DragonflyProject Update Sep2023 (Patreon)

New version 0.1.6 available for download (find it attached).

To play simply replace the old exe in the folder I sent on the Aug2023 update.

Looking at the changelog, it seems like I didn't actually add as much new stuff to the mix as I thought I did, so I'm sorry about that. Seems like it was mainly a bug fixing month, even though that silly random freezing bug is still around for me. I've checked around and it might have to do with luaJIT which scares me. I've heard its a simple as changing a .dll but I'm still hesitant to mess around with it but I aim to investigate that particular bug a bit in future.

As I hoped, I was able to nail down a few spells and I gotta say it's liberating when I don't worry about balance right away. Most of these spells are for The Dancer and as I result they are now able to be encountered as an end of stage boss. There were also some other new spells including this one for Voiceless which turned out really cool. I was experimenting with homing lasers, ended up cranking up the homing a little too far but it ended up being really fun to play. It's "Demon Carving" in the practice menu if you wanna test it out.

I've also been thinking about a huge rework to the rank system. I've tested out a few things in this update but I plan on providing the player with much more control over the difficulty of their run. The plan is to have new players able to reduce the rank and be able to finish a basic run with some effort, but lock a true ending behind a high rank so that mastery is rewarded. It sounds simple, I mean this is how it works in most shmups with rank systems right? but because the power-level of each run is so volatile it's hard to design a consistent way to grant control over the rank. I've only changed some equations for now but I want to try out a UFO-like system where each act and spell drops an item that can either grant bonus life/bombs or rank. Something like that could work, it's consistent and rewards timing and positioning but it feels like theres a more natural solution hiding somewhere, but I won't know until I try. So definitely expect something like this in the next update.

Apart from that, I think this month I really wanna nail down Ember and Ker's portraits and potentially even the main character. While they don't have a design yet I do have a solid theming and backstory for them so I really should figure something out there. I would also like to get some more backgrounds done, having a good-looking game makes me feel way better about showing it off and I wanna get to that point real bad right about now.

I dunno if anyone's noticed but my motivation has been in a real bad place for the last few months, but I'm finally starting to feel things picking up again so I wanna take advantage of that as much as I can. Getting to a point where I can post stuff publicly would go a long way but I'm still not super confident about it but I think the time is approaching where no matter what I'm gonna just go ahead and post some shit, it's probably the best thing for my mental right now. And when that point arises I'm also thinking about setting up a discord for the updates, playtesting and discussion and whatnot. Please do let me know if that'd interest you, I've been tentative about setting up a discord because it seemed too early but I think it's a good time now and could help keep me motivated. Of course patrons would be the only one's with access to the updates from there.

Last thing before I forget, I'm throwing around the name "Savage Limbo" as the actual name of the game. I think it's also time to move on from ProjectDragonfly soon but finding a good name has been tough and this is the one that sounds the coolest and also represents the themes and gameplay the best. I was also tossing around "Redlam" cause I like cool made up words but I'm not 100% sold on either one. Would love feedback on this or any suggestions if you have any.