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posts dated from: june 2016
Dev Log: Sky Sister Portals
As I gather more feedback and suggestions my task list for Sky Sisters unfortunately is exploding with tasks and bug fixes! I'm having a lot of fun working on the game but by now I'm getting itchy to finish it. Remember when like, last year, I was going to finish it and put it out there? Well, so much for that.
One of the pieces of feedback that has been lingering for awhile is addressing what happens after a boss fight. The original idea was that after a boss fight far enough into the game an exit portal would open up and you'd have the option to take it and end the game. By doing this you double your score and officially "survive" the game. If you waited long enough then the exit portal would disappear and your next chance to take one would be after the next boss fight.
The whole "waiting around until the exit portal disappears" wasn't really working out that well. It was tough for players to understand it, and a lot of times they would accidentally miss their chance to take the portal because they didn't know how to use it right away. So now I've taken out the single exit portal and I've replaced it with two portals.
The portal with the skull on it takes you further into the game and you will face tougher challenges and more bosses, and the portal with the heart is the path to salvation. I've also made some overall changes to the game's timer system that lets the players wait as long as they want to make their choice. The game now only counts "survival time" which means the game timer only ticks when you're facing a threat. Otherwise it will wait around for you to move on.
I've also made a change to the way that the sky backgrounds work. Before it would slowly fade through a number of color palettes, but now I change the palette of the sky after taking the skull portal. The sudden change in the sky color after taking a portal feels like some form of progress, I think. There is some demand for more background art, but we'll see if I can get that far.
One of the pieces of feedback that has been lingering for awhile is addressing what happens after a boss fight. The original idea was that after a boss fight far enough into the game an exit portal would open up and you'd have the option to take it and end the game. By doing this you double your score and officially "survive" the game. If you waited long enough then the exit portal would disappear and your next chance to take one would be after the next boss fight.
The whole "waiting around until the exit portal disappears" wasn't really working out that well. It was tough for players to understand it, and a lot of times they would accidentally miss their chance to take the portal because they didn't know how to use it right away. So now I've taken out the single exit portal and I've replaced it with two portals.
The portal with the skull on it takes you further into the game and you will face tougher challenges and more bosses, and the portal with the heart is the path to salvation. I've also made some overall changes to the game's timer system that lets the players wait as long as they want to make their choice. The game now only counts "survival time" which means the game timer only ticks when you're facing a threat. Otherwise it will wait around for you to move on.
I've also made a change to the way that the sky backgrounds work. Before it would slowly fade through a number of color palettes, but now I change the palette of the sky after taking the skull portal. The sudden change in the sky color after taking a portal feels like some form of progress, I think. There is some demand for more background art, but we'll see if I can get that far.
Dev Log: Tougher Foes
Part of adding more stuff to Sky Sisters was the addition of yet another difficulty level beyond "Impossible." It sounds crazy, but I do want to make sure that people that put a lot of time in the game have a lot to get out of it. This new difficulty mode doesn't have any effect on unlockables or achievements in the game, and is really there just for an insanely tough challenge.
I wanted to make this mode unique somehow so I spent some time making "elite" versions of all the enemies in the game.
These enemies have more aggressive attack patterns and will ruin your day a lot faster if they're not dealt with immediately. You can actually run into these enemies in a normal playthrough as well but not until you've made it far into the game. The game does allow you to keep going as long as you can survive, so eventually you face harder versions of the bosses, and now you can face harder versions of the regular enemies.
I wanted to make this mode unique somehow so I spent some time making "elite" versions of all the enemies in the game.
These enemies have more aggressive attack patterns and will ruin your day a lot faster if they're not dealt with immediately. You can actually run into these enemies in a normal playthrough as well but not until you've made it far into the game. The game does allow you to keep going as long as you can survive, so eventually you face harder versions of the bosses, and now you can face harder versions of the regular enemies.
Dev Log: Demon Sisters Intro
The time of procrastinating on this is OVER! This week I finally tackled one of my big remaining tasks for Super Sky Sisters: The intro sequence for the Demon Sister battle! (Mega spoilers, whoops, but hey, you're reading a dev blog so you get to know all the secrets.)
Here's the start of it:
The rest of it I'm going to put behind the "read more" link since these gifs get pretty hefty. For whatever reason my motivation was way up this week! So I was able to knock this out pretty quickly (just two days of time, yeehaw!) I think I gained a lot of spirit from the demo I did last Saturday where people really enjoyed the game.
Anyway to check out the rest of it, hit that read more link already.
Here's the start of it:
The rest of it I'm going to put behind the "read more" link since these gifs get pretty hefty. For whatever reason my motivation was way up this week! So I was able to knock this out pretty quickly (just two days of time, yeehaw!) I think I gained a lot of spirit from the demo I did last Saturday where people really enjoyed the game.
Anyway to check out the rest of it, hit that read more link already.
