finally this thing gets what it deserves

it hardly seems to justify four extra days, but now these things can lose their hats, pick up their hats, explode with or without the hats, and make slightly fewer maximum decibel noises that I recorded in 2002 or stole from something else. in fact the new sounds may even be TOO quiet. in parts where I turned down the video volume to make the old ones bearable, the new ones are inaudible. particularly the TERRIBLE old sound effects for the player taking damage are still active. after the first section I quickly replaced them but the damage has been done!
these will spray out collectible candy pieces once I get around to that. The little colored dots that fall out of their bodies are supposed to be candy. It ends up not looking any less gruesome than blood and organs but this wouldn’t be an official bimshwel production were there not copious amounts of effort put into something that doesn’t really make a difference.

I still need to find a proper bell to sample since the little circular bells and christmas ornaments that I have don’t sound like the bells on display here and are hardly audible unless i initiate a heavy impact that ends up registering as more plastic than bell-like. I also haven’t seen them since before I moved my desk and bed a few weeks ago so for the moment additional recording attempts are not possible.

the animation state the corresponds with dropping the hat I realize does not work. the creature throws its head back which looks good from the side, but 80% of the time it would appear from the front. even if I set the hat to get flung upwards, that would be beyond the view of any player close enough to connect with a slap attack. whupth. I put in a temporary weapon object that could inflict hat-removing damage from a distance, but then the dork was even less likely to walk back and grab its hat since there wasn’t a player obstructing its movement and forcing it to turn around. I have a very silly life.

another problem: when I record video it gets REALLY slow, and it stutters each session while loading graphics anyway. getting these idiots to walk toward their hats and retrieve the hats while on camera is also frustratingly elusive.
they are also supposed to drop their hats 100% of the time when slapped but sometimes they just do nothing or drop two hats without losing one. even the idiot stuck in a wall that can’t take any actions but to walk in place and make noise manages to maintain control over its hat when I want it not to.
additionally, only the morons with santa claus hats currently toss all the correct objects when they agree to toss anything –the green short imp wearing red near the end magically transforms into a taller imp when it explodes– because because because because because because but now that I have proof that one works that means that the others can also be made to work eventually. Tossing the objects is crucial because if everything is in one sprite the body ends up looking about 4 times as wide as its collision box and that is not good.

and they ARE morons; even when positioned properly they aren’t smart enough to actually take the hats so the hats need to GIVE themselves back.
note that for example purposes I am mostly pressing a button that instantly deals maximum damage to foes in order to provoke their explodo animations rather than using a weapon which does that since I still have yet to implement an implement of mass destruction, other than the tossable pog, but using that while recording video makes it struggle even more, and pog generally isn’t out to cause trouble deliberately.