CrossCode Update #53
Content, Critical Damage and a drowning Lea

We’re back! And yes, we’re one week late. Since the last update many team member have been missing due to several trips (vacation and business wise). Thus, we waited another week to get more content together. And this is what we got for you: First, we added water, hidden treasures and a little boss in the autumn area. Second, we created a first test dungeon using all the puzzle elements and graphics of the previous updates. And then: critical damage, sound playback improvements and more.

Lea can’t swim

Sorry to inform you, but Lea can’t swim.

water-splash

No matter how much she tries…

But also some good news: neither can your enemies.

water-battle

So yeah, just recently we added real water to CrossCode. The kind you can jump into – to be respawned.

Otherwise, lot of stuff happened to the autumn area. R.D. did a lot of work and finished most of the planned area (as shown in the last update).
In addition, we added treasure chests to give the player more motivation to explore the area.

open-treasure

Currently you only find a whole lot of hedgehogs in this area. Of course we plan to add new enemies, but we’re still lacking graphics at the moment. But at least we added a stronger hedgehog for a small challenge:

blue-hedgehog

Strangely enough, it’s a blue hedgehog. That’s because blue is a nice contrast to the rest of the green-yellowish autumn area. Yes, that is the only reason.

Our first little dungeon

We presented several new puzzle elements and graphics for a new dungeon during the last updates. Now GFlügel, R.D., and me actually created the content for this dungeon. That is: puzzles. Here some impressions:

rhombus-dungeon1

rhombus-dungeon2

rhombus-dungeon3

Creating interesting puzzles isn’t all that easy – but we’ll get there!

Critical damage, sound playback and concept art

One important feature that has been planned for a long time but never really implemented is critical damage. Now it’s finally done:

criticals

The probability of critical damage depends on the player’s and enemy’s focus value. When it occurs you’ll get those flashy yellow hit numbers with around twice the usual damage. There will be other advantages to criticals as well. Of course all of this still needs plenty of balancing but at least the mechanic is there now.

Another feature that is hard to demonstrate with GIFs is an improvement of our sound engine. For a long time, sounds have been an issue in CrossCode when there were too many at once. For instance, when Lea was bashing a whole bunch of enemies, you got multiple hit sound in a very short time frame – even several sound in a single frame. Up to now, we simply played all these sound without any restriction, so there was a lot of overlapping. The result ranged from rather strange to downright unpleasant. However, there was a very simply fix: when one sound is about to be played while it’s already playing, simply stop the previous playback. This really improved the overall sound playback. It kind of reminds you of old style video games with limited sound channels, but that’s actually a good thing in our opinion! We have the matching graphics after all.

Finally, we have Frece creating more concept art! Yeah, I know, surprise, surprise. This time, it’s not only about new environments but also something else: a new race that you will meet in the world of CrossCode. Want to see pictures? Unfortunately the design of the race is still work in progress, so you’ll have to wait a bit longer. Until then, have a peek at another landscape by Frece:

cold-area-excerpt

And that’s all for now. Until the next update!

10 Comments

  • Am I the only one who wants to see Lea walking on water? :(

  • But… but… A good Action-RPG needs to have the possibility to get a swimming-ability later on D:

  • James Pierce on August 25, 2014 at 12:40 pm said:

    With every update your game gets more and more amazing. You do awesome work, especially in a team over such a long period of time.

  • Hard Alundra vibes are coming from the puzzle area. :3

    I am eagerly waiting for the first real dungeon that combines everything you have so far: Interesting enviroment with obstacles, enemies, loot and a boss battle. :3

  • I guess it was a real challenge to program these blocks, s.t. they can be moved around the environment and even nicely integrate with elevators and such. Right? ;-)

    • Actually it was quite easy thanks to the way we handle entities on maps in general. All these blocks derive from one single class/entity type. How it looks is defined by a given style and we can move it much like NPCs. In our editor we can set different move paths and states based on variables (hitting a switch -> activate platform) and so on. This way we don’t have to add extra code. We just need to make the graphics and tell the blocks what to do on a map!

    • With respect to physics: Our physics engine is designed to handle cases like this. When an entity is on top of another entity, it will automatically move with it.
      But to be frank, when we first tried this use case there have been (again) some bugs that we had to fix first. :P

    • Well that speaks for a good design! :)

      Something else I’m curious about: Since some of the puzzles involve moving blocks and/or other objects around, there could be a possibility that the actual physics are slightly off the intended behavior, and the resulting state (like a block getting stuck somewhere you did not intend) is not resolvable by the player.

      What happens then? I hope that by leaving and re-entering the room/area, all objects will be reset to their original position? Otherwise, the game might just end up in a state that does not allow any progress.

      • So far, the physics of the block pushing are fairly predictable so I think it is possible to design puzzles that won’t enter a “dead lock” state. The fact that the player can push AND pull boxes really helps a lot.
        And yeah, even if for some reason we reach a dead lock, we can reset the position of these entities when reentering the room.
        We plan to only fix the entities when they reached the “right” position.

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