This week I've followed through with finishing the evolution system! It's all there... in the code.  From a programming standpoint the game is in an interesting place.  The demo is completely finished, and now when you play you see all of these cool evolutions available for you powerups, but when you finally unlock them, out comes developer art and debug lines :) It's funny and also kind of nice to how much progress I made on this system (all of it) in less than a week. Let's talk about it.

Art

Now you might be asking, if you have such a talented pixel artist working with you, why is there no art for the evolutions? Well that's because Ref have been continuing with the creation of level 3 enemies and he's done a killer job.  They're all mocked up, and the first 2 are now live and walking around.  Check it out.

This spooky scare crow will chase you down.  He's entirely resistant to projectile damage so you'll have to dice him up with your blades.

I really like the long limbed and spooky look of this guy.  As we continue I've noticed that his art is getting slightly more sinister with each level, and for me that's a good thing.  I love how all of the other level sprites turned out 

I honestly can't wait to see these enemies fully animated and causing trouble for the player.  I think it's gonna be a good time.  It's also really exciting because these are the first enemies with game mechanics not seen in the demo >:D be prepared!

Programming

On the programming side I've just been churning out evolutions.  Like I said before, it's been a journey of a week, but it's really nice to see that I can pump them out so quickly.  Fortunately I have a few things working in my favor:

- 1: I know the damage numbers for all evolutions, the only thing that changes is their functionality, now their power scaling

- 2: I have been building a whole suite of helper classes and tools to help me work with animation quickly.  Having this build really helped me nail down designing the powerups.  The code powering this is already tested and modularized so all I have to do is think up of some cool functionality and implement.

- 3: I did the piping up first.  The hardest part was figuring out how the system would work, and how to morph my powerups on the fly.  I spent a large chunk of my vacation time thinking about this, and I'm glad I did because by the time I got home it was pretty easy to code.  I guess it's true what they say that 80% of coding is just sitting in the shower thinking about it (Who says this?)

Next Week

Next week I'm going to playtest the evolution system and if everything goes smoothly build out the evolutions for non-demo powerups as well! This is my favorite part of game development. I love sharing the game with people having them enjoy it, and watching something I spent countless hours working on break when it's in the hands of the player.  It's painful at times, but it really helps you prioritize your next goals.  Plus, it's fun to buy pizza and a beer for you friends in exchange for a night of playing your game.  I'll report back what the results are for this system soon! I'm hoping it's positive!