Hey everyone, I hope you liked the teaser trailer I posted last week! If you missed it, you can watch it here. I haven't had as much time as normal to work on the game over the last week, but I still have some interesting content to talk about! 

Over the last week, I've been planning out some specifics of the world regions. One of these things is the mutagen upgrades at the end of each region. Each reward room contains a choice of three mutagens, which the player can only take one of. I've decided to keep the mutagens in each reward room related to each other. For example, the tutorial reward mutagens will affect the player helix dash. I've shown this room before and it already has two helix dash mutagens, but I needed a third. This new mutagen increases the speed of the dash and sits nicely alongside the others. However, the new mutagen made me aware of a problem.

This next bit is a tad technical. When I first made the player metaballs effect, I used a rendertexture which was smaller than the screen resolution. This wasn't a problem as the metaballs trail never went outside of the texture. However, when I applied the new mutagen to the player, the dash trail clearly extended beyond it. So, I thought I would increase the size of the quad the texture is on, which didn't work because of something I setup from the start. The camera that renders to the metaballs rendertexture is a perspective camera. This is a problem because the camera doesn't change its view size when the texture does. Nonetheless, with a bit of work it is possible to do this manually, which I did. Doing this created a new problem, the effect looked different. The blobs looked more rounded, and the edge colour had less space. Basically, nothing I did would make this work so I went back to what it was.

The solution came to me soon after this. If I can't increase the texture size, surely I can move it to centre on the effect. I know that the trail effect mostly goes in the opposite direction to the player. This means I just need to move the camera and texture in this opposite direction. I can do this by using the negative velocity of the player movement. To my relief, this solution works very well. You can see it in action in the above GIF, the green box is the quad the texture is on. Phew, a big visual issue solved! Now, onto other tweaks and improvements.

Perhaps the change which will have the most impact is that the lives no longer reset in each level. Instead, lives will reset at the start of each region. This may not be a permanent change if it proves too difficult, I'm testing it at the moment, but I hope it will make a fun challenge. Something I mentioned last week was the design of one of the Flop Shark levels. I have now changed it to work better with the enemy pathfinding and it is much easier to navigate now. The last change I'm going to mention is something that isn't very noticeable but has some impact. Until now, the player would get 10 points for infesting an enemy. After some thought and testing, I have removed this as a source of points. This is to allow for another mutagen in the future and to prevent early exploitation, which is easy to do with the dash cooldown time mutagen. That's all the changes I'm going to talk about today!

The player spawner has needed a change for a while now. Currently, players and enemies can climb up into the spawner. This allows the player to hide while the enemies struggle to get into it. It also means that if the enemies do get into it and kill the player, the player may end up in a loop of spawning and dying, which is not desirable. To fix this, I have finally added a lock system, which opens briefly when the player spawns and closes immediately after the player leaves. Until leaving the spawner, the player will not have control to prevent them getting stuck. Adding this in has reminded me that I'd like to add more animated elements to the spawner, so you'll probably see some more animated assets soon!

That's it for today's post! Next week's post will be slightly different to normal. It will have been one year since I started developing the current version of Squillamorph. So I want to look back at the year and see how far the game has come! 

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​Thanks for reading! 

Hello everyone, this past week has been fantastic for progress! I've updated and added some visuals, worked on the world design, and made a teaser trailer which you can watch now! Please share it with your friends if you're excited about the game!

Recording footage for the trailer gave me the chance to test the game, which of course meant I found no bugs whatsoever... if only. I actually found several game breaking bugs. The most amusing is in the GIF above. This one caught me completely off guard when I found it and I couldn't stop laughing. Issues with the vents were the main problems. I also found more of an ease of play related issue, rather than a bug, to do with one of the level designs. Turns out having too many corners next to each other messes with the enemy movement and makes it really arduous to climb as the player.

There have been a few improvements to the visuals over the past week! The first, which I mentioned last week, is the large shark sprites. This took significantly longer than the smaller shark sprites because I had to add and adjust more pixels. The part which was especially difficult was the attack animation. I think the end result was worth it though. Another new aspect of the sharks is the skill attack effect, which is now its own sprite rather than a few red ovals. I do not like how subtle it is at the moment, and I'd like to use particles to add more impact but I've had a few issues getting them to work for some reason. Another addition is a new HUD icon and animation; an icon for the Test Dummy enemy and an Infest animation to go with it.

Something else I have added is another variation of the Test Dummy enemy. I've been meaning to do this for a long time now but it hasn't been a major priority. But I found the time to do it and there is now a Test Dummy variant with more health. It does feel fun to have an enemy with a moustache and monocle, from Connor's original concept! Anyway, that's about it for visual updates. Needless to say, the game looks a tad more interesting now!

Continuing on from the previous week's world design work, I've been thinking about how to represent the regions/levels in the game. I played around with a few designs before settling on something quite simple. I then created a menu in the game to place the map into, which players will use to choose a region to play through. You can see a piece of the map on the menu in the above GIF. This is an early implementation and I might change it because it is rather small when there are only two regions, but I'm liking its functionality so far.

Working on this got me thinking about the scale of the game again. As a result, I've decided to reduce the number of planned regions. This is for a couple of reasons. The first is that some of them aren't really necessary; the enemy ideas weren't great and I felt the regions seemed to be there just to make the game longer. The second is that I want to be able to finish the game in a reasonable time frame, but with the number of regions I had planned it would take an unreasonably long time. This doesn't affect too much, the game will still be quite large. I haven't shown or discussed the cut regions and I believe the game may even be better in a slightly more compact form.

That's everything for this post. Don't forget to watch and share the teaser trailer! I've also setup a new Facebook page for the game so you can follow the updates via a whole variety of social media now!

Follow Squillamorph on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to stay updated. Don't forget to tell your friends to check out the game too! 

​Thanks for reading! 

Hello everyone! As I said in the last post, there wouldn't be much if any content for a post today because I was away last week. I've done my best but I only have a few small things to talk about.

I've finally got around to altering the appearance of the Flop Sharks. ​I want each shark variant to have a slightly different design to match their attributes. So far, I've altered the small shark's sprites. I may still change them but they are now slightly different to the normal shark. The small shark is faster but weaker than the others, so I've made the fins more curved and narrowed its head very slightly. I haven't had time to do the same for the tank shark but I intend to get it done this week. 

I've also briefly worked on the world design; roughing out the levels I haven't yet and changing some of the region names, which I'm still not set on. I'm not going to show you ​the whole thing but the image above shows levels that I've mostly shown. This is how I plan/experiment with regions and levels. I won't say exactly how many levels there are but I will say that this image makes up a piece of the first part of the game. At the moment, I'm planning to split the game up into acts to tell the game's story. So far, I haven't discussed the story much for a few reasons. One is that I don't want to spoil too much so I can leave lots for players to discover. Another is that the story isn't something players have to follow or pay much attention to. I want to leave most things up to player imagination, but I might hide some lore secrets in levels for those who want to dig deeper!

I know it wasn't much but I hope you enjoyed this little update! Things will be back to normal for next week's post!

Thanks for reading! You can stay updated with Squillamorph updates on Twitter and Instagram. Don't forget to tell your friends to check out the game too!