Devlog, Feb 2025

Hi again! I'm going to be trying to do these kind of in-between development updates every month or so for clarity purposes, and so that you guys can kind of gauge my development speed. Also, if you're not aware, I usually post the spritework for completed enemies, as well as music and concept art over on my FA (can be found on my creator page).

Development speed has been a little on the slow side for the past 3ish weeks, as I had the flu for the first, was working on things for my 3D portfolio the next, and have been trying to set up art commissions and nail down my understanding of freelance art tax this past week (a bit of a double edged sword; should hopefully open up more time to work on the game, but also uses creative energy). If I'm not in the mood to work on the game directly I'll usually end up making music for it that will be used further down the line, which usually helps refill my creative battery for 2D stuff.

Outside of the spritework and music, most of what I've worked on (in the two weeks I was actually able to) has been rewriting and tweaking code to fit suggested improvements.

As of right now, here's what's been done:

- Spritework for 3 new enemies, Lesser Royal Mage, Lesser Royal Guard, Sap Slime

- 1 Fully completed enemy, Lesser Royal Mage; avoids the player if they get to close, attacks by casting gravity fields that fling them up, hold them to the ground, or launch them towards itself. Not super threatening on it's own, but potentially dangerous if left alive in areas with multiple enemies.

- Rework of finisher script, now uses modular code sections instead of a single set-in-stone one. Finishers can now have multiple sections that lead into each other as necessary, allowing for things like multiple struggle loops chained together.

- Filter changes - You can now filter animations by enemy gender (male, female, male intersex, female intersex, ambiguous, and none), and the Feral+Sexual filter has been removed because I'm not comfortable with animating that. I'm not really sure why I even included it in the first place.

- Controller support. I'm testing it using a Gamecube controller.

- Better combat - You can no longer do the infinite rapid attack chain, charged attacks are more powerful, and regular attacks have reduced knockback. The attack sound has also been changed to something more generic, and less grating. 

- More logical health drain - enemies drain your health at a steady rate instead of chunking it in intervals.

- Submit option while in grab state - attacking instead of jumping (after a short delay so it's not accidental) jumps straight to the swallow animation, and the player continuously takes damage while in the struggle loop unless endo is enabled. The animation continues as normal past this point. Submitting yields different dialogue than a regular game over, also different if endo is enabled, making 4 different dialogue types in total which each have their own individual random options.

- Camera has been zoomed out a bit, and the aspect ratio has been changed to 2:1. Background art has been redone to fit the new resolution.

- Tilesets have been made for the first of the next two zones, Limestone Capitol

- Music has been done for Limestone Capitol and Redwood expanse, as well as several other areas and character themes that are for later updates

EDIT:

Totally forgot, health-based grab animation progression has been implemented, but I'm not planning on adding it to existing enemies. In most cases, it's different swallow stages, with the final one happening at 0 health.

And here's what still needs done:

- Some bugfixing related to save/load code that can cause weird spawns in specific situations involving the sandbox and save clearing

- Converting some older enemies to use the new finisher system (not technically required, but would be best practice in case I need to modify it)

- Player needs invincibility on break, not just stunning the enemy

- Coyote time

- Redwood expanse needs tilesets

- Spritework for new enemies: Cursecorrupted citizen M, Cursecorrupted citizen F, Fox, Tanuki

- Behavior code for new enemies, and adding projectile throwing to Red Squirrel

- Downed player state for enemies that have damage-only attacks

- Debug cheat setup for currently implemented and future player upgrades

- Level assembly

- A small handful of NPCs with base functionality, one in particular to be expanded on in a later update

- breakables 

- probably some other stuff I'm forgetting about