Changes & Hot Additions

Hey everyone, the last week has been an eventful one! I've got some cool new content to discuss but first I have to announce a change to the team.

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Team Changes

I'm sad to announce that Connor and Sarah have both decided to move on from Squillamorph. They've been great teammates who've produced some amazing content for Squillamorph. Without them, Squillamorph wouldn't be what it is today. I wish them all the best with their future endeavours. If you want to keep up with their work, I have put links to their portfolios on the About page. Go check them out!

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New Levels & Hot Pipes

I've been designing and making some new levels for the Flop Shark region! I mentioned last week that I might have one ready to show but I really got into the swing of things. I designed 3 levels and made two of them. I haven't put any scenery assets in yet but they are fully functional! These levels are all smaller than the current level and are really fun to run around.

Since I changed the level design process, I have not re-implemented the hot pipes. This is the main environment hazard for the Flop Shark levels and seeing as one of them is full of hot pipes, I needed to get them back in. Functionally, they are very easy to make work, but getting them working visually again was a bit harder. Before the level design change, I would use a rendered image of the level pipes from the old designer and a blurred version, then overlay them in the level. This was an accurate but expensive method which I can no longer do. So now, I use an image which comes from the design where 1 tile is one pixel. It isn't as accurate but it has the same effect. So the hot pipes are back at last!

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Player Mechanics

In some of the recent posts, I have mentioned the difficulties people have faced with the wall jump ability. I did say I might not change it but in the end I decided it would be better to. The player will now 'stick' to walls when touching them without having to move against them. This means that, if in a narrow vertical tunnel, the player just has to press space and won't have to use the direction keys at all to wall jump. To prevent the mechanic from being too easy, I have decreased the 'stickiness' of the player when on a wall. I will do a few tests soon to see if the changes worked out well!

Another mechanic change for the player is invincibility during the dash. This was actually meant to be in from the beginning and I just forgot to add it. I'm honestly not sure why it took me so long, considering I realised way back at EGX Rezzed and was reminded again at the uni grad show! Anyway, it's in effect now and I won't have to be reminded again!

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Flopalodon

So I finally got around to making another stage for the Flopalodon boss. This stage requires the player to directly attack the boss using Flop Sharks, which only spawn in this stage. Also, to make things more interesting, the Flopalodon can now breath fire. The fire will kill other enemies and the player. I am still working out how to get the boss to aim this fire properly but even now it adds another fun aspect to the fight. This sort of fire hazard is something that will come from other sources in future levels.

I have also heavily tweaked the boss arena. This is mainly because the boss kept getting stuck in the smaller nooks of the level. There is still an issue with this as the boss can get into and stuck in the tiny spawn area. I'm really not sure how that is happening because there is no way it could fit in there but it is something I will endeavour to fix this week.

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Before the end of this post, I need to mention that Squillamorph will be at the Guildford Games Festival with the University for the Creative Arts! You can find out more about the event here: https://guildford.games/festival

Anyway, that's it for this post! Thanks for reading!