More Bugs, More Visuals, More Fun

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!

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Testing & Fixing

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.

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Visual Updates

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!

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World Design

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.

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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!