Hey guys - Dev here
Let's have an update, shall we? Making all the levels is a lot of fun and we make good progress. Since our last news we made 7 more levels. The second biome (Level 6 to 9) is done and the third biome (Level 10 to 15) is only missing level 12. We also adjusted the house ui to be easier to read and navigate, improved our workflow some more and created a lot of content to be put into the levels. And the reason for the silence is that we don't want to spoil the entire game with dev-logs. We already have plenty of spoilers on Discord, where we post our subversion messages.
And because it is fun to say A and do B, let's talk about spoilers.
Robots
A lot of time (and the reason we skipped level 12) is the robot enemies. We want the robot enemies to work differently than the monsters. While the monster evolves based on what we say, the robots evolve based on the player build. If you go for high bullet damage, the antagonist will adjust his battle robots to be immune to bullets. So mean. The nice part is that it didn't require a lot of new code. All we had to do was to setup a more sophisticated node setup for robot evolution and it kinda looks like this:
Another aspect we wanted to define is the look for the robots. After all, they are built by the antagonist to fight the tentacle monsters. The space ponehs don't have an army or any planetary defenses. So far they only take care of meteors and asteroids. The antagonist repurposed the drones and robots of the automated logistic network into weapon platforms. The visuals have to fit to the huge lore dump and that is our unpolished proof of concept:
And to get these visuals we use a modular approach, with some room for variants:
Monster Visuals
One big problem we found creating fully evolved monsters was that they were really difficult to read, especially when it came to immunity. You know something is bad, if even the developer struggles. So we addressed this issue. Let's have another picture to show the issue:
Imagine Dora asking: "Where is the bulletproof eye with the spawner eggs?" Every toddler learns to change the TV channel in an instant.
Our solutions are to use colors instead of tiny, fiddly sprites:
And this is how an evolved monster looks like:
*insert Let's Game It Out-Josh's Mmmmmhhhh*
Summary
So yeah - We make nice progress with the levels, but have to stop every now and then to fix and finish things we started a long time ago. Progress speeds up at times and then slows down when we have to tinker with another tiny feature. We'll let you know when there is something cool to talk about.
Have a good one ^^