I took a break from working on level charting to turn my attention to something that's been on my to-do list for a while -- adding new companions and followers that you can purchase in the in-game shop! I've added 5 new ones, for a total of 7:

Animation Notes

First off we've got this cute green turtle!

It's a simple animation, but took some fiddling to get the feet to read smoothly. There's a small little bob in the motion, but most of it is expressed through subpixel motion.

The jump animation is a fun one where we have the limbs flapping about like it's trying to fly:

So far none of the companions have separate animations for flight paths, but I also wanted to give turtle a chance to do the classic turtle thing and hide in its shell, so I used that for the flying animation, along with the standard green wings:

The above concepts are combined together for when you respawn after making a mistake, which I think is a fun touch:

Next we have a little red fox! The running animation is the most fluid one I've made so far -- it has 10 frames, more than any of the actual playable characters (ha ha...):

I was initially going to look at some references to draw up a graceful running animation, but I pivoted to this happy-go-lucky trot instead, which I think is more fun. Getting the height of the "bounce" to feel right is really the main reason why this animation is 10 frames. There's also a bit of secondary motion with the head bob and the ears flopping around, but otherwise the main challenge here was animating the limbs to seem natural instead of robotic. Notice how they spend more time tucked back and less time contacting the ground, so the timing is more snappy.

For now I'm again just using my normal cop-out animation of "just play the running animation, but faster" for jumping and flying:

I could maybe spend some more time here and use motion smears instead, but this'll do for now.

Last but not least, there's also this dude:

I did look up some references of capybaras running around, but...it seemed more appropriate for it to just be sitting and napping, so I went with this kind of nonsensical wagon that it sits in. It's weird, but if it gets a chuckle out of someone then that's good enough for me!

The "mini ghost" was a really low-effort one since there's no animation, just a single image that floats up and down in the same way as the enemy ghosts. The sprite is just a smaller version of the enemy ghosts, with a little cute bow on top. Here's that one in action:

And finally, another low-effort one, I decided to transfer over the player character sprites from Ripple Runner into the game. Wow, this was drawn over 10 years ago...it's really quite shoddy by my standards now, but there's a certain charm in keeping it exactly as it is instead of reworking it, perhaps.

This one has a special feature where for flight paths it flips upside down, as a reference to the gameplay in Ripple Runner:

Since I was already examining the followers a bit, I also gave the black cat from rain more of a gray tint and outlined it in dark black, to hopefully make it show a little more clearly in dark stages like this one:

I do think that levels 3-3, 3-4, and 3-5 are generally just too dark though, so perhaps that needs tweaking as well (some of the other levels are also too bright...)

I know the companions aren't really an "important" feature for Rhythm Quest, but working on these animations has been a really fun break from the other types of work that I've been doing, and it's nice to have the roster a little more fleshed out now.

Discord Changes and Onwards

I'm also finally knocking off another long-time to-do item and changing the Rhythm Quest Discord server to be announcements-only instead of a forum for general discussion. I could probably make an entire separate devlog post about community management (and how I don't want to do it anymore), but the long and short of it is that there is not that much to discuss there since the design of the game has been complete for quite some time, and I've decided that it's not worth the extra energy and time to maintain a public discussion server when I have other things that I should be prioritizing (like, you know, actually working on development).

I am also personally getting a little bit tired of people asking me when the game is going to be finished, people demanding that I release extra levels to them early, people telling me to release the game for free and then announcing to my server that they will pirate it, people asking me to help them with their coding homework (!? These are all real things that happened...). I just wanna make my game in peace...

As we go into the holidays I'm not sure whether I'll be throwing a ton of time into working on the game, probably just keeping up a steady pace like always. I hope everyone is staying safe and taking care of themselves during this time. Here's to another year of steady development and progress...the past few years have ALL had some rough IRL stuff happen to me midway through the year, so I am hoping to maybe have better luck with that next year.