Since the demo was last updated at the end of 2023 (FfS_Demo_v0-473), LOTS has happened. We’ve seen GB Studio get some huge improvements with a flurry of updates to the engine, moving up several versions from the version used in the 2023 demo.

Tales of Monsterland DX became a thing, and I learned a ton from both the creation of the DX version, including finding out about some serious changes that needed to be made (all in the backend) to keep Fall from Space viable and in particular, feedback from the fantastic QA testers that I think has made me a better game dev. 

I can’t be bothered reading about that, what’s actually changed in the demo?

Well, if you don’t fancy diving into the change log (and I don’t blame you), ignoring all the back end rebuilding or content outside of the boundaries of the demo you might notice some of the following:

• Emotes! Collecting coins and various items now have emotes
• New SFX! Coins and Radt squeaks courtesy of the game OST’s scorer Beatscribe
• Better controls! Movement speeds have been increased, walk cycle improved, jump animations faster
• Better combat! New attacking frames, enemies attack more quickly, improvements to AI, roll more useful. Worked out you could punch your way to invincibility? No longer! 
• Enemies updated! Spider-mines more deadly, Croes less buggy, Rumbleguts a little less limpy.
• More responsive! Picking up items and events in platformer mode should feel a little quicker
• Bug fixes! Yeah, there were loads, but I have fixed them all! (Very doubtful, but if you find any more, please let me know, I’m certain I’ve fixed vastly more than I introduced at least!).
• Slopes added in various places
• Dialogue tweaked in places
• Additional effects for Color devices

Note: performance does seem to have taken a hit on DMG since upgrading the GBS version, which is something I plan on looking into, as before though despite my love of the OG Game Boy, Fall from Space is best played on Color+ devices (additional effects like reflections, more enemies with quicker AI, lighting effects and more).

GB Studio updates

These are coming very quickly ever since the GB Studio Patreon opened (definitely sign up to support them if you can!).

GBS 3.2—Slopes. I’ve always had to think in blocks so slopes opens up a lot of possibilities for more organic shapes. Particularly useful on two of the upcoming worlds, Los (ocean planet) and Urthona (forest planet). 

GBS 4—Too many to mention here and tons of bug fixes. Color mode, an on going temptation that effectively doubles all the graphical/sprite limits, I’m resisting to keep some DMG support.

Apple Silicon native version which speeds up working in the tool and a big one for me was the organisational aspects, folders for scenes and scripts and multi select of scenes helps me easily reorder and group items by area, even prefab support. This really helps going forward with what is a pretty huge project.

Essential I felt, was being able to benefit from the latest bug fixes with still a lot of development work left on Fall from Space. There were some bugs introduced that hit FfS (breaking it in some cases) but the support, particularly from Chris (Maltby) has been tremendous.

QA testing

The QA testing I was lucky to get for Tales of Monsterland DX was fantastic, everyone helped and added something in their own way, in particular, Eric Mack really helped me think about the responsiveness and polish on the game, as did my friend Matt, who on top of a big doc of solid suggestions, asked why Fall from Space felt slow compared to Tales of Monsterland, initially I was a bit defensive, they’re very different games! But this didn’t really leave my mind.

FfS is a lot more complex than ToMDX which is more of an arcadey, throwback to a classic era of platformer, but going back to FfS, it did feel a little sluggish. Sure, you’re a robot and there are more limitations because I’m already really pushing the CPU, with the enemy AI and constant monitoring of states (so things like double jump and the SRPP teleport cube work), however I found a number of ways to make the game (hopefully), feel quicker.

• Slight speed ups to walking speeds and tweaking of acceleration
• Improved walk cycles
• Sound effects moved to the start of all collision scripts, collecting a coin or hitting an enemy instantly felt better
• Animation speeds sped up
• Rolling backwards given more momentum
• Jump animation faster going upwards now I’m monitoring the state (on Color+ devices only)

Mr Blinky also went absolutely above and beyond on the ToMDX testing and he’d notice either things I hadn’t found or sometimes things I had noticed but somewhere along the way I’d figured, this isn’t a big deal, but I do think they really add up, a sort of ‘death by a thousand cuts’ of minor, ‘mmm that wasn’t what I expected would happen, but I can still carry on’. Someone else noticing them switched me to the mind set, these all do matter. As well as the big difference in polish it added to the game, the reassurance that someone had been that thorough really took a weight off my shoulders.

Anyway, thanks again to the QA testers! It set a high bar I’m hoping for again. Feedback is king, any and all feedback welcomed for Fall from Space, good and especially bad.

Variables!!1

I’ve gone in length about this one (in the last blog post), but it had knock on effects to every area of the game, new scripts needed making, new helper scripts creating to deal with flags (a little more awkward to work with than standard variables) and all the testing that followed. Still, it’s a leaner game code wise with better systems now, tons of bug fixes and most importantly, a game I’ll actually be able to finish. So worth it.

Leaving Pandæmonium/What’s next

The demo is centred on the planet of Pandæmonium, so you won’t see huge differences in terms of content, but hopefully a more polished experience, there are three hidden disks to find, a variety of quests and an overall goal to 'acquire a ship and get off the planet'. 

I’ve been working on nailing down the look and feel of the other planets, which I’m quite happy with so far, with more to share in the future.

My next priority is finishing key story beats, starting with a very important (and enlightening) character you meet on the Machine World who may help you recover memories, give out tons of lore and answers a big question—why exactly did you Fall from Space anyway? and ‘What now?’.

