This week is light on content as it was a holiday Monday and ref and I have been kind of in the weeds with the Main menu.  Let's get into it!

Art

Art this week, as I've said has been rather low.  Ref and I are thinking of redesigning the main menu so we've been putting a lot of effort into making it look good.  This has involved a lot of research and mock ups of all the sprites we will have and the layout.  I've also been writing up a parallax script and trying to get the lighting just right since we're ditching the old capsule art main menu and giving it a cool pixel art, fully animated make over. Behold!

Just kidding.  This is definitely still the mock up.  But it's easy to see what we've been trying to accomplish.  We've decided on a character size of 128x128 to give them all some details and we finally FINALLY found a place to put the moon, which has been something I've been meaning to do for a while now.  Soon this will all have a nice polish and lighting and particles to really excite the player and make them want to play.

Music

Juan finished the boss fight track and it's a bop! Very intense and it has a chorus reminiscent of dark souls.  I really really dig it!

Programming

On the programming side I've been on clean up duty all week.  I've taken care of a laundry list of tasks, but the main one I'm most proud of is spicing up the main game mechanic "dual wielding".  The biggest problem I've had from playtesters is that the dual weild mechanic is hard to remember.  The reason for this is because I had a very convoluted way of activating it, which involved switching weapons but not activating your perfect swap.  This was very counterintuitive for the player and even if they knew they HAD the dual weild charge, they just couldn't remember in the heat of battle how to do it.

So to fix this I gave dual wield it's own button, ala the right-mouse click.  I also added a little charge time on it and some awesome shaders to really sell the power of this thing.  Now when it's available your dual weild meter starts to shake with the raw power you're keeping in and there's fire effects glowing all over the place.  When you hold down the right click a charge timer appears, the screen starts to shake, and when it's activated a massive aoe knockback eminates from you and pushes back all the enemies on the screen.  It's awesome and really conveys the power of this transformation.  I'm excited (and a little nervous) to have people try it out.  I hope it makes them feel like gods while it's active.  

To add to the effect, I also added some other reminders for the player to do all the necessary steps to activate dual weild.  For example I noticed people weren't paying enough attention to their meters and would keep fighting with the weapon they preferred, rather than killing with both to get their dual weild charged.  As such, I added a spicy sound effect and a shake on the ui element once your dual weild for a weapon is fully charged, so you are reminded to switch weapons.  I also added a continuous notiifcation shake to the meter when it's fully ready so the player knows it's charged.

Other than that, I also updated the keybindings so players can swap out the button to press at any time.  And also I updated the tutorial to demonstrate how it's done.  This funny enough sent me down a rabbit hole of updates the the UI of all things which gave me the change to add the visual polish I wanted to all the other UI elements.  Each screen is now Tweened, so it looks nice and professional when it pops up!

Next Week

Next week, we will continue working on the main menu, trying to get it nice and polished.  I will also continue working on the 25 PAGES of bug fixes I have to get through (my god) before the demo is nice and ready.  After that I'm going to get a redesign of the capsule art and start Play testing play testing play testing.  I read that it is absolutely essential to playtest on a large scale BEFORE putting out the demo, so I will be taking that advice to heart.  I really hope people like it!