ProjectDragonfly Update Nov2023 (Patreon)

Finally an update that's on schedule, feels good. Bit of a shorter one obviously but there are still a few significant additions.

Notably, a new game interface! Complete with life, bombs and their charge, a point counter, a pressure meter (rank), item display and a stage progress disk, all with subtle animations to keep things lively but hopefully not too distracting. The stage progress disk is the only thing that needs work but the rest is as good as final as far as I'm concerned which feels good to say.

Speaking of final, I've been drawing more of the item sprites, and now all the player items have been sprited (except the new player character). I've also started redoing a bunch of the older sprites and adding some new ones for the basic items, so now they're all slightly more HD and I think it's a good look for them that's easy for me to make consistent which is honestly a bit of a problem for me especially when I space out development as much as I have recently.

I added Entity as a boss last update and now Entity is a player character, who has a randomised passive and weapon each time you press play with them. Probably a horrible character but why not include it.

I added some notable debug controls:
F4: Brings up the profiler which is used to find what function is using up the most CPU, though the profiler itself will eat up A LOT of FPS itself.
F5: Will show or hide the bonus info on the HUD such as FPS, DPS and Object Count (DPS has been fixed this update)
F6: Will show or hide the entirety of the normal HUD.

For December I have a lot more time so I feel like I can be a little ambitious. I definitely want to get all the item sprites done, maybe make a start to the library on the title screen which will show all the item info so you'll be able to check out all the sprites. I'm also gonna set aside some time to really focus on music again, everything else is really shaping up but the lack of music is becoming more and more of a set back, but also I really just wanna get back into it for myself as well, finishing a song would make my year. I don't guarantee I'll be able to actually finish one but I hope I can at least get something going.