Development Blog

4/21/24 - I added a new dash attack! It was highly requested, especially at the Midwest Gaming Classic, and rightly so. It's fun to use and I was able to set it up so it isn't to game breaking or overpowered. I started the process of switching from the old Unity Input manager to the new system. It's going pretty well so far. I'm not sure I'll be able to remove as much from the update loop as I would like, but it's still worth switching for a bunch of reasons. I'm note sure if I'm going to move straight into a controller remapping option or something more fun. I've been really itching to start another level. 

4/8/24 - So much new stuff. In a giant push to get ready for MGC I added so much in the last few months. A title screen, level selection, working sound and savable options for volume. A ton of major graphic updates as well. I spend a ton refining and tweaking mechanics. Finally I fixed all the new bugs I created tweaking stuff :) 

10/14/23 - I've added the spider form to the bug witch to 'boss her up' a bit. Added some new background art for which I used some of the new generative AI features in Photoshop. Finally, I added a new menu feature to pause and switch your active magic power. There were unique challenges for each of these. Using AI comes with a host of issues, and while I have a license and rights for what I use it for and I'm limiting to some help with background art, it still feels odd to not create everything pixel by pixel. Realistically there's no way to make progress at a reasonable pace without leveraging it in some way.  Updating the bug witch with the spider form was just pure fun. I can always tell its working when I get a chill looking at my own roughs. The menu tool is only half way done, but it was fun so far, even when I had to pull cos and sin out of the attic in my brain to get them to display in the right places.  

9/9/23 - I've been working on one of the initial eight bosses, the Bug Witch. I missed about two weeks due to vacation and illness but I came back energized and ready. The first round of bug witch sprites came together pretty well and its now mostly just coding to do. I wanted to keep the boss fight mechanics simple, with basic attack patterns and such, but maintain an element of player influence on the boss actions. I ended up building out a whole new class for the witch bosses with subclasses for each which required a trip back to some of the first code I wrote for this game. Fortunately past me was cool and didn't leave any huge problems that I needed to recode, just a few small ones ;)

6/25/23 - I started adding water to the game. Implemented swimming movement controls, created some of the necessary animations and particle effects. The biggest challenge was movement out of the water area.  Fortunately I already had most a solution ready since I had a similar issue when designing the cat transformation movement controls, specifically climbing past the top of a wall or platform edge. Both situations have vertical movement into an area with different movement options.

6/9/23 - YouTube Vlog launched! Social media is up with a big thanks to my wonderful wife, check the links at the bottom of the home page. I've also added an image gallery and put a few sprite gifs in there. 

6/8/23 - Development blog launched! Today I'll be adding several videos for basically everything I've got so far. Moving forward these will be more specific to whatever I'm working on, but for now there's so much to catch up on :)