Oh and Rita should totally not be able to swim. I'd like us to have a no-swimmer in the bunch, like a less-pathetic Armin. She behaves like the others do underwater (though her stats would be altered to make her less mobile) except that pressing up to swim has no affect and you lose the ability to roll. She would have to survive on air bubbles and the like until she reaches a ladder to use to climb out, or something. But, bonus, you can roll along the surface of the water while retaining your usual jump height.

I was thinking that solid objects would cause Rita to bounce and change directions, but wooden crates would break and abort the roll. Lol, you'd have to avoid wooden crates while rolling across the surface of water. I'm picturing doing this in a big room with rising water and crates only, and you have to wait for the water to rise while constantly avoiding wooden crates.

Not what you were looking for, Jell? When you decide on characters, the first thing on your mind should be, "What would this do for the game-play." So I think this discussion is completely warranted.

Recap:
- Captain Floyd is a wolf that has better than average stats with no specials abilities.
- Pilot Felix is an eagle that can control falling speed, allowing for move precision while falling as well as a longer jump distance.
- Technician? Ivan is an otter with great handling underwater and an extensive air supply, but less-than-ideal abilities on land.
- Medic? Rita is an armadillo who cannot swim but can roll to increase her speed significantly to cross the surface of water and destroy spikes.
- Janitor Hugsy is a deranged hamster who... is deranged. No special abilities and average stats.

I changed Ivan to an otter since it seems like we're doing away with the old character than Ivan used to be and to save having to come up with something new for this one. What's missing from all this? Technician and Medic don't seem very reflective of the characters in-game abilities. They should have roles that reflect their abilities or visa-versa. As well, we were originally planning on having six characters, so if we're sticking with that (we don't have to) then we need to come up with another one.

Lol, you can't decide one without the other--especially when you wanted this to be the "finalized discussion" for the characters. We can't simply think of certain species we might want the characters to be without analyzing what specifics they'll have to offer. That's just poor construction and planning, and it would only hurt progression rather than speed it up.

And I don't see a problem in taking time and steadiness in discussion. As of now, you guys only have Livio as the sole programmer--if the community plans ahead and gets what tweaks out of paper that they can, that can't hurt the productivity or progress of the game. From what I've seen out of the demo, we're still trying to figure out the basic mechanics and functions. We shouldn't really even be trying to "finalize" anything--this is a discussion board, and if someone might challenge or question some suggestions, it should always be up for discussion and consideration.

I also don't see the problem in having multiple characters, but I was personally surprised when I found that you guys wanted so many. In my opinion, three would have been a solid variety of character choice for a game of this type. It would be good to go beyond the restrictions of one character, but having too much can get chaotic if not handled properly.

Mmm...these were really just some unorganized thoughts, but hey, get out of them what you can.

hey, we can test character abilities out now if we want. I could start programming in their abilities and then release a demo so you guys could test it. And I can make it flexible enough so that you can fine tune their settings. However, I guess the drawback is that we wouldn't have many tiles to put their abilities to the test.

but I agree with jell in that we forget about some of these plans, so we need to do a better job of documenting them all. There were some cool attempts in the past to better document plans (including the APPROVE/REJECT edits into topic titles, and that "Idea Database" topic) but we still forget things...

awesome.

Maybe Rita could be the technician? That "morph ball" ability of hers just keeps reminding me of all those times in Metroid Prime when I've gone into some "maintenance shaft" while in morph ball mode.

As for Ivan the Otter, we could make him the ship's Navigator, since he moves so freely underwater, which is like moving in space? lol

I'm good with those professions. And these 5 characters. Should we lock it in?

yes. I'll put them in the header post

Another useful character-specific skill: back-flips. When you face one way but jump towards the opposite directions, you do a back-flip. The backflip animation can make your hit dimensions smaller at the peak of the jump, allowing you to dodge stuff and get into crawl spaces, and maybe jump onto 4 tile-high walls.

Do you mean wall jumping? If not, please be more clearer.

have you played any of the 3D mario games? In those games, you can jump higher if you run in one direction, and then quickly change your direction and jump at the same time, thus allowing you to do a backflip. I was thinking we could have that ability for another character.

As for wall jumping, I forgot about that idea. Maybe we could make a monkey character who can wall-jump and back-flip.

I REJECT wall-jumping. Complicated, and many puzzles could just go wrong.

And, whatever happened to Jean the Cat?

Walljumping is fine for one character, but not all.

Backflips though, are a no-no for me. It just makes the game more complicated than it needs to be.

Yesh, there are already so many characters.

5 is not very many.

Again, what happened to Jean?

6, and nothing.

this game definitely needs a badger as a character

really? I thought it was brilliantly simple.

and jell, we have 6 characters?

Oh come on. What happened to Jean, and why is she not on the list?

If you excluded her just because you all hate cats, I am going to kill you all.

I think we got rid of her b/c we couldn't think of anything cool she could do. If you look at the current list of characters, they all have really deep mechanics worked into them. Except for Hugsy who is strictly a bonus character.

As a bonus Hugsy should start randomly dancing if he's just standing for a minute or something.

yeah, I imagine that all Hugsy's got going for him is his appearance, so we might as well expand on that and make his animations interesting.

So just make Jean have the same stats and abilities as Hannah.

That is Hugsy.

And I think CSD forgot about Jean when he made that post. But I like Jean. Couldn't we spritify Ruby and use that as Jean character or something? Have her use her sword as special ability or something.

Sword = 0.1% chance of not dying from something that kills you. Why not?

Jean's just forgotten, for some bad reason. I'll edit her into the list.

Cos that would be silly. Maybe if you could knock arrows out of the air if you pressed at the right time then the sword would work but having a luck survival rate would just be annoying.

Or have her be able to destroy some enemies.