The Octopus

Arcade Show & Tell
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22

I somehow got better times on my phone…

I kinda want to not fill up the space in the thread

Screenshot_20260503-081453
Screenshot_20260503-0814531080×2340 157 KB

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If you are looking for help on making this game, I would love to help with whatever you would need, music, art, procedural animation, or enemies.

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Thanks, your procedural animation extension is really intuitive!

Sure! I wanted to have a parallax background for this game but never got around to it. Since the screen resolution is 320x240, its pretty time consuming to make one. I like to use this extension Having a Blast with MakeCode Arcade! - #6 by AlexK because it scales background images very nicely. If you wanted to help, a parallax with some pipes and sewer grates would be great! Try to use only the darkest few shades of green for the background if you can.

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I’ll implement that in the next update!

P.S your times are better than mine lol

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do you think you could add some sort of low detail mode? the last level is very laggy on my phone. I think the lag is mostly the animations and how the hook works though

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I mean I have played Celeste maybe a bit too well… (13 gold berries + moon + 1A dashless)

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Probably not, this game is pretty bare bones in the sense that it doesn’t have too many animations. If you play any of my games on a device with low battery it will be very laggy, maybe that is it?

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How did you beat first two levels in under five seconds woah. :face_with_open_eyes_and_hand_over_mouth:

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I spent a little too much time playing :face_in_clouds:

Thank you for letting me help! I would love to help with the parallax background! Let me see what I can do with that extension, and I’ll post what I come up with in this topic.

I’ll show just a demo of it and you just give your input

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Here’s a demo I just made:

I noticed the double image logic is using a variation of the Eric’s Pixel Expansion (EPX) algorithm, but smoother. I’m not sure if that’s what you want, but it does look cool!

But, is this the kind of parallax you are talking about? If this looks good then I’ll make a different project with this kind with your game with the pipes and grates and such.

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Exactly, you don’t need to draw this many layers if you don’t want to though.

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I played 15 paths by taser a bit, the first level has like 10 enemies and lags, the second has none and it runs smooth. A later level has more enemies, and it lagged. I am certain that it was the sprites, for this reason. Now that I think about it, maybe have a “disable animations” that does not place the sprites at all!

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Here’s what I got so far. I know maybe the art isn’t that detailed, but I found it got distracting, so I changed it to simple, but that also doesn’t look great in my opinion:

Another thing I found is that when the parallax screens are made, it lags a little bit and throws off the player’s first move. The front parallax is also interfering with the stopwatch and some of the platforms.
Let me know what you think! I think it needs improvement but it’s a good start.

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How did you change the game resolution?

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Javascript:

namespace userconfig {
	export const ARCADE_SCREEN_WIDTH = ...
	export const ARCADE_SCREEN_HEIGHT = ...
}
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A great start! I’ll edit it a little bit so that it blends in some more. Thanks!

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When I do parallax, i try to do a few things
→ keep elements consistent to create scale (ie draw similar things on different bgs, you could add decorative pipe elements to the main tilemap and then draw them smaller on the bgs)
→ shrink the scale for every layer
→ every layer transitions closer to the background colour (mimics like a fog)
→ don’t use scaling as you want to make the background consistent and feel like a natural extension of the tilemaps
→ try to do something to seperate the tilemap with the bg (usually works if you just add more visual interest and detailing, or if the palette is drastically different)
→ you can make the background more visually detailed and make it work (especially with your game having a strong contrast with the orange)

some examples that might be interesting:

westward7PhantomsRedLineWarppointsdeliverimania

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How do you make such good images?!? :
Westward is such a good game and the Delivermania update was awesome! Please teach me your ways but I won’t bother you with the shudders Horrors of my work…
Images:

  1. :frowning_face_with_open_mouth: Delivermania! RemasteredWestward
  2. :anguished_face: Red-Line Remastered
  3. :fearful: Westward
  4. :scream: What is the fourth one, it looks soo good :shaking_face:.
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…

It could’ve been such a good game… If I was as good as I am now at the time it probably could’ve succeeded.

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How do you grapple?

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