Mine is 6291 in Voxatron 0.2. What's yours ?

Is there any way to spawn monsters in the air and make them fall down ?

Side note: I would love to drop barrels from above and make them detonate from falling damage.

Some of you create fairly long levels, with 10 or more rooms. In some cases they're quite hard. Then you spot some bugs and release a new version. Then a couple more bugs and another version. It's exhausting and sometimes just boring to play the same rooms over and over. The first rooms will get the most testing, but if you're working on a level you typically add rooms at the end.

The solution ? Warp zones.

I haven't made a single level so far (but I will), but it should work. Simply make the first room in the level a "teleporter central" with diamonds leading to various stages of your level. For instance your initial room could have teleporters to room #2, #5, #10, #15 and so forth. This would allow people who played your level before to test only those parts that changed. Bonus points for actually telling people which rooms changed. Then, once you consider your level complete and bug-free, you replace the initial Warp Room with something else, even a simple road leading to a gate.

Please do this.

This thread is not for posting bugs, but for gameplay comments.

small blue guys: they are fine, perhaps even a little overused. They swarm very effectively and eat through obstacles. One complaint, though - they get stuck fairly often. I end up wondering if it's a broken/unfinished level or a tiny monster got stuck somewhere.

I think something should be done about stuck little guys. Not getting stuck would be ideal, but may be hard to achieve. A compromise would be blue guys making scared sounds if they're alone. That would let player know there's something left. More often than not single blue guys stop progress, so "scared when alone" makes sense.

Orange "rats": They work as an introductory enemy. But they're somewhat boring, and inefficient at killing. They occupy quite a lot of space but you can cut through them easily.

Level designers don't seem to like them much, I wonder why. I think they could be given a special ability like eating (destroying) powerups.

[b]Orange grunts:

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A number of levels is classified as "finished", but they clearly aren't.

The most aggravating example is a level named "Test".

Others include:
Watch your step (unfinishable - infinite loop)

You can bounce projectiles with sword. Perhaps not so obscure, but I haven't seen a room based on this ! Using the _dojo feature you could make a room where ranged weapons are not available, and all enemies are on the other side of a pool of lava. The passage appears once all enemies die.

Triple shot fires only two projectiles. Sad, but true ;-). It alternates between "left and middle" and "right and middle", a bit like Mancubus in DooM II. I also tested it on a minotaur. Without Triple, it took 25 shots. With Triple, it took 12. So there you have it, it's just as fake as Quad Damage in Quake 3 (which only triples damage).

After one too many creative level design I'm starting to wonder. Is there something special about voxels that allows quick creation without (many) restrictions ?

You practically don't need to draw. No need to texture. People talking about textured voxels are insane. You don't texture pixels. You just arrange them (or voxels) into a sort of a mosaic.

Voxatron uses very low resolution, which certainly helps. You can't spend hours editing a small(ish) sprite. Increase voxel resolution and levels will take longer to create; artistic skills will get more important. At the moment you can get away with a nice idea, some patience, and a sense of aesthetics. You can make fairly intricate objects quickly, then mass-produce them like in the times of tile-based graphics - only with more flexibility.

And this is just the beginning. Assuming Lexaloffle delivers, creativity will boom. Moving platforms, animated objects, custom enemies. Want to make an eurasian badger (meles meles) ? Go ahead !

It's nice that Voxatron already has a level editor and an enemy editor is in the works. The game is going to be quite moddable. You hinted at gameplay mods. But how far do you want to take it ?

What interests me is how powerful the tools will be, and will there be any scripting support ? And I mean the ability to create (sometimes major) gameplay changes, like stuff I posted in this thread:

https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=462

You are probably not going to release the C source code of the game anytime soon. I'm only a novice at C programming, but Voxatron is the kind of game that makes me WANT to learn more C.

We are starting to see some diversification in enemies, which is good. The first several monsters are a bit bland. Some more ideas (for enemies, mechanics, items...):

• New monster: suicide bomber. The explosion should be quite small but still dangerous up close. Perhaps more importantly, it should harm other monsters. If that's too redundant (too many explosions), they could just burst in a pool of slime spreading across the floor, then drying up after a few seconds.

• Flying enemies. They could include melee attackers and bombers. Bombers should make significant damage to the terrain. It could be interesting to introduce a new shooting key: "shoot upwards". It would be "5" on numeric, and for everyone else... hmm... I guess 1 more key isn't that much, right ?

• enemies that shoot projectiles like artillery, in an arc.

• gremlin: a helpful "enemy" that runs away from the player. Like scarabs in Spelunky, they would have to be picked up. This would grant a random powerup, including Duplicate, Apple, Chocolate and Sushi. As for introduction of new powerups affecting old levels... room creators could have two settings for gremlins. a) progressive: gremlins in this room will be affected by future changes. b) conservative, the list of possible powerups will be limited to those available in current version.

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Post your ideas for interface improvements here.

• The way rooms scroll is mildly confusing. I can't tell if I should go left, right, "up" or "down" to continue exploring. All screen edges are black anyway. I have an idea: black edge should be reserved for room boundaries. Edges that can be explored could be light gray, like a fog.

• wasd keys work ingame, but not in menu

• I find myself trying to save time by going down when already at bottommost menu item. It doesn't work because menu doesn't wrap around. For instance when the cursor is on "back", pressing down should change selection to topmost menu item

• I MISS DIAGONAL SHOOTING KEYS ! (7, 9, 1, 3)

• Slightly more standardized room exits would help. Invisible diamonds (item 9) are fine when the creator wants to make something fancy, like exit via a car, phone booth, jump into a well, or even a portal in the middle of a room. But LOTS of rooms have exits on one of edges. How about an additional item for exits on screen edge ? It would work the same, except it would look like a bright blue rectangle (1 voxel thick, dimensions about the size of a door). Players would be encouraged to use it when room ends on an edge.

The big suggestion thread:
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=460