This week has been pretty light in terms of new content.  With the Cover art done and Ref on vacation I found myself looking for things to tune and polish while no new art is coming in.  As a result I spent this week adding particle effects and fine tuning the attack patterns for the elites and bosses in the demo.  

Programming

It was a slow process upgrading my attack pattern director, since my attack pattern system was woefully under developed. I spent a great deal of time fixing up its basic implementation to support randomized attack locations and letting other components use the system.  I made it so that it's compatible both my behavior tree system and animator so that they could summon attack patterns mid animation which gives them a much snappier feel than the way I had them before.

Unfortunately there isn't much to show for my efforts :(  I'll still be working on finalizing the last 2 bosses so that they feel as smooth and powerful as the bosses in the first level.  After that it's just a matter of waiting for the art to come in so I can give them a face lift.

Another thing I spent time fine tuning was adding Particle Effects to my attack patterns!  This was actually a very educational and entertaining development process, and by the end of it I created some cool particles for the bombs that enemies throw, the player projectiles, and most importantly a satisfying little dust effect when you knock enemies back with your melee weapon.  I think it adds a lot of juice to the combat and I'm excited to show it off in the latest build when it goes live later this week.  I can feel the end in sight for the demo build and I'm very excited to reach this milestone!

Music

Another thing that happened this week is I spent some time talking to @juaneiava who is currently developing the first 3 tracks for the game.  In only a couple days he's already produced a main menu track that feels super bad ass (like the music to a batman movie mixed with bloodborne) and is now working on a track for the first level.  This is by far the coolest thing that's happened this week, and I'm excited to show off that intro music when players first fire up the game.

Next Week

Next week I'll be working to finalize the attack patterns for the bosses in level 2 and will be spending a lot more time cleaning up some really boring bugs I've been putting off fixing.  It's getting to be that time again that it's all hands on deck just doing the dull parts of development like fixing problems, play testing, and balancing.  Hopefully it comes out looking good.  I also really want to experiment with a couple more mechanics that are easy additions, like bonus rewards for killing defense enemies with their corresponding weakness!