Rocks'n'Diamonds

1. the pneumatic hammer is a bit indistinct from the rocket and the rocket launcher for being oriented the same way and using the same colors; if i saw it in a level i would probably struggle to tell it apart at a glance. here's a mockup of it flipped horizontally with the same colors as the bomb: though on that "rockford using jackhammer" sprite...

2. the gdash graphics and the old RnD graphics make it (i think) reasonably clear that when rockford is using the pneumatic hammer, the hammer is a separate tile with full collision (gridline for emphasis): and though i can't be totally sure of it i'd think somewhere in the Crazy Dream series (which introduces the pneumatic hammer, and is all about weird miscellanea and playing around with the constraints of its elements - there's an interlude where a slime converts "rockford" to "rockford with bomb") there might be a puzzle that relies on how using a jackhammer creates a new solid tile temporarily.
meanwhile the new pneumatic hammer animation has the jackhammer take up a measly 1/8th of the tile, almost looking like an edgecase to offset a graphic than an actual separate tile. maybe the jackhammer could be larger and held at a 45° angle, or even larger and held at 30° like the original RnD graphics.

3. the pot has come an interesting way; in the gdash graphics rockford is stirring it with a big ladle: in the old RnD graphics rockford is standing in it (maybe he was in gdash too?) and stomping around: in the new RnD graphics the pot is empty and rockford seems to use it as a place to contemplate his decisions: since my previous bafflement with "collecting 5 skeletons to stir the pot" (has it really been 2 years? sheesh...) i happened to read a page about the history of Repton; at the bottom a Repton-like game named "Bonecrusher" is detailed, including these interesting bits:

Your castle is the headquarters of "Bono's Bathing Company". Inside the castle are 22 increasigly hazardous chambers where you and your business partner, Fozzy, produce soap by an age-old recipe: collecting skeletons and boiling them in a cauldron. Five skeletons are needed to make one bar of soap. Once you have collected five skeletons, simply move to a cauldron and touch it.

If a monster catches you, it will kill you immediately. There are three ways to deal with monsters:
Trap them in by using a glook. If a monster is unable to move it will die and you can then collect its skeleton.

(what a "glook" is is neither here nor there). i suspect the cow/skeleton/pot mechanic as it originally appeared in Crazy Dream was directly inspired by Bonecrusher, itself a BD-like game. so there's a clear causality to "collect 5 skeletons to stir the pot": after collecting the skeletons, rockford throws them in the pot and stirs it to make bone broth. or soap. (maybe the gravity switch is dirty and he cleans it off with the soap?) maybe TOG was already planning this but this provides a bit more logic for rockford to specifically be stirring the pot rather than just arbitrarily interacting with it.

----

and of course i only realized partway through writing point 3 that most of points 2 and 3 were already addressed in TOG's topic in 2025: viewtopic.php?p=19315#p19315

TheOnyxGuy wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2025 3:40 pm

ncrecc wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2025 3:25 pm also the pneumatic hammer animation needs to be 2 tiles wide, because the two tiles in the normal animation are actually separate tiles (rockford holding the pneumatic hammer and the tip of the pneumatic hammer itself)

I know, I did make them double-tiled, it's just not very visible here, but pneumaplayer animation is not aligned with everything else, because Rockford is indeed occupying both tiles

TheOnyxGuy wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2025 2:12 pm One thing, though, my pot player animation is fine by itself, but may be potentially wrong for BD engine itself, because you can stir it in four different directions, which all share the same silly animation, while I did just... him looking down with a bit more determined gaze.

oh well; it's good to note regardless.

(side note: i use "pneumatic hammer" and "jackhammer" interchangeably in that post; what in GDash (and maybe in Europe?) is called a "pneumatic hammer" is called a "jackhammer" in America, though i don't know if which is the more widely used term worldwide. i do know that Wiktionary lists "pneumatic drill" and air hammer" as synonyms to "jackhammer", but has no page for "pneumatic hammer"; however "pneumatic hammer" on Wikipedia is a disambiguation page including a link to "jackhammer")

Ok, honestly, I understand, some things I did indeed kind of rushed and questioned afterwards without properly fixing them. I do especially agree with the pot one, I just kind of had no idea what that kind of pot was supposed to portray without knowing how BD's original one looked like. Although honestly, I still kind of don't fully get it, to me it kind of looks like Rockford is mixing a potion inside of it steering it around with a large scooper (man Atari required a lot of imagination). So yeah I should definitely try to make sprites with the pot looking much closer to it's original look whenever I find time for that.

About the pneumatic hammer... Now that I look at it again, yeah, at a distance it pretty much blends with others, I just never acknowledged that because I basically almost never play with LARGE graphic sets like that 1920x1080 one hecause it's unnaturally and (in my humble opinion) unnecessarily humongous. I'll see what I can do to make it look more distinct. Coloring it red is kind of fine, but also I dunno, it kind of feels like it doesn't exactly make it good, perhaps coloring it red only in certain parts. Oh yeah, the main reason I made it specifically more like a jackhammer sinply because it just kind of looked ridiculous to me how player just has the hammer with it's base engine sort of being dragged after. But on other hand, it not like it matters, it's a regular puzzle game where player not only grabs huge gems and explosives that shrink to fit in his pockets.

And last, about the hammer occupying two tiles while barely looking like it fits one, while reading the post, I did have an idea of just adding little sparks to indicate it better, but on second thought, that's just going to be some unnecessary noise, plus we technically only have two frames for that. Perhaps making it larger is just the better idea, but again, I definitely should find time to experiment with it more to find a better solution.