Devlog - 47

Did another round of iteration on the God Lance weaponry. In the first video you can see all standard attacks; sword, streamers, beam, and spread shot. I'm also trying out a secondary color for outlines and additional details of the God lance, attacks, and effects. While I want to keep things minimal, I'm afraid the pure white could bleed into an unreadable mess when the action picks up. I'm not a big fan of outlines in general, but they are often necessary for clear readability of all elements. Particularly, solid black outlines can be unsightly, but outlines can be quite nice when done with subtlety, or unique style.

Furthermore, let me introduce the psycho power mechanics. These are special attacks that are dependent on a limited resource displayed as a gauge in the HUD.  you can see I've started playing around with some UI concepts. As long you have some psycho power in the gauge, you can perform the missile flurry attack. This sends out numerous powerful homing missiles. This attack can be sustained by holding the button down, as long as you have enough PP. You can see the concept of missile flurry in the second image.

If the PP gauge is filled to max, you can perform an ultra missile flurry, which will shoot like a hundred missiles at once, destroying everything on screen, rewarding score bonus for the more things destroyed. However, this drains the PP gauge to zero.

The psycho power can also be used like an auto-bomb/shield. Ordinarily, taking a hit is instant death, as is the tradition with most shmups. However, If you have a full PP gauge and you are hit, you are allowed to live at the expense of depleting all PP. This also clears all on screen bullets and gives a brief invulnerability period, but does not reward score. The spinning cross thingy is a possible concept for this, which emits a shockwave while blood particles drain out of the God Lance, as it transition back to the white version. Oh, if you haven't noticed, activating psycho powers changes the ship to black and red colors.

The psycho power is an alternative to the traditional bomb stock in shmups. Traditionally, bombs destroy everything and grant you brief invulnerability, so they are used when you get in trouble, or to deliberately skip difficult patterns. To me, that always feels like a cheap way to advance the game without getting any better. Also, many games award a score bonus for remaining bombs, so ultimately, high level players just never bomb. I think it's more fun to incentivize bomb use and provide more meaningful strategies. I hope psycho power can achieve this.     

Lastly, I just wanted to show off the rotation frames of the missiles. 16 frames, for a pixel perfect spin.