ProjectDragonfly Update Sep2022

Alright so I'm presented with the difficult task of detailing 2 months of work having done an awful job of documenting said work so I'll do my best but I might not remember everything.

I think I've implemented a lot of mechanics and got them working in gameplay such as temporary stat buffs, enemy debuffs, more item effects and stuff of that nature. I also put a good amount of effort into making systems that make creating new bullet patterns real easy especially for stages. The main thing is now enemies can store "AttackPatterns" that can control how they shoot or move or what happens when they die and I can apply them to any enemy spawned at any point. This makes it super easy to have enemies in multiple acts that behave the same way but maybe with minor differences here and there depending on the act.

This is an example of a simple stage segment.

One thing I've been spending a lot of time on is researching a bunch of other shmup games and see how their stages are built, specifically enemy placements and attacks. Upon trying to actually make some stages myself I've found it kinda tough to make it feel good to play. So I'm trying to try out some elements of stage design from other games and see how to go about making it here.

I think I will be making use of revenge bullets ALOT since theres a possibility of getting so powerful you kill everything before it shoots during stages so having at least something to dodge guaranteed will be very effective.

Bosses are another story, I feel rather comfortable making new boss attacks. I think it's just having to consider all the elements of stage design kinda overwhelms me and just having a single boss enemy to worry about lets me focus on making a cool pattern to dodge.

Here's a couple examples of the boss attacks I've made. Lasers are scuffed I do need to make some new bullet sprites but you get the idea. This last one in particular I find really fun to dodge as well.

One thing I want to focus on is making patterns a bit faster than Touhou style ones. This may be because I personally like these faster attacks that require more movement throughout the whole screen. I think being a little bit faster makes sense since I want the game to feel a bit more arcadey since you'll be replaying it a lot, but of course it shouldn't go so fast that you can't react to anything (except maybe on very high ranks).

I think a lot of the other stuff I did was mostly cleanup, bug fixes and adding more systems to make gameplay easier to implement. I honestly don't remember and my github notes are not helpful in the slightest lmao.

I think I really wanna focus on just adding more gameplay, get a stage and a boss finished and get more items finished, and not worrying too much about visuals or more mechanics yet. I think I'll work at then as things move along and I think they're needed.

One last thing I've been considering whether to bother with 3d at all since I could make some cool little scrolling 2d backgrounds instead without having to worry about implementing 3d at all but I'm not sure. I won't make any decisions yet but I do think 2d bgs might suit the style better. Maybe gimme your thoughts on that if you have any.