DragonflyProject Update Jan2023 (Patreon)

Huge progress this month I'm happy to say. Lot's to go through but I'll start with the most exciting.

The visuals are really starting to come along. I have some basic backgrounds from last month, I have a bunch of new shaders to perform cool effects, I have a basic start on the UI, and I finally have a pretty much final enemy visual design.

Behold the vulture.

Very much inspired by the Rainworld vulture. I know I said I was gonna use silouettes for enemies but I'm kinda sold on this low detail look. I will probably still use the shadowy look for high detail areas (such as the wings here) but for the main body of enemies I wanna try get this cool mix of organic and mechanical I think could be really cool as a theming for all the enemies. I might even try make this design a bit more organic but for now I think it's great.

I also have a short video of a wip boss fight using the spells that I'm currently the most happy with.

streamable.com/e/6nbwm6

Here you can see what I'm trying to do with the UI. I want that decaying mechanical look that I'm also using with the enemies. It's very basic now but I eventually want lots of moving parts so that UI doesn't feel so disconnected with the game world as it does in a lot of other shmups. You can kinda see the start of this with the gears next to the spell timer and spell name.

You may also notice the hue-shifting on the bullets more noticeably now. I know I mentioned it last month but I didn't really show it but this is the kinda stuff it allows me to do.

I've also been experimenting with pickup styles as I'm in the process of replacing all the Touhou assets. Right now I'm using flashing doritos but I'm not sold on it yet. They're don't interfere with visibility which is good but I don't yet know what I want the pickups to feel like as part of the game world yet so expect changes there.

A very subtle change you might notice here is that I'm experimenting with a new rank system. Previously, rank increased with the stage number hand in hand but now it's affect by the progression through the stage as well as how long the player has survived without dying. I'm trying this out because there has always been the potential that the player gets way too powerful and just one-shots everything. But now the better they're doing the harder the rank will accelerate in an attempt to kill the player. I'm still working on the specifics but hopefully this will make the game always challenging no matter how powerful you are but also has the potential to make you feel super strong by overcoming extreme obstacles.

Something else in this vein that I'm experimenting with is limited max lives and bombs. For now I'm going with 5 but I could potentially go with 4 or 3. The purpose of this would be to prevent players from stockpiling resources until there's basically no threat to them. Instead they must focus on recovery which would ideally require more aggressive play with certain items (ie. flytrap's caged heart). Since this is a purely survival game, lives have no purpose beyond survival (duh), so the player should want to utilize them more, same with bombs.

Also I've finally managed to get my IDEAL BULLET BLENDING working without any cluinky bullet layers with the help of shaders.

The solution was remarkably simple. All I needed to do was use basic subtract blending which I was using before but couldn't have a dark outline because the brightest parts needed to be on the outer part of the bullet or else the outlines wouldn't blend together. The best you could do was a white outline which looked ugly as hell. But thankfully with a shader I can use a white outline so that they all blend properly and then render the entire layer with a shader that replaces all white pixels with black pixels, leaving me with the nice black outline.

Other than that I guess I've been working on a bunch of utility functions to aid in making cool patterns. I'm most proud of this function that determines the point at which a laser intersects the edge of the world. I did the math completely from scratch and it works flawlessly (provided the laser starts from inside the world).

The diagram I made to visualize my ideas as I was workshopping it is truly deranged though. But it works.

Can't say what I'll do next cause I think I work best just going with the flow, whatever I feel like doing will probably get done. I would like to have a more detailed UI though that's for sure. And I'm kinda feeling attempting a few boss backgrounds. In general I'd like to get the game looking nice enough to finally post about on twitter and stuff. The other thing is though I made all this progress but at the neglect of my commission work, so I really should take a break to catch up on that, but it's kinda hard when I'm getting so hyped about working on this.

Anyway, I'm excited for how this is coming along, thank you all for supporting this project as always.