Heavily inspired by a new NES game “Micro Mages”, my latest project is built entirely in blocks.
I’ve had a fun time with this project. I want to thank the MakeCode Arcade folks who do the livestreams because I’ve been able to learn a bunch of good stuff from watching your videos. (I owe my charging projectiles and boss battle to your recent streams!)
The game runs poorly on my Pybadge and I wouldn’t recommend digging around in the code as its size causes a fair bit of lag. I would have liked to make this a fuller game with multiple boss fights but the editor’s speed has really slowed due to the amount of code. I can’t wait for future updates to help with this (a stand-alone application would be amazing!).
If you’re interested in learning how I made my first game Bobo the Monkey, I have a couple of guidebooks to walk you through the process. Educators feel free to share these with your students. My plan is to record a video tutorial in the future for my own students. I’ll link that here when it’s done.
Wow, this is really cool! I love the background and environments. Also, so many great mechanics: enemy health, chain climbing, spring, wall jumps, moving spikes, … these are so great!
These are great PDFs, thanks for sharing these!
Regarding the slow editing experience with large blocks, yes, this is unfortunate We have a couple fixes that should be releasing in a month or two that should help some. I’m thinking about if there’s more we can do as well.
As for poor Pybadge performance, there could be a number of reasons. One is particle effects, another is just large maps in general. If we had some analyzer info for likely performance issues, that would be awesome.
If you open the game in blocks and add “/beta” to the URL after .com, the game will reload in beta. Then I’d recommend right clicking on the work space and saying “collapse blocks”. This should declutter the workspace and make the editing process much quicker.
If you run into more significant issues while editing, please let us know because we’d like to make the experience editing large games like yours as smooth as possible.
That’s awesome. I originally had bigger ambitions for this game. (Level themes, multiple bosses) but the editor’s speed hindered that a great deal. I’ll have to go back and have a look again.
Also, will this do anything to aid the games speed on hardware or is it purely from an editing standpoint?
These changes just impacted the editor speed. Speed for hardware improvements will have to come later.
We’d love to hear if the editor upgrades are sufficient for your goals. Also, as a data point, if we only had time to improve the game speed on hardware or the editor speed further, which is more important to you after these changes?
@darzu Definitely editor speed. I all but stopped work on the game because it was becoming too time consuming to code. A faster editor opens up a lot of possibilities.
I’ll give it a go when I’m back at my computer and let you know how the performance improves.
I was wondering what would have helped editor speed before this. I have a reasonable gaming pc but only 8gb of ram. Do you know what’s important with regards to pc specs and editor speed?
Have there been any thoughts on a desktop app? Doing things in a browser can really take a hit on computer perf, but on a desktop app you could probably utilize more power. (And I could give that process a higher priority)
Hey @SPerkins25! I have been speedrunning games lately! I tried speedrunning this game and got 4 minutes and 5 seconds. Super hard and eventually beat the boss battle. This is a lot of fun. I speedrun games a lot (but no world records) but this is a whole lot of fun though.
I love that you still play this game and your speedrun is really impressive. I’ve ran the game myself now and set a real challenge for you. I’ve set a time of 3 minutes and 28 seconds and I’ve got some tips to help you out!
Climbing ropes is faster if you hold A and jump from side to side.
Use damage from enemies to reach higher spots without having to charge your weapon to max for the super jump.
You can charge your weapon during the door change animation.
Prioritise hearts from candles so you can use damage boosting as often as possible.
Kill as few enemies as possible, they waste precious time and never drop anything (only candles drop items).
Get to the end boss with at least weapon level 2 so that you can kill him in one cycle. If you can get to him with max weapon level you can kill him in
WOW. Nice speedrunning tips. I’ve tried speedrunning like Mario games and I kept dying. I guess the propeller suit is the best powerup in the game I guess
I usually speedrun short games like this on my break times. It’s a lot of fun with the code and how you assembled it and yes… the lag was real. Good thing that the computer barely got even slower. The loading symbol must’ve been taking his own time when you got all this code
We have a couple fixes that should be releasing in a month or two that should help some. I’m thinking about if there’s more we can do as well.
