ProjectDragonfly Update Nov2022 (Patreon)

Finally made it to a state where the workflow is super clean, at least for developing the base game. Making new items and stages is super easy now and making the assets to go along with them is also fairly easy although I'm still havin' trouble with art in general recently.

Here I finally got around to making a bunch of bullet assets to use, which ended up begin way easier than I thought. As of now there are 6 possible colours for bullets (Red, 2 Pink shades, 2 Purple shades, Black) thought I'm thinking I could probably shed it down to 3 or 4. I also think a few of the smaller bullets are too small and I probably need to redo them bigger while also making a few more new larger bullets. I am super happy with them so far, the little animations ended up great even thought I didn't consider them much in the process of making them.

You can also see some new shot sprites, been playing around with the palette ideas I had last month, and while I think the blue = player, red, purple = enemy idea works and looks good I think I do have some freedom to mess with the player shots some more since the fact that enemy bullets have black outlines is enough to distinguish them. Luckily experimenting with that sort of thing has become way easier.

Upon trying to make new stage and boss attacks I've found it kinda hard to making patterns that are fun to play. I often have a lot of ideas I think are cool but end up not really playing very well. I think I need to get into the right mindset when it comes to pattern design, and maybe start with WAAAY less ambitious ideas.

Designing new items has been a blast though, even come up with some more character concepts through it, since player characters are pretty much entirely based around their starting items. The best idea I had was for a forward-focus character that benefits from constantly landing hits with their main shot. So if you can constantly position under a boss you'll kill them super quick, but any time not spent direct hitting them will shrink that advantage quick. The other cool one was for a bomb based item that causes charge pickups to drop while dealing damage but especially when in close range to enemies. The next time you use a bomb it'll be stronger based on how much charge you collected and can eventually become free if you fully charged up. It results in really interesting gameplay where you take risks and if you make a mistake and have to bomb it doesn't feel so bad because it's probably super powerful.

Another big thing is I've kinda nailed down the premise of the game story-wise. The main idea is that everything in the game exists in this realm where space infinitely folds on itself creating a labyrinth that connects to places in the world arbitrarily (explaining random stages). All the characters and the world was trapped in this realm and everyone has the same goal, to find a way out (explaining how most bosses are also playable). I want to explain the roguelike-style respawning but I'm not 100% on it yet. Ideally there would be a true-ending kinda deal where you can actually escape, though I don't know what the method would be exactly I do have a few ideas as to what would be there.
Also decided there would be no dialogue, I suck at writing it and it interrupts the flow anyways. I think most of the lore will be told through item text and context clues via boss spell names.

What I'm looking to get done next is if I can, just make a whole lot of assets, including trying to nail down the UI (been cropping it out recently cause its terrible). This is probably gonna be hard cause the art block is still real unfortunately and I've been procrastinating on another commission I really should do. So backup plan is to get into a better pattern design mindset and possibly redesign my menus cause they kinda suck currently.