Hello everyone! Christmas is fast approaching and I am doing everything I can to get the next Squillamorph update finished before then.

​Quickly want to mention that I am going to shorten the posts slightly from now on. If you would rather have the more in depth posts, let me know!

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The past week has seen some good progress in different parts of the game. I started off with more combat improvements. I did some research into combat in other 2D games and noticed that most of them made imminent attacks very clear. So I've added in a warning particle system, the yellow exclamation marks, that makes attacks a bit clearer. I intend to tweak the effect slightly as I think it is currently a bit chaotic. Other changes to combat include timing adjustments to the Flop Shark attacks and minor tweaks to their movement behaviour.

The next thing I want to mention is, of course, the Santa hats. I spent longer than I should have getting them working properly but I think it was worth it! Every enemy has one, except bosses, and they don't impact performance much because they don't collide with anything. They will only be in the game from the next update till the new year.

I have continued work on the Kragon boss and have begun implementing a second stage, which involves making use of the Kobolds. This needs a lot more work but is coming along nicely.

Lastly, I'd like to discuss some quality of play changes and improvements. I have removed the freeze frame effect that happened on enemy deaths. I had received quite a bit of feedback about it, so it is now gone. I have also reduced the screen shake effect. An equally important change that I made last week was drastic improvements to performance. I discovered a way to half the performance impact of collision checks, which is a major improvement. I also managed to reduce the impact of pathfinding updates that occur during gameplay.

I hope all these changes will make the game more enjoyable!

Things I will be working on this week include:
- Kragon boss second stage
- Combat improvements
- Mutagen upgrade updates
​- Optimisations

Hopefully, I will have everything done for the update by next Monday.
​I hope you enjoyed today's post! ​Thanks for reading!

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Hello everyone, over the last week I've been busy working on new features and improvements for the next update. I estimate that this update will not be ready for another week at least, but I'm working hard to get it out before Christmas!

​Get the game on Steam now!

In other news, Squillamorph and I have been featured by UCA in an article on their website. This also led to an appearance in a local newspaper, which means I am now officially a 'gaming guru'!

Until now, I've been relatively content with the quality of gameplay. However, I got some feedback on the game that made me seriously think about the current state of the game. It made me realise how unfinished the existing content is and that there is a distinct lack of variety. So I played the game through again, looking for things to improve when I noticed something that I have been overlooking in the Flop Shark levels. The combat felt uncontrollable, unclear, and nonsensical. The worst thing was that I didn't know why. I hadn't noticed this before and just couldn't put my finger on it. I took a step back from the game to think about what could be fundamentally wrong with it.

​After thinking it through, I realised that it was mostly the combat at fault, but more specifically combat involving the Flop Sharks. The pace at which they swarm and attack the player is just unfair. Even if you get the hang of their irregular movement, it is still difficult to control a fight when completely surrounded and pushed around. After several waves, this can get to the point where it feels chaotic and unenjoyable. As the first main enemy encountered after the tutorial, it is incredibly important that the sharks feel good to fight and control. Otherwise, players will quickly become infuriated with the game and stop playing, which is perfectly understandable. For a game focused on combat, this is unacceptable. So, the next question I had was how to improve it?

The solution is to rework the combat, which in hindsight wasn't that great to begin with. To start with, I have reduced the amount the number of enemies spawned each wave increases by. That should help prevent players being overwhelmed too quickly. The original idea for the Flop Sharks was to have them constantly swarm the player, but this might not be such a good idea. To reduce the swarming mosh-pit tendencies, all player attacks now have some knockback. To improve the combat skill requirement, I have also made the 'skill' attacks more skill based. They now require consecutive hits on an enemy to trigger the more damaging third attack. I am still working on this and I am also considering a possible damage multiplier as a reward for sequential hits.  

In summary, I am working to improve the combat and make it much clearer, more satisfying and logical. I am also looking into ways to add some variety to the gameplay, perhaps in the form of waves with special enemies or environmental changes.

​(Side note: The GIF above shows a great example of how the brief invulnerability after ejecting, added in the latest update, has prevented unfair deaths)

The Kragon has needed improvement since EGX. I have not yet finished its fight but I have had the chance to think about it and start adding to it last week. Now it has a new ability to use against the player, which is designed to make it harder for the player to hide behind environmental objects without fear of the boss. It can shoot a volley of 3 non damaging grenades, just like the Kobold's but with a larger blast radius. I'm still working on the force of the blast; this GIF showcases grenades that are more powerful than what the final result will be. I think this will only happen when it isn't attacking but I'll have to test it. 

