Devlog #3


Hey there, welcome to the third installment of the Astral Flux devlog. Let's take a look at what's new!

Background Story

First up, we've got a brand new background for the ice world! This was a collaborative effort between Nathan and me: he created the early version, and I did a few polish passes to balance the contrast, detail the trees, and add the scrolling clouds layer.

Simple, but effective, I'd say!

Along the way, I noticed that the pixel density of our parallax backgrounds was way off, so I took the time to fix that. We now have backgrounds that are nice and crisp, just like the rest of the pixel art. (Whoops! Measure twice, cut once, as they say.)

Unlike the first level, which has a separate background for the starting area, I think we'll use this background for the entire level.

Icebreaker

So we're still trying to settle on the design for the world 2 boss. This has led to lots of prototyping, which is great because it gives us lots of raw material to work with.

The initial boss concept started as a bipedal enemy with a weak spot (i.e. shoot its head, and then its back):

This then evolved into more of a freaky alien creature, using some snazzy inverse kinematics for movement:

But we felt neither of these was "icy" enough for an ice world. Subsequently, the most recent iteration is a "crystalline" boss.


We'll spend some time developing this over the next few weeks and see where we end up.

Can You Feel It?

One thing that Nathan and I have been chatting about recently is game feel: in particular, how can we make exploring the world and fighting enemies feel better? Something that I've been adamant about is that we need to keep the pace up: anything we do to slow down the player subsequently slows down the action, and may lead to a player abandoning the game.

I've spent some time prototyping and iterating on this, and it's led to a few fairly significant changes. We'll see how many of these make the cut, but so far I've looked at:

  • Speeding up movement and dash speed
  • Adding a second jump
  • Replacing ledge grabbing with wall clinging/jumping
  • Animating the bullets
  • Adding impact particles for bullets
  • Enable automatic fire for the gun
  • Adding knockback for enemies
  • Bigger, bloodier explosions for bigger enemies!

Let's see how all of that looks together:

One thing you'll notice--and that's perhaps slightly counter to what I've said above--is that the player is slowed when attacking in the air. The reason for this is to enable more aerial combat: if the player were to fall quickly, you'd need to keep jumping back up to take out stronger airborne enemies. So although this quite literally slows the player, it ultimately enables faster combat. (Shout out to the game ScourgeBringer for the idea.)

Oh yeah, and remember what I was saying earlier about prototyping leading to good raw material? Well, since we're not using that spidery boss (yet), you'll see that I've repurposed its head into a floating/swarming enemy. 😉

Well, that about does it for now! I hope you have a happy new year and a good start to your 2022. It can't be any worse than 2021, right? Right?!

Thanks for reading, we'll see you again in about a month,

Adam/The Cosmocat

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