Merry Christmas from Bloodmoon Survivors! This week has been filled with real life stuff more than anything: Travelling, eating, recovering from the prior year, but I did manage to get some development time in in the evenings.  I didn't manage to get everything I wanted to do, but like common, have I ever?

Art

Starting with Ref's art, as per usual.  We've continued our work on the powerups and it's been smooth sailing through these last few.  Ref has been on a tear converting our old powerup artwork into something new and exciting and I've been going crazy with particle systems, and shaders to add a little game juice to his inventions.  It's been fun to revisit the powers I already have and just make them a little bit crazier as we go!

Hollow points will need to be renamed after this, but I love the rolling effect on the attack.  It looks so intimidating. This ability softens up enemies by doing percent damage to any enemies above a certain health % Threshold

A Spinning Scythe that culls the enemies, it pairs nicely with hollow point by executing enemies below X% health.  The idea is to use hollow points to soften then Grim reaper to kill

Ref also gave me Ice powerups to play with.  These have been fun because I learned a cool little particle trick to make them look way more intimidating. Basically, instead of 1 particle system I use 2 to sell their size.  One I slap on the parent object and make it shoot trailing particles out of the back.  These persist in world space making a cool trailing effect.  The Second particle system I add to the game object's sprite child object and it emits a separate series of particles that float around it.  The trick with these though is that they more in local space, making the missile seem like it has energy swirling around it as it travels.  I've done it for both effects, can't wait to show it off in the next build!

Icicles - You spawn these little splinters of ice in clusters of 4 to 8 depending on how powered up you are.  They home in and freeze you targets, and deal percent damage to boot when enemies thaw!

Permafrost - this ability was inspired by WoW's cone of cold.  It spawns in front of you, freezing anything unfortunate enough to get caught in its path.  In gave it a lerp speed so you can drag it around the screen as you switch targets

On top of these, I've also implemented some powerups that trigger when you perfect swap your weapons.  This automatically knocks enemies back and give the player a little breathing room to fight.  I added a cool shader that ripples out of the player when he performs this knockback which I think adds a nice touch

Music

On the music side of things Juan has finished up another pleasant track that he identified as necessary.  It's the music that plays once the round is over.  It is meant to be still tonally dark, but lighter in mood, almost contemplative, to give the player time to relax and check out all the cool unlocks they received after fighting for 20 minutes.  He nailed the track on the first try, and we're moving on to the next one next week.  2 tracks left before the music is done!

Programming

On the programming side I've just been brushing up the powerups.  I really wanted to start implementing the Bravery point system as well, but I realized that it's not as simple as I originally thought and the golden rule of programming is that it's cheaper and more cost effective to spend time whiteboarding then coding.  Every line I write is a future liability, so I'm trying to take my time and get the system right in my head before refactoring.

I've identified 2 major changes that need to be made.  First, I actually need to redo my resources in the game so that each level drops it's own unique resources.  This is important because otherwise players can speck into upgrades that are very overpowered if you acquire them all at once such as Health.  I want people to get a tier of health, then be required to play the other levels to get the resources to get the higher teir upgrades.  I think this is important to keep the game balanced as they dive deeper into the levels.

While I'm working on resources, I think I also want to rebalance how they're distributed.  Right now the game relies on giving players resources per minute they survive.  The goal is to ensure that players that are struggling continue to get the resources they need to unlock powerups.  I don't want to only reward players who are already doing well.  However, players also say that they find that after completing quests in the level, there really isn't anything to do but survive.  I want to address this by putting more resources in the level and make them harder to bust open.  My plan is to recycle the "Reward Burst" system I use for bosses where I spray out exp coins when they hit certain health thresholds, and to increase the health of my resource nodes so players have to spend more time busting them open.  I think it'll be a fun little minigame for players to hunt them down and farm them in the heat of battle.

Finally, I need to update the Bravery point system to implement quests. These quests are unique to each level, and difficulty.  Players will spend the Bravery Points they get to unlock higher difficulties.  The beauty of this system is it synergizes well with the resources, because I can make the rewards for higher difficulties be larger drop rates in the nodes I place around the map!

Next week

Next week we're going to continue adding cool powers and hopefully wrap up all this brush up work.  As fun as it is, I'm ready to move onto the next art task which is making the game's mascot and main menu screen!

I'm also hoping to AT LEAST start the resource node refactor by making some resource nodes and placing them dynamically around the levels.  I don't need to actually make the currencies do anything yet, but just testing out if it's fun to collect them and saving them to spend will be a great start.