Entertainment Hero 2 Launches Today!
Hey there! My name's Nathan and I'm one of the two folks at Windzen. We've decided to put Hero 2 out a day earlier than planned (March 1st, 2020) so here's some info on the game and it's future. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Questions about Content and Updates Entertainment Hero 2 is
Hey there! My name's Nathan and I'm one of the two folks at Windzen. We've decided to put Hero 2 out a day earlier than planned (March 1st, 2020) so here's some info on the game and it's future.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Questions about Content and Updates
Entertainment Hero 2 is launching at version 1.1.1. and we know of several elements that will be fixed/polished/updated in the future. The game is finished and fully playable and we believe we've sorted out all of the game-killing bugs and issues. Of course we have no way of knowing what players will do so if you find a problem with the game let us know about it here or at www.gab.com/Windzen and we'll add it to this list and then get it fixed up right away.
-=-=-=-=- KNOWN ISSUES (These will be fixed in version 1.1.2.)
- Two Master Villains can briefly be seen at once during the ending cutscene. I will never poke fun at there being two Kairis in Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep ever again.
- The Shotgun powerup plays a sound for every bullet and becomes waaay too loud.
- There are audio inbalances that we're working to iron out, particularly with sound effect volume.
-=-=-=-=- KNOWN ISSUES (Fixes for these are still in the works.)
- There are times when too many sounds can be played at once which will stop new sounds from being heard properly and on rare occasions can even cut into the background music. This shouldn't happen often but life finds a way.
- Another one we're confident we've completely eliminated but it's still worth a mention: On rare occasions during testing cutscenes wouldn't move on automatically like they're meant to. Hopefully you'll never see it but there's a prompt that says "PRESS JUMP" that appears two seconds after the screen goes dark after cutscenes just in case the game decides not to move forward. You can always press jump to skip cutscenes but if you see that prompt it means you'll have to to move forward.
- The Controls tab when launching the game. It's an absolute nightmare and I'm really sorry about it. It's a Unity thing and there's nothing I can do to sort it out or even re-organize it to put the important bits on top. I tried to delete the unnecessary inputs and it destroyed controller compatibility so I had to put everything back to the way it now. The game is set up for Xbox One control pads at the start so if you're using one of those you're all set.
If you do need to remap the controls I can make it a tiny bit easier for you with the following:
1) You'll only need the controls that begin with "Player1".
2) Hero 2 doesn't use the "Glide", "Fly", "Jetpack", or "TimeControl" inputs. These four are control inputs you don't need to bother with.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Questions about Structural Decisions
First, on this topic:
We love Mega Man. All the Mega Man stuff on the shelves in the Windzen development room might imply an unhealthy amount. We chose to model our first game after that series in particular but we knew we couldn't be a Mega Man "clone". As such there are substantial differences between Hero and Mega that come both from our inability to follow in The Blue Bomber's footsteps and also our unwillingness to. To go into more detail:
-=-=-=- Why no stage select and boss powers?
This one's complicated. Entertainment Hero 2 was always meant to have a story told between the levels and that can't work with the traditional Mega Man stage select. Stage Mode does allow you to pick a stage and play through it when you want but we know it's not the same.
As for boss powers we did actually have that planned and most of them were made. The problem came from how bad it felt interrupting the flow of the game with a menu. We couldn't get it to feel right and switching on the fly lead to a lot of collision problems with the floor and walls that we couldn't devote the time to ironing out. Next time!
-=-=-=- Why no continues, and why no saving?
On the game's general structure and flow we decided to model it off of the Sonic the Hedgehog games, particularly the good ones on Genesis (S, S2, S3, S3K), in that if you run out of lives it's back to the start. We play a lot of Sonic and we know how unforgiving that can feel especially to younger players and that's where Stage Mode came from. Practice up so you can survive the main game!
We feel that the total amount of earnable lives is set properly for the length of the game. Rather than having random item drops that add 1 onto a number hidden on the pause screen we made earnable lives a staple of each level with a permanent on-screen visual during gameplay. We felt that this approach adds value to the process and helps players map out and improve their playstyle until they can make it through the entire game.
We know it's inconvenient having no way to suspend a game and resume it later but we haven't found a good solution to that problem yet. We aren't programmers so we have to rely on the Unity Asset Store for game functions and we've been unlucky in this area. The inability to save and load is a major ball and chain keeping us from tackling more ambitious projects and genres so we're always looking for the answer to this problem. We'll be patching this functionality into Hero 2 as soon as we're able.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Questions about Controlling Hero
-=-=-=- WHY CAN'T HERO CHARGE UP HIS BLASTER?!
The simple answer is that we wanted it but couldn't get it to work properly. I tried a whole lot of different ways to get it up and running but it was never reliable and it was frustrating to use. We decided to bench it for now and revisit the idea in the future when we have more experience. We promise, if Entertainment Hero 3 ever gets made, Hero will charge his Hero Blaster.
-=-=-=- Why is the Ski move continuous?
This is obviously a departure from the games that inspired the mechanic. We decided we liked it better having two speeds for you to choose from rather than the more tradional one speed plus momentary dash. We wanted to do things a little differently without losing the original purpose of the dash move. Whether you prefer to move at full speed all the time or to only ski out of danger, it's there for you.
-=-=-=- Why does Hero move straight up a wall while climbing instead of kicking off of it?
This one's tricky. Over the course of development we tried different things but it always came down to responsive controls. Hero's horizontal momentum and mass are tied together in a strange way. We could make him kick off the wall but at the cost of mid-air turning speed which greatly impacted general playability. It just wasn't worth it.
We looked into baking the wall-kick into Hero's wall climbing sprite sheet but in practice that would remove Hero's visuals from his GameObject and thus his collider, resulting in a lot of unfair damage from attacks that didn't appear to have hit Hero visually. It would make landing and moving off of walls very janky to look at and this wasn't worth the trade-off either. In the end we decided that the kick from the wall wasn't that big of a sacrifice.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Questions about the Game Generally
-=-=-=- Isn't that reference to another series a little worrying?
We don't think so. If you browse around Steam or the Nintendo Switch eShop you'll find homages, parody games, and outright clones of existing properties that are far more blatant about their inspirations than we are. Hero has Mega Man DNA, Master Villain has Sonic-ish hair (or is that a helmet?) but we certainly don't feel we've crossed any lines or stepped on any toes. There are references both in-your-face-big and barely-noticable-small hidden throughout the graphics and music but everything is of our own creation. We aren't worried but we're more than willing to remove elements that cause a problem if we're asked.
-=-=-=- Was the bit about ***** ******* *** really necessary?
YES IT WAS AND NO ONE CAN CONVINCE ME OTHERWISE.
Entertainment Hero and Master Villain were created for a shortlived internet video series discussing game design and I missed when they would have those discussions with eachother. I guess this scene is just that original purpose finding its way into the game. We had a second scene planned that poked fun at another old camera system but we couldn't find a good place to put it and didn't want to force it into the game just to have it in there. It does make the one in the game seem harsher all by itself but what can you do?