Carrots, super meters and flashing enemies
Hello! I spent another two weeks burning through my giant list of visual and gameplay improvements and it’s pretty much finished. Here’s a quick roundup of what I’ve done:
HUD improvements
I gave the HUD some more love and attention. Everything bounces now, and the chain meter looks more like a super meter in a fighting game. Last but by no means least, I replaced the bombs with carrots because I think they’re cute:
There’s also a beat em up style “GO!” arrow when you finish a room:
Gameplay improvements
Taking damage now stuns all the enemies on the screen, giving you a moment to breathe. Dropping a bomb briefly pauses the game and stuns all the enemies on the screen too, making it feel more powerful than before.
I really wanted it to be easier to spot when long-range enemies are attacking, especially on easy and normal mode, so I made them flash during their attack startup. I knew I was going to prefer how the easier difficulty modes felt with this change, but I was surprised to find out that it even made the harder difficulty modes feel better to me.
Hopefully this means that more of the game's challenge will come from trying to dodge, bait and herd enemies, instead of from enemies sneakily hitting you before you even notice them. I'm still probably going to make a few more tweaks to the flash effect to try and get it in that sweet spot of being easy to notice without being annoying, but I think it's getting there.
You can see all of these changes and more in this video clip:
All that’s left on my giant list of visual improvements is to make the player’s attack animations look more exciting and to add a cool fullscreen visual effect when you take out a boss. I just started working on both of these today, so I should be able to show them off next time!
Once that’s all done, I’ll finally get back to making the rest of the game. I’d like to be able to show off co-op, boss fights and adventure mode when I announce the game, so I’ll work on whichever of those things I’m in the mood for. We’ll see!
Anything else?
I love the old 1979 arcade game Rip Cord and I've always wanted to make something inspired by it, but I couldn't come up with an interesting direction to take it in. Fortunately I don't have to do that anymore because the creators of Donut Dodo just released Looney Landers, a game that turns Rip Cord into a brightly colored two player party game. It even has music by naruto2413, creator of that one famous chiptune from the 2000s. I only just found out it exists and I can't wait to give it a try.
It's Steam Next Fest! I had fun playing the demo of Touhou Fantastic Danmaku Festival III and looking at all the pretty bullet patterns, but surely there are a bunch of other interesting games that I don’t know about yet. Let me know if you have any recommendations!
That’s all I’ve been up to recently. I hope you have a great couple of weeks and I’ll see you next time!