Hello once more folks,

This week brings the first build that has all three phases of this game in it! Wooo! Phase 3 still has a lot of work to be done as it is far and away the most complicated thing I’ve ever made. Admittedly because it’s so much more involved the other two phases made me kinda wary about starting on it haha. 

So Phase 3 is what I’m calling the “Duelist”. It sort of a reverse Ganondorf to Ganon situation, where the boss goes from being towering over the player to being at the same scale as them. I hope players have an “Wait wait?” moment when they realize the black thing in the center of the boss wasn’t like a pupil or something but actually a humanoid figure all along. Once I realized I could do something like that due to the artstyle I couldn’t resist. It’s one of the advantages of the super small pixel art. Since the boss is at the player’s scale I actually just reuse a lot of the same sprites and just color them black. So it also saved me a lot from having to draw a ton of new art. This also led me to the decision to give the boss the same sort of invincibility time as the player. Which in turn makes the phase more about surviving as long as possible.

The phase as it stands right now is incomplete. There’s only the first two sections (of about five). In the first part, the boss just runs around the arena and will do certain attacks if certain conditions are met. It will only attack every two seconds. If it’s in the air and near the top of it’s jump arc then it’ll fire a boomerang-like projectile. If it’s on the ground and the player is across from it, it’ll shoot a basic projectile. Lastly, if the player is very close to at any point then it will try to use its melee attack. I have mentioned before that I was working on other “games in the series”. All of these attacks come from those games in some way. At least in terms of what they are named. Hopefully the theming and subtext here is obvious. A “These two characters are more similar than they are different” sort of thing.

Speaking of the lore for a bit, in phase 3 multiple sets of eyes appear in the background as you progress the fight and they track the player character. I’m probably never really going to explain why other than “I wanted to animate a weird eye opening and then have it follow the player” and “it’s cool”, but I will say I’m not planning on them having any other interaction with the player. They’re just kind of meant to be unsettling. 

Outside of phase 3, I was able to get over myself and just solicited feedback for this game and got a decent amount. My one brother suggested I add something to indicate which weapon you’re switching to and now an icon appears overhead when you cycle through weapons. Someone else mentioned how the controls on the analog stick were kinda awkward. I realized my implementation was all wrong and completely redid it (which was a lot easier than it sounds.) I didn’t really notice the issue earlier since I figured most people would use the d-pad instead, but that’s no excuse not to make the analog stick movement feel good. Now it does. I think I’ll need to add a way to do alt-fires differently though. We’ll see!

One last thing is that I decided to hide the earlier builds from being downloaded for now. So if you go to the game page, you’ll only see the most recent build available. Since this is Week 7, I felt there were just too many there and that it could easily be confusing for someone. I’ll probably make an archive page or something for those old builds.

That’s all for now. Hope you’re all well!