Summary:
In which more aesthetic changes are made; new enemies are added--including a new boss; an extant boss is made less overwhelming; performance improvements are instated; and music is added to a race.
Greetings and salutations!
This week's screenshot shows a new enemy:
The week just past was a multifarious one, I think: one of aesthetics and enemy-making and gameplay-work and technical matters and more!
I mentioned in last week's blog-post, I believe, that I had made some changes to the aesthetics of the "Ossuary Moon". In the week just past, then, I went further, and instated some changes to the aesthetics of some of the extant enemies, too.
Specifically, enemies are now--to one degree or another--a little more shaded, and in some cases, a little more consistent with each other. Some of these changes are slight--the standard skeletons look little different, for example--while in other cases they're somewhat distinct, I feel.
Either way, I think that I'm happier with their appearances now than I was before!
And speaking of enemies, in the week just past I added some new ones!
This was prompted by my desire to look into hiring a sound designer for the vertical slice, as I recall: It occurred to me that it might be a good idea to have a full list of my desired sounds--and that, with enemies as-yet not made, their associated sounds were uncertain.
So, I set about filling the list of intended enemies.
Two of these new enemies come from a sub-region of the "Ossuary Moon": a place of bones from the primaeval past, bones long turned to stone. A place, in short, of fossils.
The first of these is, essentially, a trilobite, rolled up to form a floating "pill" shape. This enemy then dashes at the player intermittently, doing damage on impact, and in between drifts harmlessly. (It's very much inspired by the nautiloid enemies from the game
Aquaria, as I recall.)
The second is perhaps my favourite addition thus far: the skull of some perhaps-saurian creature, that relentlessly chases after the player, biting biting biting as it does!
It's seen in the first screenshot of this blog-post, above, but here below you should see a gif of it in action:
And last of the new enemies implemented in the week just past--and unfinished at time of writing, for that matter--is a new boss: the liche who is the primary boss of the moon; an undead sorcerer and archmage of undeath.
And as part of implementing the liche, I've made a bare beginning on a level in which to encounter them.
Remaining with bosses, I made some changes to the previously-shown "multi-stage" boss that's found on the "Ossuary Moon".
Specifically, I felt that it was somewhat too unforgivingly hard--even I, who made it, wasn't managing to get through the encounter. And since I'm not aiming for a hardcore combat experience in this game, I decided to tone it down rather.
To that end, I reworked its attacks (and concomitantly, some of its animations).
And it now, to me at least, feels rather more fair! (Which, according to my experience with difficulty, means that it should likely still challenge first-time players.)
On the technical side, in the week just past I implemented some performance improvements: the AI "avoidance" behaviour is now more streamlined; projectile-templates in weapons are now constructed only once per class; and certain sound-related text-string definitions are likewise now generated only once per class. (For the most part, in the latter two cases.) The result is, I think, that the frame-rate no longer dips as easily as it previously did.
On a different "note", I added some music to the previously-mentioned race that's found on the "Vertical Slice Moon". Specifically, I've applied a (royalty-free) track that I'm quite fond of, and that I'd hoped to find a place for--I'm thus glad that it seems to fit the race!
And finally, there were a number of changes, fixes, and tweaks that don't seem worth detailing here, I do believe!
That then is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^