Animation

Updated the walk. Slingshot is very rough. Working on jump animation.

Next animations to do: TRANSITION FRAMES, crawl, grab/climb ledge.

Smell

Smell will play an important role in the game. Things will make you smelly, and other things will make you less smelly. Your level of stink determines the distance it takes for someone to notice you.

The Buff-stink Tradeoff

Using items will increase various "stats", some of them will make you stink (garlic, onions, coffee, alcohol, tobacco). Dog urine may make you stealthy to dogs but more detectable to humans (ok I'm having second thoughts about this one).

Stink Sources

You can become stinky from the environment. You come more smelly if you hide in a garbage can, mud puddle, or a dead body. (I didn't mean hide in the body, but that actually sounds kind of awesome.)

Deoderants

To get rid of your stink, you can use other items (deoderant, cologne, new pair of clothes [possibly from a guard], mint, toothbrush), take bath in the town, or find a hot spring.

spike1's Questions

spike1 asked how smells will be represented. I was thinking of representing them graphically as an animated sprite or particle effect. Each "smell-type" will have a different colored smell trail and an icon representing the smell-type will hover above the source.

In addition, smells will have varying degrees of stinkiness, which determines how far they can travel.

Gettin' Caught / Dying

I don't know how to handle being caught or dying in the game. Different ideas:

1. You have an amount of health. Things can hurt you, and being discovered by a guard should be devastating to your health / hard to manage. Guards will readily call in back up, which will lead to a virtaully impossible situation. Dying will send you back to a designated checkpoint.

2. No health. Being discovered sends you to jail from which you will have to post bail to get out (which will send you back to the room from where you left). If you can't post bail, you have to revert back to a checkpoint or the beginning of the chapter. Gives incentive to collect coins (how original!).

(Edit: maybe you only get caught when you black out. In other words, you do have health, and are only caught sent to jail when that health is depleted.)

3. Yes health. If you black out (i.e. run out of health) you "wake up" in a hospital. Instead of posting bail, you have a number of "lives". Run out of lives = start at checkpoint instead of where you blacked out.

Checkpoints will be rare enough to punish careless playing, but common enough to avoid frustration.