Writing devlogs makes me feel like a real dev

Time for a new devlog, woooooo!

This latest release is a small increment compared to the previous one.

I spent a lot of time watching tutorials and learning new things, so the amount of new features is actually pretty limited.

A large part of this time was spent creating the new "Sewer" level.

You might recognize the boss as being inspired by Ghost in the Shell for ps1 (impeccable taste btw), at least aesthetically. Mechanically, the boss fight is actually pretty different. Instead of having a laser weapon that directly targets the player, the entire floor/ceiling is turned into an electric field, to incentivize the player to switch back and forth using the gravity pad.

Right now it's all handled by simple timers, but i'll rework it so that the boss can actually know wether you are on the floor or ceiling, and act accordingly.

The boss is surrounded by flying orbs that shoot normal projectiles at the player.

Honestly the entire thing is still extremely wip, but I've learned some valuable lessons in the process (printing the entire bone structure of a skeleton3D, having a specific bone rotated towards the player via remoteTransform etc), so I ended up making some good progress along the way.

The various story mode levels are concatenated into each other, and before and after everyone there is a very short (skippable) visual novel style cutscene to flesh out the worldbuilding.

I added a little fade in at the beginning, but there's still a LOT of work left to polish them further.

During testing I noticed that the Laser Cannon weapon is actually very overpowered, and I'll likely nerf it into the ground soon. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Given that it deals continous damage, can hit multiple enemies AND can bypass enemy defenses like shields, I will have to significantly reduce the amount of damage and increase the cooldown after every hit for balance.

I was planning to make my arcade and randomized modes more complete, but then I bought persona 5 royal during the winter sale and, uuuuuh, yeah.

My artist FINALLY felt like making some new portraits. Now I just need to convince her to create more expressions for all of them (no easy task).

I added a small animated intro when you boot up the game, but I'm not happy with it yet.

I want it to recapture the feeling of the old ps1 intros, but I barely know how to use fl studio honestly, and the logos and animation still need more work as well.

Finally, I gave some love to the overboosting mechanic.

It's waaaaay overpowered and I will have to create level design specifically around it, but at least I finally got rid of the shitty particle effect I had, and the back of the mech has a fuel meter that shows you for how long you can still boost around, which is pretty neat imho. (it was blatantly inspired by the dead space health bar)

As soon as demo day is over, the first objective will be upgrading to godot 4.4, which could hopefully, FINALLY at least mitigate some of my stutter issues.

Then I plan to learn more about animation blending and animation trees, to create more complex enemies.

I wish I had more to show, but IRL stuff kind of got in the way.

What matters is never giving up and learning something new every day, practicing and improving what you already know, too.

WAGMI!

P.S. If you press 0 (zero) on your keyboard (not on the numpad, the other one), you can hide the entire player + radar, which is useful for taking screenshots while in game.