This is a different post compared to my usual updates about game development and my misadventures with technology. This post is an essay on why I consider Half-Life (specifically, Half-Life 1) to be a Metroidvania game. Firstly, what is a Metroidvania? Well, if we consult the Wikipedia page for the subgenre, we can see that it's a portmanteau of Metroid and Castlevania. When the page lists the characteristics of this kind of game, the first aspect mentioned is its 2D sidescrolling gameplay. This rules out the possibility of Half-Life being a Metroidvania, right? Well, Metroid does have the Prime trilogy which brings the franchise and its iconic gameplay to the third dimension. Castlevania, while it doesn't have any official 3D games, does have a fanmade Doom mod that throws the franchise into 3D, adhering of course to the limitations of id tech 1. The conversion of Metroid and Castlevania into 3D retains their iconic gameplay mechanics and thus, I believe 3D games shouldn...
With this post, I joyfully announce that the development hiatus was unnecessary, as we have overcome our main development obstacle. New tilemaps are now able to be loaded into the game. The only problem is, the player is loaded in at a fixed position in each tilemap. The problem with this, is that if a player is spawned in on the left, goes to the exit on the right, loads into the new map, and then goes back to the initial map, the player will once again appear on the left side of the map, rather than in front of the right exit. I will need to figure out some way to load the player independently of loading the tilemap. After that, Alpha 0.2 will officially be released. If you look closely at the code of Alpha 0.2 when it is released, you may see snippets of features that are to be implemented in 0.3! I'm hoping to get Alpha 0.2 out by the 10th, but I can't promise anything.
I do apologise, but I still have some features I'd like to add to Alpha 0.4 before releasing it, and I failed to take into consideration the 4-day vacation I took recently so I wasn't able to get as much work done as I would have liked. 0.4 will be released on August 30th.
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