Devlog No.051

A couple more weeks and now we're at another progress update. These last couple of weeks have been a mix of under the hood stuff, preparation, and just general additions to get the ball rolling into the next update. Also finished Galitoray's TF and I'll start on the winner of last month soon too.

To begin with, I'll start by talking about the easiest to really discuss and that's the small bundle of new unlockables going into the game. While they won't all be available with 0.6, most of them are

Circlets

Between these two, you may recognize one of them. The one with a crystal is the peace circlet and it removes your passive energy drain, but not the energy drain you experience from movement.

Anklets

These anklets cut off 33% of the energy drain you receive from moving around each. With all three, it removes the energy drain from movement completely. As you can imagine, to completely remove the energy drain, you'll need all three and also the peace Circlet. The copper anklet will be added to Shopia with the next patch and you should be able to purchase it as soon as you reach Kirizmi (or right away if you are already there.)

Tiwold's Broken Shackle

Probably the most asked for feature so far, this simple looking item will allow you to go backward in rooms for about 70% of rooms. There are still quite a few which you cannot go back after you go forward. Example being rooms where it's a one way like the blueberry detector passages. Though some which take you into shrines or caves or beyond laser walls sometimes are one way. An example of a one way trip is the shrine in Emar forest. Due to the relative safety and the bonus golden candy there, I decided to make it a one way trip. You can, of course, always go back around again if you have the means, though the time spent doing so I think is acceptable.

Twin Spheres

This item will cause your Magic Orb attack to be replicated as a weaker shadow variant that has it's gravity reversed. Right now it does 50% of the damage of your attack. One orb is good, but who doesn't like a couple of round spheres? I had to do some stat modification to get this, and other things, to work properly, see below after the items section.

Mana Retainers

These are straightforward; For each of these you have when you die, you'll respawn with that amount of mana on your person. Limited by your max mana of course!

Grahstering

Grahsterings are nothing new. I believe there are two currently in the game, though all of these are actually programmed. I just have to put them down. I'll just give a quick overview of each one real quick.

Toraz - Makes the yellow whirly grahst do more damage.

Kyrakyst - Makes the purple punchy one do significantly more damage to enemy block.

Silfire - Makes the blue wispy grahst explode at the end of his path. (NYI)

Zerkawn - Makes the teal mourn grahst do additional damage to armored opponents. (NYI)

Rasper - Makes the red chompy grahst give the player some energy when it does damage.

Grahster-earring

Decided to be silly and continue the trend of this naming with earrings. These will be more impactful versions of the rings however.

Toraz - The yellow whirly grahst attempts to bounce into enemies after each bounce.

Kyrakyst - Undecided on what this one will do unfortunately. Will modify the purple punchy grahst though.(NYI)

Silfire - The blue wispy grahst will slightly push back opponents it passes through. (NYI)

Zerkawn - The teal mourn grahst will 'target' every enemy it passes through, dealing some damage to them after it deploys. (NYI)

Rasper - Makes the red chompy grahst 'jump' to a new target after it's current target dies. This costs it one charge of 'bite' when it does so though so if you have a grahst with one bite left, it will just evaporate instead. (If you have read previous devlogs, you'll know that there will be at least one more ring for the chompy grahst)

There are quite a lot of grahstery items to modify the large number of projectiles so I went with the easy solution of making the items similar to one another. Considering how other weapons function and their power, I feel like it's appropriate to be a little samey with the item design itself. With that said, the next item gets to be a little more unique.

Onyx Opal Grahstering

An ominous ring of opal and onyx. This one unlocks the Omen grahst for your grahstery. He very rarely randomly spawns in place of a normal grahst. When you are under max weapon power, his chances to spawn are significantly increased. If you have one loaded up already, then another shouldn't spawn in.

His functionality is simple; He traces an instant line between you and the direction you're facing, impacting the next thing in line. His range is decently long, but he is most notable for doing a massive chunk of damage to a single target.

Now that we discussed the items, it's time to discuss a few changes I made to the weapons systems. As it currently is in the game, most attacks will cause the target to become 'invincible' after being hit. The spread weapon is an exception to this. For the most part this kind of worked out, but I had noticed some issues with doing damage to enemies with the grahstery. As it turned out, you could run in and kind of 'flood' an enemy with attacks and quite a few of them just wouldn't register due to the enemies becoming damage immune.

I noticed this while testing out the new Omen grahst where I would throw a punchy grahst and then an omen and the omen wouldn't even hit. So I checked other forms of damage and lo and behold, yeah, sometimes damage wouldn't register. It all culminated in seeing damage not even hit an enemy while the magic star was in play causing it to be largely ineffective.

So as a result I went ahead and categorized the types of damage and invincible states to mix damaging attacks better. Now sticking five chompys onto a target will result in five chompys worth of damage. Though there are still 'some' damaging attacks which are affected by invincibility. As well, mourn's beam needs some attention that I haven't fully given it yet.

Before this change, the magic orb would hit a target, make it invincible, then the explosion would not hit the target (intentional). Now the orb hits the target and makes it invincible ONLY to AOE damage. So the damage from the direct impact of the orb will be applied, but the damage from a potentially airborne magstar should also be able to be applied too.

I have a few damage types for this and I reserve the 'fully invincible' flag for enemies who are intentionally making themselves invincible (golems using their shield) and potentially for things the player can do to enemies that needs them to be invincible for.

I keep thinking that I am done with systems only to find myself coming back to them. A small thing I also changed as an experiment was how the charge card (and omen) lighting effects work. As it currently is, the lighting just 'vanishes'. Though now the charge card and omen will have 'fading' added to them.

In the roadmap I have 'refining the lighting system' in there, but this simply could not wait because of the omen impact being invisible without a lingering light and I was just annoyed by the way it just cut out. I noted it was happening on the charge cards and really pretty much all temporary light sources. For now I'm just going to let it go, but when I come back to the lighting system later I will most definitely revamp it to have a lot more fading for all temporary light sources that I can remember.

For the time being this is all I can remember that I worked on. There was more but the what escapes me currently. Now then, I'm going to continue to work on things. I'm thinking that soon I will start work on revamping the wind blade weapon as I have said and/or working on the new weapon. Which I've been thinking about the new weapon a bit and wondering on the implementation. I would think that I am making a failure of a weapon right away, but the next area the enemies I want to add should make the weapon feel stronger. Yet I will keep working at it until it has an identity of its own and feels strong enough. The wind blade I think should be comparatively easy to work with. Though I am going to have to add a few new animations to Aria, but they will be on the short side.

That's all for now!