Changelog

I spat out a list of commits from Github, deleted the ones that don’t affect the demo or have spoilers, or were just not really noticeable, anyway, here’s a list of most of the changes in the new version of the demo.

FfS Demo Beta 2 [0.5.0] - 2024-08-29

Added

• Added emotes to hidden disk collection
• Added emotes to coins
• Added emotes to item/bottle pick up script
• Fixed missing coin FX with a brand new BeatScribe one and also Radts given their own squeak SFX
• New punching frame
• New jump kick
• Added dialogue in to oil mission for missing child incase never received the brief
• Added SFX to Shoppo
• Added text event before conversations to increase dialogue speeds and make all fast forwardable
• Added a Color screen for DMG to remind extra content, performance and special effects present if played on Color+ hardware
• New track added, A theme
• Stair steps mimic going up and down in bar cellar
• Ad bot avatar added
• Cat now killable (please don’t)
• Updated to latest version of GBS (4-1-0)

Changed

• Enemy attacks are now animated manually, a frame at a time rather than 'play for 0.8 seconds', to enable more accurate attacks
• All actors getting hit feels more responsive by moving SFX to start of get hit event
• Moved up several versions of GB Studio since last demo
• Increased speed of enemy deaths
• Improved Pep Z bottle rotation, added extra frame
• If chest opened in one side of store, it’ll now show through wall on the other side of store
• Spider-Mines explosion bigger radius, not immune if standing on them
• Rumbleguts animations speeded up, start menu disabled in fight
• Can't drop the boulder over sleeping NPC anymore
• Croes can be punched out of air more easily
• Improved ship teleport directions
• Updated roll towards to be slightly less than back to account for advancing enemies
• Improved striking enemy animations when hit whilst attacking
• Improved train foreground seat obstacle visibility to better differentiate from background
• Attacking enemies removes invincibility frames if shooter not striker (can’t punch through bullets)
• Improved collision boxes for player when rolling and standing
• Enemy attack speed increased, new area move to implemented on all enemies to stop platform enemies walking on the air
• Improved kid cage drop
• rebuilt object moving system to reduce variable usage and fix minor bugs
• Boulder tweaks
• Minor Junkton fixes, pause on ship location and bad fade on car location
• Updated log screen again to fix issues, stopped log updated barkeep message repeating, named flags for future reference
• Work on improving log who, where messages
• Added in missing ui calls and fixed minor typos Junkton, text formatting improved (centring)
• Player attack speed increased
• Roll speeds/distance upped
• New enemy area movement and strike AI built, applied to all enemies, movement speeded up slightly on some
• Non robot objects now no longer solid
• Major reworking of how unlockables work, CE made to load and check all slots for 16 possible flags, music updated
• Minor UI/menu updates and save SFX added
• Converted Edna convo to flags, added option to refuse inspection, minor dialogue tweaks
• Junkton door tops should now cut off head on Color+ devices
• Created lighten and darken functions for palettes. (Color +)
• Punch SFX fixed to not lag behind actions
• Fixed planet launch animation repeating
• Speeded up Platformer walk
• Teleport script added to map explore mode
• Map explore teleport now remembers position
• Color+ only, improved going behind tree, grass and walls in a few places, falls back to nothing for DMG
• All sprites hidden on parallax levels when using menu then restored
• Tweaked run speed, made punch dummy knock the right way
• Flash changed last for two frames of animation when enemies hit
• Studio screen and more of the intro quicker to skip with b or all with start
• Menu lockout when taking damage or UI loading
• fixed music flag saving though needs a good testing and added boss and author unlocks
• Added option to quit and save and quit to the various game menus
• Improved player walk/run cycle
• scenes put into folders
• upgraded to GBS 4 beta 1
• Tidied up palettes set dmg plus defaults
• stopped being able to open menu for a second after saving to let everything draw
• Added palette change functionality
• Speeded up top down movement slightly
• Flipped npc portraits to face left
• Replaced coins with Flags/global variables
• Replaced majority of enemies with reusable global variables/Flags

Fixed

• Big fix–Portal cube ability getting overwritten by run ability if run unlocked after fixing it, fixed
• Wurm drops in Train appearing if not destroyed
• Improved coming out of roll
• Increased collision box sizes for player and SRPP to stop platform fall off on left and throwing through walls
• Major bug fix, clamping numbers in shop resets large credit amounts
• Fixed throwing SRPP into new scene bug
• Stopped junkton plaque dialogue looping
• Fixed player behind background sprite state
• Fixed wurm area script to correctly attack player on left
• Spam guard added into items menu to stop corrupting text
• fixed pitcher spit sprite leaving bounds and not rotating
• Fixed SRPP changing player state when going past Shoppo window reflections (Color only)
• Fixed hidden disk collection repeating dialogue bug
• Fixed oil can blank first message if UI reloading collecting credits
• Added potential fix to enemy not being able to be attacked
• Fixed invincible frames meaning you could attack enemies at the right window and not get hit
• Added spam guard (to stop text overflowing) to Quest items and RCVR-Thees
• Lava tile swapping made a CS to improve performance and fix a crash that could occur
• Removed deadly hit box from pit dangling rocks
• Enemies will no longer leave platforms to follow players in the air
• Dialogue not behind sprites on parallax levels
• Fixed first dialogue on Oz return from CS not showing
• Fixed fall damage controls unlocked
• Fixed gameover glitch