Wrapping up the build. Changes and final animations. (Patreon)

Heyo again everyone! Sorry for the late post, there was a lot going on today, but here we are with the last progress report before v0.6's launch on the 1st. I still have a bit left to do unfortunately, but I am hoping to put in the hours to wrap it up this weekend.

Now! Let's get to it!

As you can see above, Nika has been added to the party select, and you may have noticed some changes to her planned abilities. Let's take a look at her abilities in their current state:

-------

ACTIVE:

Reckless Play: Throw out a ball of yarn. Collecting will give you +1.5% ATK SPD on primary weapons (This will also effect Gatling Gun), but you will also take +1.5% Damage (The image is out of date in terms of the current numbers). This buff will stack infinitely, and will last until the end of the level.

PASSIVE:

Nimble: Boost speed is doubled, and Brake speed is halved.

--------

At first Reckless Play was spread across both her passive, and her active. Upon review, I felt this was a little too "isolating" in the sense that her role would be very independent from the rest of the team. As a result could feel like she has no real synergy. I decided to combine them to make her active, and give her a new passive.

The dynamic of Nika is to give a bit more of a pacing character. She can utilize dead space, and busy moments in levels well. She can brake better if there are a lot of enemies, but she can also clear dead space in levels by either stacking her active, or boosting through it. The boost will also be nice utility if you want to get through levels fast for reasons like farming affinity, or trying alternate routes.

There are a couple questions about it. ATK SPD is more beneficial to some attacks than others. ie, it's ultimate combination would be Gatling, as it's so low-maintenance. To remedy the contrast between it, and Power Shot (Which is typically a 3-shot burst). The power shot WILL increase in speed in the exact same way as Gatling, however at certain thresholds Power Shot will actually shoot an extra bullet in it's burst. (25% = 4 shots, 50% = 5 shots, 75% = 6 shots, 100% = 8 shots). It's unlikely you will hit the higher end of these threshold, unless your against a boss you can sit there and farm on, but what this means is that if you were at say... 85% ATK SPD, with 1 long press, you will shoot 6 shots instead of 3. The point of this is so that you don't actually have to press any faster to keep up with the ATK speed increase.

This technically still leaves the question about Flame Wave and the next planned attack type. While there is no "extra" effect of that kind on them aside from the ATK SPD, I will continue to experiment with it and see how ATK SPD feels with these weapon types.

Let's move on from Nika's abilities. On to enemies.

I finished off some of the scripts I had been wanting to get done. First off... When the "rocket" and the hand come into contact they will combine. This restores their health and puts them into a new state. They share health, and will find an anchor point in your play field. They will remain there and shoot at you until they are dead. They will not go away.

There can be a maximum of 3 doing this at a time.  If this happens a 4th time, the new duo will vanish. The best way to deal with them is to kill them before they combine.

Another is the drones.

Upon getting close enough to a drone they will drop their boxes. In an attempt to drop them on you. The boxes will also drop if you kill the drones. (This also comes into play later)

Now onto the next point was the "Wire" route, and it's transition point.

As you can see... in general... Nika doesn't fly too efficiently, so her ship kind of does what it wants... If you fail to shoot down the Hologram wall, she will bounce off it like a plushie toy. The point of contact is decisive point. If she hits... you go the normal way, if you destroy it, you go the wire route.

Nika instructs you to ONLY shoot Pink Wires. Shooting any other causes and explosion that will deal heavy damage, so be careful!

That being said, on this route, while dealing with wires, there will be no enemies to worry about.

We're getting there... Next point would be the final implementation of the boss' code, and animations. In these examples I have removed the mouth. I didn't like how it looked on the model to put it bluntly, but I may return to this in the future.

The point from this would be her eye tracking should generally be following the player now.

Small Flame effects have been added to a couple of her moves.

This covers a couple things... I was trying to show off the drones, but she happened to use the swipe... When swiping you can either go hard right and dodge the whole thing, or go left, and run from the hand that will continue moving in that direction.

The drones with blue boxes you see are the final phase of the fight. Once you have shot off Pom's clothes, you need to shoot the drones. When all 3 drones have dropped their static boxes, Pom will be stunned.

Shooting the machine will cause it to spin. There are a total of 3 speeds. This whole process will deal a damage over time to the boss.

Stationary. - No damage
Slow - x1 Speed
Fast - x2 Speed

Basically shooting the machine itself does not do damage, but the damage dealt to Pom is based on the speed of the machine.

The final thing this week was the implementation of the new slides for Catiya's cutscene.

Here's a look at some of them.

With that, I think I'll wrap up this progress update! As mentioned there is still actually some work to be done before this build is ready to go, but it shouldn't take too long, and should still be ready by the 1st.

The things I need to wrap up are fine tuning enemy placement in Neos, along with finishing off the level's transmission dialogue. I need to do the intro and outro sequencing for the boss. (Like her intro, and her dying phase). After that I will need to do a bit of connection work with UI.

I WOULD like to add Pom's assist functions, but I just might not have the time for that in this build. If not, I will look to have it in the next one.

Anyways! Thanks again everyone for the support! I'll catch you all on the 1st for the release of Nika and v0.6!

-Regulus