Since the last update two weeks ago the following minor changes have been made.
- Intro screen updated to proper date.
- Practice mode respawns the enemy after the player kills it.
- Minigunner received a minimap image.
- Arcade mode actually spawns the shielder enemy type.
- The enemy spawns are telegraphed, so the player doesn’t face cheap deaths when suddenly an enemy appears in front of them.
My solution for telegraphing the spawns was to create a spawner object.
When there is nothing in the pipeline, the spawner is a muted grey/black. When there is an enemy to be spawned, the spawner changes colour, from blue to yellow to red as the spawn approaches.
But then I realized that this was too subtle, so I just slapped down some particles to grab the player’s attention. It works, and it can be amazing how much of a difference even this hacked together thing makes.
Currently these are only active in the first boss test, as opposed to the arcade mode or campaign. Speaking of said boss, here he is.
I mentioned this boss in my latest “I Hate Modern Gaming” piece.
I didn’t want to animate anything, so I made him the disembodied head of George Soros. He shoots projectiles out of his mouth when he isn’t casting various spells or summoning golems through teleporters to fight on his behalf. The reason why you encounter this thing on the nine hundredth floor of Epstein’s basement is because
it’s true to lifevideo games need content.
To be clear, while this game is not supposed to feature a story worth more than a few laughs, this doesn’t even qualify as a prototype. I just needed something to test out a few gameplay ideas I had, and get some programming up and running. Nevertheless, I think the boss turned out quite well, and I think he’s fun to fight against.
Or rather, he’s fun for me. Likely anyone else will find him to be totally overwhelming, or, occasionally, trivial. This is because I tuned him to be at the exact point where I, if I’m really focusing, can beat him around 80% of the time. Even as I say that, it stops being particularly true, because the more I play against him, the more easily I kill him. It’s pretty close to 100% now, and I’ve even beaten him a few times while taking nothing more than a bit of shield damage.
If I increased the amount of projectiles he throws at you, or the rate at which he spawns Golems to fight for him, then the playtesters would probably die almost immediately. The final product will of course have many different difficulty levels, it’s just not worth my time right now to provide that level of polish over what is essentially a prototype of a prototype. I hope you can manage.
The final product will also have a detailed scoring system, which provides an even more granular self-imposed difficulty. Again, there’s just so much else to work on that it’s not a high priority right now.
As always, you can find the build here.
Rake Touhou, who would’ve thought of it.