Devlog No.045

I released the latest build of course, and then the past week I've mostly spent just bug fixing and optimizing. Several small little things that needed to be addressed along with a couple that were just busted. The filimuri lightning has code in it to manually create lightning sprites, then draw them, but I was not properly disposing of those sprites so it created a sort of pseudo memory-leak any time one would cast lightning.

Game Make is smart enough to clean this junk up, but not all the time, so it will build up very quickly and only release the memory much later down the line. This obviously resulted in some significant performance loss. It's all sorted now.

I also discovered a strange nuance to game maker's VM rendering systems where it would not prioritize the best GPU on a system sometimes. Which naturally would cause the game to lag or just not run well even on decent systems. (Mostly laptops) This should be fixed now in the experimental version, but moving forward I will likely build most games like this. I swapped over to building out in YYC which takes much longer to make the builds, but will result in the higher performance of course. Really this is probably how I should have been doing it the whole time.

Aside from that there were a few bugs such as with ceranix substance still having a few situations where it would crash the game, but they should all be patched.

There is still a rogue bug somewhere involving the wind force spell, but I haven't yet been able to pin it down or even replicate it. Only had a report of it happening in one of the new areas. If you ever crash while using it, please send me the popup message it shows! (Really if you crash at all I'd like to see the log that pops up)

Overall though things should just in general run better and play better now.

On that subject, I'd love to hear more feedback on Kirizimi and if it feels significantly better not having to worry about your energy draining in the undersea area. I tried to offset this by forcing the player power level to 1 and hopefully it didn't feel too oppressive. If you have level 3 weapons, things are simply too easy. Enemies in the game don't even hit that hard and the vast majority of the damage you receive normally is from the passive drain from just running around.

With that in mind, as more items reduce that drain, the enemies in the game will start to hit harder to compensate. I forgot to add in one unlockable item that reduces the drain, but I'll put it in when I finish the ratty crossbow. Speaking of, I'm pretty much done all his animations. Mostly. I say that because as I'm programming him I may add more depending on how things go during testing. The one saving grace of being a solo dev is that I don't have to bother someone else to keep making me new animations and frames whenever I get a new idea for something. (Though I do still have to make it myself)

So should have another build up in the coming days with those things added and then I am going to focus on the NPC tfs. Once those ladies are done, and likely the next month one, I'll begin work on the next area!

In regards to that, here's the plan so far for it:

Kirizimi lets out into a peaceful field/canyon area which is basically the farms for the city, then into a more open autumn field. This will then lead into a regular forest area where there will be a storylet between Illaria and Milan. This will result in the forest becoming a spooky forest. There will be a few more rooms and then a checkpoint.

After the checkpoint will be the game's second (well third) boss followed by another checkpoint.

I will also likely add a small path split in the spooky forest too but it will only be a room to two extra.

As for 'things' that will be in this update...

Another boob statue will be somewhere.

Another way shrine (small shrine you can't miss) will be along the main path.

A new weapon will be introduced. (I talked about it in an earlier devlog, but it will be a sort of mobile, auto aim bow weapon)

A new spell will be introduced. (Not sure which one I will pick that I have planned)

'Something' involving Shopia...

There will be at least three new enemies with one of them being a recolor with different behavior, a new 'hazard' type enemy, and one new 'big enemy' who will start off quite small. The plan with her will be that she starts off small and gets bigger as you damage her. Using the wind inflation spell on her will remove one tick of her armor (increase her size by one). Similar to the slime girl, she'll have four states. Level 1 - Less threatening, small size. Level 2 - now a threat, can't dash through her, enhanced moveset. Level 3 - Might have one additional attack, but otherwise no difference mechanically, just visually. Level 4 - Defeated state where the enemy becomes a physical object in the world to interact with.

Regardless of inflation spell or not, the enemy will always reach the level 4 state by attacking her. However, she becomes more dangerous as you increase her level. You can also just bypass her by jumping over her or dashing through her at level 1. You'll only be REQUIRED to beat her one time. After that, it will be optional (though probably a good idea) to do it.

I might also add another enemy type resembling a gobbo just to have an inflateable enemy type.


One thing I will note is that most of this update's work will be in creating enemy sprites and just designing the levels. But I'm hopeful that since the number of levels will be significantly less than Kirizimi (Seriously, I think Kirizimi has four times the number of rooms overall as the field area.) that it will mean I can just focus most of the work on the boss fight and making her both fun and satisfying. Like the gargoyle boss, I'll integrate the inflation spell in a way to activate a 'hard mode'.

Anyway, that's all to report on for now!