RELEASED

ITCH PAGE HERE GO PLAY IT

What I Did

WOO LAST DEVLOG!!
Just for completion sake I'm gonna list here what I did this week.... which was mostly finish up the second level!
I'll be honest that it was a touch tougher than expected, and I'll admit I think it's a bit worse than the first level I did, but it's still pretty enoyable!
I encountered a weird... issue, idk, about spawning bullets too frequently making graze impossible, which was weird, but it was easy to circumvent.
I also made a nice tutorial so that I wouldn't have to make it through text! It's pretty simple, just a series of texts appearing, but still fine.
Ah...
It's done.

Another heavy week!! If it all goes well then I'll have a release for this demo/proof of concept thing next week! Look at it, I even bring gifs!!

What I Did

Loads and loads of tiny things and fixes!
Most importantly I discovered that my graze count was broken, which,,,,,,, considering that's the main mechanic of the game,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, was worrying.
But luckily I got that pretty early in the week, before I got to the balancing, so it wasn't that much of an issue. Plus, it was a very easy fix. It was litteraly a bool check that I forgot about ToT.
Other than these smaller things though, I got a whole complete level done!! Yayyy!!!! Yep, dialogue and all! Note that "Done" here means for the demo, not for a full game. It's got 12 patterns total and 9 in the longest play path, and I'll try to match that on the second level I'm working on for this!

What I'll Do

Finish it up, I guess?
The main things I need are: The second level, which also entails new boss and player sprites along with the dialogue and patterns.
Credits, which will be pretty easy to do.
And, if time allows... a tutorial. Either way that's gonna be included at a txt at minimum, but if I get the time it'll be a level in itself!
Most of it'd be simple text and maybe one or two simple patterns to test the player, but that's it, so I think it'll be doable!
Fingers crossed, as I'm in the home stretch!

So much done!! Thank fuck for time off!! Here's a comparison from june this year to now, Im so proud...

What I Did

Shit, what didn't I do?
I did of course what I mentioned last week, touching up slightly boss movement (specifically boss now returns smoothly to the default position after attacking, instead of just blinking there), I implemented boss timeout along with its scoring system, and adjusted the UI display for player power/progress.
But of course, that's just what I mentioned last week! I also implemented saving (just for settings and high scores, but still), level selection, pausing, redid the scoring and level progression behaviour (as the previous was a touch overcomplicated imo), did a new animation and UI for player clearing areas which turned out quite good, implenented an auto-skip for dialogue, and.
Most important of all.
I got music in the game!!! WAHOOOO
Really, words can't describe the difference in feel that better SFX and music make. I'm currently using a couple of sounds from FilmCow's free SFX library and some music from NoSoapRadio that I found via gamesounds.xyz.
In all, man what a week. I'm actually believing I can get this done within the next couple of weeks! Sure it's not gonna be perfect, and I'm gonna keep telling myself that, but its like a dam has been openned, and its been a looooong time since gamedev felt this exciting to me.

What I'll Do

So, there's definitely a good number of things yet to do for this project. But as I said, I'm holding myself back from trying and doing everything perfectly.
Therefore, in terms of actual implementation... most things are donezo, even if they could be much, much better. I can only think of actual high score UI, credits and endgame progression.
Other than that, most of what remains is visual or design. So, what I want to do this week is. Again. Reworking bullet shapes.
I did that a couple of weeks ago, and they're fine, but they're not........ that pleasing or easy to read. I'm gonna abandon the idea of giving them "borders" I think and go for simpler shapes. After that I'll try and actually finish one of the two planned levels, dialogue and all.
That's gonna be the roughest part to accept as "finished" I think, but I gotta accept that, again, I cannot make this "complete" or "good enough for me". It just has to be held together and minimally enjoyable, which I hope it'll turn out to be.

Whew, this is the start of the big push!!

What I Did

All planned bullet behaviours are implemented! Or rather, I'm promising myself these are it.
But honestly that's still quite a bit. All the base speed variation stuff, and now there's homing as well as delayed aiming, and bullets that burst and bullets that leave a trail of bullets.
A good variety to try and do what I want. And I'll try and hold myself to these only since uh. Man I can't just keep piling stuff on.
It doesn't help that well. With these new behaviours in play the maximum number of bullets I can have while mantaining 60fps has seemingly decreased so... that's sad.

What I'll Do

So! I'm taking the next couple weeks off of work, and the goal is to hopefully finish up a demo for this project by the end.
So this week I'll have a lot more time to work on this! What I'm planning to do then on the next few days is smoothen the boss' movement and work out how timeout works for each pattern.
Additionally, I'm gonna touch up the UI and perhaps the UX in general, settle on a couple game terms and such... Hopefully I get it all sorted.

Small one this week, but look! Image!

What I Did

...Not everything I wanted sadly! This week was a bit much so I couldn't find the time (or mindset) to get into the code more, but I did do the main thing, which was new sprites!! Wow! Look at them, so pretty!!!

What I'll Do

Basically what I couldn't get to this week, meaning the new bullet behaviours. They shouldn't be too hard, I know I can do both of them in a week.

And after a couple weeks buffer... in which I made this website, wowee, here's what I've worked on actually in the game! It's not much but it's something, and that's enough for me.

What I did

Circling back to what was discussed in the last devlog, I actually did both things I mentioned, having dialogue sprites become 'unfocused' when the character's not speaking and blocking player input when dialogue is up! I don't know why I didn't do these things earlier cause honestly it was... very simple to do! Though I did have to set up a custom dialogic portrait, which took a bit of trial and error. It was frustrating trying to figure out which funcion was recquired and was missing, so here, for future reference: Apparently dialogic custom portraits recquire the _get_covered_rect function to be able to work, which was not made clear in their docs.
They're open source though so I can't really fault them for that :P
Other than that, I've started on reworking player and boss sprites! The ones I'm using are from an old attempt at this project and the characters went through a bit of a redesign.

What I'll do

New player and boss sprites!! And a new bullet behaviour at least. I already did homing, so I'm thinking more speed variation, specifically go -> stop -> aim -> go. That and bullets exploding into other bullets are the only other behaviours I currently have in mind for a demo, let's see if I can knock them out in a week!