Ready, Go! Stage Clear!
Hello! The submission deadline for SAGE 2025 is a week away so I spent the last two weeks trying to polish everything up for a demo. There’s still a bit of work left to do but I should be able to comfortably hit the deadline!
Grass sprites
Although I love the game's new bright pink widescreen borders and menu backgrounds, they had the side effect of making some of the game's environments feel muddy and washed-out in comparison. Most of the environments felt this way to me, especially the grassy fields that can be seen in the How To Play demonstration. So I decided to brighten up all of the environments' color palettes a bit.
While I was brightening up the grassy field environment, I quickly realized that I didn't like the look of the wavy line pattern on the grass. This is probably why I had subconsciously made it so faint that it was barely visible:
I replaced the old wavy linens with a repeating grass tuft pattern! It's still got a bit of that abstract videogame feel that I love, but in grass-like way:
It's so much grassier now! I want to stick my hand in it. As you can see in the bottom left of the image, I'm still using the old wavy lines for the paths but hopefully I'll think of a way to make them look better soon.
Ready, Go!
Getting a demo ready has forced me to work on all the little things that I’ve been ignoring until now, like all the little transitions at the start and end of each stage. Each stage of arcade mode now starts with some animated “READY, GO!” text:
Stage Clear!
I’ve been working on similar effects for the start of the boss fight and the end of a stage, along with the appropriate sound effects and jingles. I’d like to add some sound effects and animations when the Stage Clear menu counts up your score and reveals your rank, but I love everything else about the look and sound of clearing a stage. It’s really feeling like an actual game now!
I’ve also been polishing the music and some other aspects of the game, but none of it is quite ready to show off yet. I can’t wait to see what people think of the demo when it’s ready to play!
Anything else?
This video of a Clipping concert recorded with a Nintendo 2DS is perfect. All concert footage should look and sound exactly like this.
My friend NomnomNami who designed the characters for my game just released a trailer for her next game! You can see the Syrup 2: Candy Alchemy RPG trailer on itch and Steam. I adore the Monster Trader character who appears around the 40 second mark!
I've been playing Final Fight again. I'm still nowhere near good enough to be able to clear the game in one credit but I've been having a great time learning it! I found some old hitbox display scripts for the game, so it's been interesting seeing how they implemented the hitboxes for various enemy attacks (videos 1, 2, 3). Being able to visualize how these classic games were implemented is such a helpful learning tool for game developers!
I also played the demo of Fox Flare Night, the upcoming horizontal bullet hell shoot em up by the developer of Like Dreamer. It has some extremely cute enemies and creative bullet patterns! I personally wish it had a harder difficulty mode and the ability to just play through the entire game in one run without having to unlock anything, so hopefully that will be an option in the final game.
That’s all I’ve been up to recently. I’m going to go finish up the demo of my game, and I should be able to submit it to SAGE with plenty of time left. I hope you have an exciting couple of weeks and I’ll see you next time!