I'm away from my main computer this week so it's been a coding heavy week, but we really did get a lot done this week.  Mainly me (For once)! And I'm excited talk about it.  I've finally gotten back to my programming roots and had the chance to touch up all the little pieces of code that have been bothering me for quite some time.  It's been exciting to revisit files that in my git history were there with the first push.  Lots of people hate looking at their old work but I love it.  Sure I have moments of "uhhh that's so gross, why did I think that worked?" But there are also genuinely times where I really impress myself. 

Art

Starting with art though, Ref and I finally FINALLY finished all of the VFX for the game.  This was much more work than I expected because as we went through I also took the time to brush up every powerup we had.  The last 3 we did this week required some several tweaks but I think they came out well enough

The powerup tree was tricky, because it have 2 overlapping abilities that can both fire at once.  The orange circle (a deflecting force field) bounces back all bullets in the form of an energy wave.  The white suction effect is an absorb, that takes in projectiles and releases a massive blast of energy.

These two took a long time because as I said last week i had to redo the deflection logic in my game.  I needed to update it so that we could interact with all of the attack patterns I'd developed so that the ability is still viable to pick up.  As an added bonus we spent time increasing the "Juice" of releasing these energy waves since players were underusing these abilities.

The absorb explosion.  I also added my shockwave shader to really sell the effect. It feels very powerful.

The deflect projectile. This was inspired by dragon ball z.  I also added some particle effects to it to make it seem truly devastating.

Finally we also update the charged slash ability that extends your melee swings with a blast of energy. This one was interesting because the ability is actually one of the most broken in the game when fully upgraded (every second you release this blast and it does like 5x your normal damage) but people rarely ever got all the way up the upgrade tree to use it.  To compensate for that I actually modified the ability a little bit to release smaller shockwaves when not at full power.  This will hopefully promise the player that it will get stronger over time.

After the VFX, Ref and I started working on updating the melee attacks for the game.  Let's cover this in the programming section.

Music

Juan sent me a music track for the boss fight earlier this week.  Unfortunately it wasn't quite was I was looking for.  I think the thing I failed to communicate, which I only discovered after listening to the track, is that it needed to retain the elements of the main menu's intensity and darkness.  I tried communicating this with a couple references, but I hope I can explain it correctly.  One big takeaway from this project has been that I really have to brush up on my music fundamentals so I can better supply reference material and communicate what I want.

Programming

Finally on a programming side, we completed a lot.  I wrapped up the resource node system! which has been a delight to see the levels procedurally generating little nodes that release resources for players to collect and upgrade their weapons.  The hardest part that I worried about has been balancing the resource drop rate to keep the game engaging and keeping the hunt for resources alive.  I had feared this part of the game because I do not have any skills in balancing but this week I aimed for simplicity and it paid off.  I set some simple rules to unlocking resources:

• First level resources = just money
• Second level = money + one resources
• Third level = money + two resources

Anything above this remains at two resources and scales up linearly to keep things simple.  It worked out rather well, and I got a good spreadsheet out of it to boot.

The last thing I worked on this week was reworking the melee system.  This was particularly tricky because my goal of this rework was preserving the pixel perfect nature of all of the swing animations.  My old system simply took a sprite and stretched it every which way to make it work in different dimensions.  To fix this, I found this one powerful formula to save my game:

• sprite scale / sprite base scale * starting local scale

This handy formula lets me set the dimensions of any attack.  For example the first one being the broadsword.

The size of my attack box for the broadsword is 5x3 and my world unit scaling is 16ppi.  So to set the scale perfectly we created an attack animation the canvas dimension of: 16 * 5 width and 16 * 3 height. that ensured it was correctly sized.

These were the sizes we determined for all of the attack animations

• Dagger: 3x4 so 192 by 64 canvas for 4 frames
• Distributor: 5x5 so 320x80 canvas for 4 frames
• Hammer: 6x6 so 384 x 96 for 4 frames
• Rapier: 7x1.5 so 448x28 for 4 frames
• TwinAxes attack 1: 7x3 so 448x56 for 4 frames
• TwinAxes attack 2: 5.5x5.5 so 352x88 for 4 frames

Once we were done, the scaling was perfect for all of our attacks at their base dimensions.  Then with my handy formula I was able to scale them up so that their sprite scale matches the new attack box size at all times!

Next week

Next week is an exciting one.  This marks the completion of all heavy code and art work for the game itself.  From now on our only goals are brushing up the game to look as cool as possible, removing bugs, and playtesting for the demo.  This is exciting for me.  It finally feels like a real game, and one that I'm personally excited to play.  On the art size we will be switching the main menu art from illustrations to full on pixel art, and I will be cleaning out the bugs and making it player ready.  

The part I'm most excited about is capturing screenshots and brushing up the trailer so it can entice players here on itch.  I know how horrible out of date they are.