Slowmo! Stamina! Sprint! Socialism! What?

Stamina and Sprint

I finally realized that speed is perhaps the most important resource in a Parkour game. Up until now, Lemma hasn't really understood the concept of "faster" and "slower"; you were always going the same speed. Acceleration from a dead stop was almost instantaneous and the Parkour moves didn't change your speed (with the exception of wall-running).

With this in mind, I decreased the acceleration a lot and made all the moves preserve your momentum. To make a longer jump, you'll need a running start. I also put in some simple combos. For example, doing a roll immediately followed by a jump lets you jump a lot farther.

Now with 100% more frame buffer distortion!

Flying in the face of midterms and other IRL issues, Lemma boldly marches on!

Spawn Point Graphics

I realized you need a way to know where you'll respawn if you die, so I added some spawn point graphics. Got the idea from Borderlands. Actually can we talk about Borderlands? Man, every time I play a good game I have to resist the urge to start incorporating its ideas into my projects. If I ever announce that Lemma will feature randomly generated weapons, just slap me until I snap out of it please.

Story Design and Loading/Saving

I now have the complete backstory and in-game story options written out!

After the initial tutorial, you'll get to a central area of the island which connects to four other areas. At that point, you'll be able to leave the island whenever you want, or you can visit one or more of the four adjacent areas before leaving. In each area you'll have to make a yes/no decision. You'll get a different ending depending on which decisions you make and at what point you exit the island. Your choices also affect how many parkour abilities you unlock. There are 5 major possible outcomes, and each outcome has a number of variations, for a total of 15.

Alpha feedback

Thanks so much to everyone who made the alpha a great success! I'm blown away that people were able to look past the bugs and crashes and clunky controls and somehow get a positive experience out of it! It gives me hope and motivation to press on.

I got a ton of very useful feedback. Here's a quick summary of what I learned:

• The atmosphere and tone is cool and unique.
• The text-message-driven story works pretty well.
• Everyone immediately says "Mirror's Edge + Minecraft"... but then realize they're okay with that! :)
• The physics is kinda buggy.
• Mouse inversion, gamma settings, and vsync toggling are a must.
• The controls are unnecessarily complex. Too many keys.
• Buggy physics. Player gets stuck in the environment a lot. Large objects occasionally start floating around on their own. Swimming doesn't really work at all.
• Combat is weak. You left-click once and hope that kills the enemy before it kills you.
• It's rather disconcerting being able to look down your own nose. Also, everyone thinks the player model is a female when in fact it's a male with big pecs. Yikes.
• Oh yes, there's lots of physics bugs.
• The tutorials are sometimes easy to miss, and the game expects you to have a move fully mastered immediately after learning it.
• Handling publicity and responding to feedback is a lot more work than I originally thought! And hosting large downloads on "pay for what you use" web hosts is a baaad idea. Good problems to have though. :)

I've already set to work fixing a lot of these issues, especially with the controls and physics. My number one priority is getting the player animation and movement perfect, which is a pretty long way from where we are now.