ProjectDragonfly Update Feb2022

Yo this month has been crazy, I feel like I've made a ton of progress with the engine, gotten a lot of really basic stuff out of the way and also a bit of spice.

First thing was creating an ID system so I can assign every entity a unique number and be able to get any entity as long as I have the number. After that I ended up making a couple of the more simpler items that only change stats and nothing else just to make sure the player stat system was compatible. I'm pretty sure I could make more complex items very soon but I wanna keep each system pretty small just for now so if anything goes wrong I don't have to change heaps of items.

Another thing I have is the main act system. In the full game each stage will be split into acts which are randomly selected and although I haven't quite gotten to the random part yet the stage does generate with acts and moves onto the next act whenever you beat the current one. The acts are also where I see most of the content code going, pretty much any bullet pattern or enemy movement will be controlled by the acts so I also made sure to provide a bunch of functions for them so it's real easy to make new content for them in future.

A huge benefit of using C++ I found that I simply wasn't able to do easily in GameMaker is be able to create functions in the act system that are then called by another object. My main use for this right now is to create delayed effects for example: a bullet stopping and changing direction after 1 second. This was so difficult in GameMaker since I essentially needed to bloat the bullet object a great deal to account for anything I could possibly want it to do in the future. I did end up making kinda a cool system to handle it in GameMaker but it was still a massive hassle, but in C++ all I had to do was plug a function into a timer object that would call after the specified amount of time. It's super clean and it's a huge relief since it opens up a lot of opportunities for cool patterns and even non bullet related stuff.

Lastly most recently I put a bunch of work into UI improvements and a needlessly complex particle system. As you can probably see I've got the cool health bars again, although now I'm using a brushstroke texture instead of my own janky art brush and I like it way better. But yes the particle system, I was kinda disappointed how limited the GameMaker particle system was so I guess I took that frustration and used it to power this crazy custom particle system that's already capable of a decent amount but it's also really easy to expand upon. You can see in the 3rd picture here, these are the 3 particle systems attached to the enemy in the gif, each system can have any number of those modules and can even stack some and basically combining them all just does wacky stuff. I don't think it can handle absurd amounts of particles but it's probably enough for me. Honestly the main reason I did all that was to get that blood dripping effect you can see in the gif and then it all kinda went outta control from there.

Another thing is I've been trying this new more grey style for the game and I'm kinda digging it so far, if you have any opinions about this style over the more colourful one feel free to let me know. I won't forgo all colour though, if I do go with this grey style I'll probably have palette changing shaders that will colour stuff for me and give each stage a different feel, but I'm not 100% on it yet.

I think that's it tho, the next big thing would be developing an easy way to make different types of enemies, bullets, items, and figuring out how to store all their info for when they don't yet exist in the world, I think once that's done making actual content is gonna become very easy and I can start working on more gameplay stuff.