which was mentioned before I think. Basically, when you pull up a piece of flooring or an item or what have you, you have the option to hold it over your head and run around and aim or quickly shuck it in front of you. The difference is between tapping and holding. A tap will bring it above your head, but holding it will throw it right away like in the image.


It's a little fast.

Finding ways to smooth out platforming is big too. Edge hanging is something that when I added it, it seemed silly to think of the game without it. Like with throwing, you have a delayed version and a quick version. To quick hang, just hold in the direction you're moving, and you'll pull yourself up automatically and keep running. Otherwise, you'll hang down with the option to pull yourself up, drop down, kick off and triangle jump, or just hang out. You can also use the jump button to alter how high up you pull yourself, so you can either just shortly hop up or sling yourself into the air from a ledge.


Still working on this.

Of course, environments are a big part of what I need to work on too. I'm still revising this area for instance. You can see OO in his little winter coat, too. The Parfait Flats are too cold to survive in just the white sweater, so the snow suit is needed.

Then of course, there's things like this.




A pioneer in its time, Terror Dash! stepped away from run and gun gameplay in favor of strategic survival, putting players in control of five very different characters at once. Hardly able to destroy every enemy, the player would find themselves jumping at the slightest noise and running for their lives from hordes of aliens through all ten large areas. Its release on the Guitar 5900 marked the beginning of a new breed of home console games, and despite criticism for its violent nature, Terror Dash! has survived to this day to be an exclusive part of Life+.

Oh yeah, and the RSS feed is up. Not sure why it wasn't before.

Jumping at sunrise, high noon, sunset, and midnight. Clockwise orientation.

Just a small update tonight. I'm pretty satisfied with how this is looking. Right now the time scale I'm looking at is about five minutes for an ingame hour, so about two hours for a full day.

Some things happen at night that don't happen during the day and visa versa, and time flows differently in some places.

That's about all I have for tonight.

Still a work in progress. This area is in the Misty Hill region.
Oh man, it's been a while.

Things are going well, don't worry. Like I've said the bulk of what needs to be done is graphical, and that's rolling around nicely. Which makes me worry about music, so I've been fiddling around with some of that and talking to people about it.

Other than that I've been jumping about optimizing the engine (no more solids) and doing graphical work.

I guess I can do an item post, too.


SNOW SUIT

A warm goose-down jacket with accessories. This makes it possible to survive the harsh mountain terrain of the island, without suffering cold damage. It reduces damage by a little and because of the soft mittens, your grabbing ability is reduced to its lowest level. Luckily, the snow of the mountains is soft so you won't be unarmed in many places.

Other than that, I made a miscellaneous little animation the other day.



With that, sorry for the lack of posting, but I'm still motivated and working hard.

This isn't Life+ at all.
Today I'd like to talk about Electrum. Electrum is an arcade shooter classic. It costs a single token for each life. The token exchange rate is 1 for 25 coins.


Lives are on top, then score, then the wave timer, then the wave number.
Electrum's gameplay is that of a survival shooter. You shoot as much as you can until your lives run out, running through an infinite number of swarms of enemies.


'As much as you can' isn't much at first.
The first wave is a warm-up, if you can't get past this wave you should probably move on.


Don't shoot this one.
After the wave timer counts down to zero, enemies stop coming. You still have to survive all of the bullets and enemies on screen, though. When the coast is clear, a carrier flies in to give you a 1-up or Power-Up for your gun.


Saucers divide the playing field into sections, making it harder to move.
Up until a certain wave, a new enemy is introduced every new wave. The frequency of enemies flying onto the screen increases as well.


It's still pretty tame.
Because you never know where the enemies are coming from, Electrum is all about raw reflexes and skill.


You can feel the impact of each hit.
The screen shakes a little for each enemy hit, each explosion that goes off, and whenever you die. Watching your ship becomes very important when things get heated, so if you have trouble keeping track you can always stop shooting. You'll earn less points, but you might live longer. It's up to you how you go about it.


The double-shot is helpful when enemies are grouped.
Each enemy destroyed without dying increases your combo count by one. The score you get for each enemy is calculated by taking a base value, and adding 10*your current combo. This makes it possible to earn very high scores if you can avoid death.


I ran into it.
Of course, you probably can't do that forever. Running into an enemy or bullet makes your ship explode. You lose one level of gun power, one life, and your combo resets to zero. You gain a few precious seconds of invincibility when you spawn again. When you don't have any lives left...


This is a pretty average rank.
It's game over. You can insert more of your tokens any time during gameplay, but once you get to this screen that's all she wrote. You'll see your score and receive a rank based on that, and actually get a prize based on your rank. I haven't shown you everything from this game, but rather gave you a basic idea. Hopefully you'll enjoy it for yourself!

All that said, Electrum is only available in Life+.