The other stages of the Kragon will involve using the Kobolds to deal damage to it, in the same way the Flop Sharks are used in the Flopalodon fight. It will also involve a freezing effect similar to the one applied to the player when they come into contact with cold pipes. I hope to work on this boss again this week, but I am not sure how much will get done as I am currently prioritising the combat improvements.

I did manage to start on the mutagen improvements last week too! I have created a functional menu system for them but it currently has no effect on gameplay. The GIF shows the menu at half the size it actually is in game. My current idea is that the game will slow down time or maybe completely pause while this menu is open, to allow for switching mutagens on the fly. Just like the Kragon boss, I would like to work further on this but it is not the largest priority right now.

Let me know what you think about the changes I'm making to the combat, Kragon boss, and the mutagen system! My priorities for the next week are:
- Combat improvements
- The Kragon boss fight progress
- New Mutagen system implementation

​I hope you enjoyed today's post! ​Thanks for reading!

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Hello everyone! Thank you for the support and feedback! I've been working hard over the last week to make necessary improvements and fixes. This culminated with the first game update, which went live last Friday!
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You can look at the changelog to see what was updated.

I didn't particularly want to have moments of invincibility/invulnerability in the game. Mostly because I didn't want to reduce the brutality of the game by using it. However, the majority of player feedback talked about how unfair things can be when dying after spawning or ejecting without a chance to do anything about it. I've become quite blind to this sort of thing in testing, but I started looking for it after seeing the feedback. I found that the need for it after spawning varies from level to level, but there are many situations where I was killed immediately after ejecting from an enemy. This was not fun and I realised that adding invulnerability would greatly improve the quality of gameplay. There are now brief periods of invulnerability after both spawning and ejecting from an enemy, represented by the flashing blue colour. It might need to last longer but I'm trying out a shorter period of invincibility for now.

In response to player feedback at launch, and my own desire to improve performance, I focused heavily on optimisation last week. The biggest area to tackle was reducing the impact of the graphics. I couldn't do too much for the low quality setting in this regard, apart from disabling more lights. However, the medium and high settings both have a layer of sprites in the background. This layer is made up of large panels of normal mapped sprites just to add a bit of interest to the dark background, which I wrote about in a previous post. This was exceedingly bad for performance because each sprite has to be rendered as many times as there are lights affecting it, and there can be a lot of lights.

I tried placing the panel sprites within a single quad using a shader and a colour pixel 'map' I made for placement positions, but I couldn't get it working. The only solution was to turn the square of individual sprites into an image, but this would take ages if I did it in Photoshop as I have to place both the colour and normal maps of the panel sprites in the same places. Then I remembered my old custom level editor and realised I could use the image rendering script from it. With that, I was able to place the panels in the same way as normal and render out both green colour and normal map images. That's it, now the background is made up of a single quad mesh. The performance toll from graphics was nearly halved by making this change. Excellent stuff!

I've also made another significant change to the structure of physics objects and creatures. I read an interesting article on the Unity blog and decided to give the manager system describe within it a go. All physics objects scripts are now managed by a single manager script and all creature scripts are managed by another manager script. I'll be honest, it did not make a massive difference but it did improve things slightly. I saw more of an improvement by optimising the way physics object check for collision, but it was an interesting test nonetheless.

While making the update and looking at player feedback, I started thinking about the effectiveness of the mutagen upgrades. After each boss, there is a room containing 3 mutagen upgrades. Players can only choose one, and when testing I always choose the dash cooldown upgrade at the end of tutorial. This was a mistake on my part. I recently tried testing the game with the other dash upgrades found there and found the difficulty increased dramatically without the shorter cooldown. This means that giving the player a choice of upgrades, while great for replay-ability, might actually be hindering some player experiences. 

So I plan to take the choice away, giving players only one mutagen after each boss. However, I still want players to be able to get the other mutagen upgrades that are currently implemented. I already had an idea for this, which would have been for mutagens not found in the choice rooms. Mutagen upgrade machines will be found within levels but are only usable after a certain wave of enemies. This should add a new fun but optional element of challenge to the game! Nevertheless, I do like the element of choice regarding the upgrades. To keep this a part of the upgrade system, I plan to limit the number of mutagens the player can have active at once. This means I will be making a menu system for them, perhaps something inspired by the charm system in Hollow Knight. We shall soon see how this develops!

To finish up, I'll tell you what I'll be focusing on over the next week:
- Finishing up the 'Reactor K' region and the Kragon boss is a high priority.
- Improving the mutagen upgrade system will take time to get right but is something I want to start on.
- I am also still working on optimisation as a priority.

​I hope you enjoyed today's post! ​Thanks for reading!

Get Squillamorph on Steam!

Join the official Squillamorph Discord server here: 
- Discord Server
​Follow Squillamorph on:
- Twitter
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- Facebook
Tell your friends to check out the game too!