Shiny coins and boss sprites
Hello! I spent a lot of the past two weeks quietly doing more work on my game’s adventure mode, but unfortunately I’m still working out the details its world design so it’s not quite ready to show off yet. On the bright side, I spent the rest of my time drawing some pretty sprites!
Shiny coins
In the previous newsletter I showed off the coins that enemies drop in adventure mode:
I decided to add them to arcade mode too, as a visual representation of the score you get for defeating enemies. But I figured I’d give them a bit of polish first. Here’s how the coins look now:
And here they are in arcade mode:
Lower scoring enemies award smaller silver coins in arcade mode, so you only start to see the shiny gold coins after you've chained a few enemies in a row. It’s a little embarrassing how much more I care about going for high scoring strategies now that they fill the screen with gold coins, so hopefully these coin sprites will make scoring more fun for everyone else too!
Enemy attack warnings
Enemies used to flash bright orange and blue when they were about to attack, but I wasn’t the biggest fan of how this looked so I replaced it with a new effect.
It’s hard to strike the perfect balance between enemies being easy to spot in your peripheral vision, without being too obnoxious if you’re already looking at them. That said, I think the new effect does a much better job of this, with its combination of a flashing outline and a ring beneath their feet:
While I was at it, I added some flashing white ‘X’ indicators on the floor beneath thrown bombs to make it easier to track their movements:
Boss sprite animations
I finally started drawing some of the bosses’ in-game sprites! I haven’t gotten very far yet but here’s the fire mage boss who appears at the end of the volcano stage:
My friend NomnomNami designed the character (along with my game’s main character and the other bosses) and I’m doing my best to convert her to chibi pixel art form! Hopefully I’ll have more bosses to show off soon.
Anything else?
I’ve been playing more Violent Storm and I cleared both loops of the game! The second loop mixes things up in the silly playful ways you usually only see in romhacks, user-generated levels or solo-developed games, such as giving you a ridiculously short time limit to sprint through a level, spawning powerful enemies behind you and making you run away from them, raining barrels down from the sky, or putting a pile of flopping fish on the ground next to the start of the stage. I was going to record some commentary for my run but I discovered that the game's hardest difficulty mode is even more fun than normal mode, so I'm going to attempt to clear that mode first.
I've been watching lots of Puzzle Wednesday youtube VODs recently and learning about several competitive arcade action-puzzle games that I'd never heard of before, such as Welltris and Mouse Shooter GoGo. It'll be interesting to see how much I enjoy those games myself when I inevitably force some friends to play them with me, but it's still fun to learn about them either way. I'd love to eventually try making a small arcade puzzle game of my own if I come up with an idea for one. My engine supports online multiplayer with rollback netcode after all...
That’s all I’ve been up to recently. I hope you have a relaxing couple of weeks and I’ll see you next time!