Two player level in Skullkeys
We have started experimenting with a multiplayer level in Skullkeys. At the moment we call the game mode “Bomb Match”. The game mode is a bit inspired by the good old Nintendo 8-bit game Ice Climber.
What’s the bomb match about?
Simple, the first player reaching the top of the dungeon and fetching the Skullkey wins!
- Each player gets 6 bombs to begin with.
- Players can use bomb jumps to reach higher ground (note: the bomb takes 1 full heart in damage) Plan your bomb jump wisely!
- If player 2 dies, player 1 wins.
In the level there are spear-spitters, moving platforms, destructible blocks, spikes + irritating bloodsucking bats….and an opponent, to make the journey a bit troublesome for the player.
Bomb jump inspired by Metroid
Obviously, a Metroidvania inspired game needs to have bomb jump. In the multiplayer level Bomb Match you make good use of the bombs to reach the top of the dungeon and capture the Skullkey before your opponent.
Beware that the player takes 1 full heart in damage when the bomb hits!
Godot with splitscreen and canvaslayers
Yes, we want to use splitscreen for the multiplayer mode. But somehow we couldn’t get canvas-layers to work properly with the splitscreen functionality in Godot. They just don’t show up. Which is crucial for our current game layout with lighting, shadow layers etc.
So we decided to save time and just make a single screen camera that zooms out slightly as the players move apart. It works, but the gameboard looks kinda small. 😉 We will dive back into the splitscreen coding at a later stage and see if we can solve the issues with Canvaslayers.
Health in our game
In our current early demo of Skullkeys, health is measured in hearts ♥️. Heart-parts to be precise, a whole heart is split into two parts. 3 hearts * 2 = 6 heartParts. 😃 So a player can take a maximum of 6 in damage.
Tinting player 2
Nicklas also experimented with tinting / replacing colorvalues on player 2 to get a blue-ish kinda vibe on that one. Just to separate player 1 and 2. That’s all for this little game development blog update. Hope you enjoy the content!
// Mattias