Water You Doing

Edit: (September 13, 2011) I have switched over to GM8.1 now. Everything has been fixed up and it works great. I like all that's been done to it. AND, faster sprite rendering, not that lag has been much of an issue since completing Black Rock on DT1.

That joke sucks and has always sucked. Anyone who uses it sucks too...

So anyway, here's a few things that will be appearing to DT3 to add to your death count. You're all going to love this one.

Water
Oh yeah, DT3 has water. *Everyone screams* There won't be swimming, it's going to take on the standard 2D platformer approach. It works much like Super Metroid, except it doesn't slow you down THAT much. Your movement underwater is limited though, and your dashes are useless for any momentum boosts. The air dash gives you some decent momentum, but your ground dash is almost literally a dash in place. It doesn't negate the invincibility frames. When you're underwater, you can drown. The moment you submerge, a breath meter will be displayed and of course depletes. Bringing your head above water does the intended effect of returning air to you. That leads me to a few small nuances. If you're running or ducking, your head is underwater, which means it will take away air. :P As for when water will start to take effect on your movement, it needs to be roughly 13 pixels up from Jerry's feet. My roommate, Jerry no doubt, says he wants me to put in splashes if you're running through water. (A different effect when it's at your feet, but not affecting your mobility.) Not sure if I'm going into THAT much detail, but we'll see. :3 Aesthetics like that can wait for now as it doesn't add anything to gameplay. (Derp, I add stuff like that all the time, I really can use that argument.)

Oh no, water levels.

Water can also change height. In fact, there is an entire dungeon based around changing water levels to get around. Water affects more than just you. Platforms will float and have a bit of buoyancy, your bombs will fizzle out. Some enemies need water, so if you empty the room, they just flop about like fish on... ugh nevermind. Others can skid along the top of water. There's a few other deally bobs going on with water that you're just gonna have to find out on your own when the time comes.

Gate 2 is getting closer and closer for my testers to try their hooves, err hands at it. Looking forward to that feedback and all the crazy bugs they're going to send me.

More Info Supplied To You

Spoilers!

The new values on the right side display an ability's stun power. This is more meta gaming stuff for people. When scanning an enemy, you can now see their stun resist. It's very simple math for this.
BaseAbilityStun - EnemyStunResist = Frames the enemy is stunned
(Those are not the variable names.)
There's a few other small things factored into it like skills and equipment. This new way of handling enemy flinch times helps balance out your close and ranged abilities. The X-Buster only has a stun power of 1. Many of the enemies, specifically robots have a stun resist of 1-3, which will completely nullify stun. Even without using various equipment combinations, I've seen some nifty stun lock methods.

DT1&2 handled stun in a different way. It was based on the percentage of damage you dealt to the enemy's max HP, which really doesn't work all that well in retrospect. Not with the numbers I used anyway. These two games also reset the stun counter on every hit. In DT3, it is continually added on, making it even more possible to stun lock.

But again, the rest is really up to how you want to play, this stun info is ultimately useless outside of meta gaming. I'd rather have stun time be somewhat transparent/ignored like it was in DT1&2. It's simply part of the flow of the game. I provide this info ingame for everyone because of feedback that I've gotten from DT1&2. A lot of people wanted to see these kinds of things and here it is.

Game Maker 8.0 to 8.1
I am still using version 8.0. I have 8.1, but remember way way back when I said it was having problems? Well it seems all this has been fixed according to the internet. I'll be getting my 8.1 copy updated to the most recent version and testing all that. If I see that everything is in order, I'll start DT3 development in 8.1, which will speed things up. Last time I tried 8.1, it flipped out at all my extensions as well as the fonts and a few other small things. o_O