Faster enemies and more sound effects
Hello! I spent the last two weeks making more sound effects for my game and making enemies move even faster at higher difficulty levels.
More sound effects
There are now sounds for stepping on spikes, slipping on ice, walking up stairs and opening doors, and enemies make sounds when they shoot fireballs, charge electricity, burrow underground, breathe jets of fire, throw magical orbs or slide along the floor. These new sound effects are a mixture of tweaked Chessplosion sounds (most of the fire stuff), sampled sounds (electricity, stairs, sliding on the floor) and musical sounds (everything else), and you can hear most of them in the video showing off the faster enemies later in this post.
I also added the sound effects for when the player takes damage or gets knocked out. My first plan was to just record myself squealing into a microphone, but unfortunately I couldn't quite hit a high enough note to sound like a tiny chibi bunny girl. My attempts at digging through voice sample libraries came up short too.
Eventually I went with the built-in sound effects from the 90s MIDI sound module emulator I use for my game’s music, of all things. The player damage sound is a high-pitched note using its “Voice Aou” instrument, and the player KO sound uses its birdsong sound:
Faster enemies
Earlier this week I finally cleared both loops of Konami's arcade beat em up Violent Storm on the hardest difficulty on a single credit, after almost two months of practice. I uploaded a video of my run with commentary and tips, in case you're curious about how the game works. This whole process taught me a lot about what makes an action game continue to be interesting at high difficulty levels, especially because one of my main criticisms of Violent Storm is that some of the enemies (especially the ninjas and the guys with long chains) stop being a threat once you know what you're doing.
I've also been playing a lot of Mr. Driller 2, trying to clear its 2000m mode without autofire. I haven't quite managed it yet, but my attempts have already taught me a lot about fast grid-based arcade action games.
With these things already on my mind, this morning I read Boghog and Kriegor's fantastic new post about things to watch out for when trying to make a high quality beat 'em up. This gave me even more to think about and it encouraged me to check how easy it currently is to run away from my own game's enemies. So I loaded up the game, checked whether or not each enemy type was as threatening as I wanted them to be on Very Hard mode and how easy it was to run away from them, and made lots of changes as a result. Slimes now move significantly faster than before, frogs chase you slightly faster, cats and penguins attack much faster, and penguins sometimes target their attacks one grid square away from you instead of all directly targeting you, making it harder to bait them all into attacking the same spot.
You can see the results of these changes in the video below. I personally think it brings the other enemy types a bit closer to the frogs in terms of how much of a threat they pose, and it brings the overall difficulty of Very Hard mode closer to the arcade games that I've been playing recently.
What’s next?
I’ve started making music for the game again, although I haven’t quite finished any new tracks yet. I kind of stressed myself out by trying to force myself to focus on making music for the game full-time this week, so from tomorrow onwards I’m going to try working on music for one or two hours each day and spending the rest of my time working on boss sprites and everything else I need to be able to announce the game. My current plan is to make a trailer for the game in early September but we’ll see how it goes.
Anything else?
Other than my Violent Storm commentary video and Boghog and Kriegor’s Beat ‘em Up Quality Checklist, I’ve mostly just been spending time with my friends and trying to decide which arcade games to play next.
My friend NomnomNami, on the other hand, has been extremely busy. Her new visual novel Return to Ash just released on PC! I'm a big fan of all of her games but this is one of my favorites, and I can't wait to see what other people think about it. Nami designed all of the humanoid characters in my game (including the main character Tess) and she even designed my vtuber character, so if you've seen my Twitch streams the art style in Return to Ash might look familiar to you. Her game BAD END THEATER just got a console release too, so that one is also worth checking out if you missed its original PC release. There’s even a second run of BAD END THEATER plushies running right now, if that’s your sort of thing.
That’s all I’ve been up to recently. I’m going to go decide whether I should play Cotton 2 or Dead Connection next, or maybe something completely different instead. I hope you have a relaxing couple of weeks and I’ll see you next time!