Devlog No.066 (Patreon)

Sometimes I forget how long hunting down SFX can take. Sometimes it's easy where I go to my library and look for obvious things and find them. Like a spell effect or bag foley. Even the map SFX were relatively easy to find since they didn't require any audio editing.

For the SFX associated with the bell priest, I spent a bit longer putting them together. Though the issue was mostly to do with the inflation and bursting sfx which I decided to expand upon. I figured that the real estate was a little low so I went through and spent some time finding a mixture which sounded 'close enough' to rapid inflation and big, bassy pops. For inflation SFX, thankfully I had a good store of them just waiting to be used, but for bursting and pops? Not really no. I have Aria popping like a balloon being the most 'balloon-like' . So I mixed together some booms, thumps, gunshot, and even a metal door being slammed with other audio under it to cushion the harshness or enhance the bass.

While I have a pretty basic understanding of audacity for correcting SFX, I'm no expert and my composite sounds are probably pretty meh. Honestly, taken on their own, I hate them. But I think when you have them 'in action' they blend decently with all the other sfx going on around them and somehow feel fitting enough. Not great though and I think I will have to spend more time adjusting the individual SFX volume on a lot of them. Same with the general SFX for the bell priest. In her case, a lot of the SFX present on her are pretty basic, but needed time spent just observing them in practice to get them to feel right.

Originally I thought that I could have a bell tone for every forward and back motion of the bell, and while that works for a much lighter weight bell, it doesn't feel right for the more audible and sonorous bell sounds I decided to go with. So they only resound when the priestess completes a loop of her animations. The SFX are also trimmed a bit and a couple of them are modified a little, but for the most part they are as they came. Although I think they fit and they have a good sound to let you know she's doing something without seeing it, I feel like the distinction between normal attack and ghostie summoning isn't there. They both do use different bell sounds, but they aren't THAT different so they sound very similar.

My correction for this will actually be voice acting. I plan to give the bell priestess a few voice lines to help you identify which attacks she's using. For this particular type of bell priestess I can see her have four types of lines to go with. One for her alert (seeing you and activating), one for her beginning to summon ghosties, one type for her inflating, and one for her being knocked out. Each type would have a small handful of voice lines. I may also give her an idle line which I imagine would be humming or something of the sort. I also plan to have two more types made as a way to scale for potential palette swap priestess in the future who might have another type of attack or utility. And I will also likely have the voice lines doubled if I can to have the VA perform these voices in two different character styles for one planned palette swap I have. We'll see how that goes though when I do it.

But before that... the jelly thay'valay will be getting some voice acting of her own soon. I don't know how good it will sound or how many lines will actually go into the game, but I plan to add some! I'm hesitant to get too many voices done because I think it could pollute the audio. So really, only major enemy types will get them. In this way I should be able to add a little more distinction in attacks while not overwhelming the audio profile of the game. So normal enemies will likely still remain silent, or mostly silent, and special enemy types will get a few voice lines.

Though I could talk all day about this sort of stuff, here's a little demo of the bell priest in action and the ghosties too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8gqX1evP7A

And to move onto the mechanics... I've gone ahead and added in a couple more. Sorta? Her inflation system is stacks based instead of just 'gets hit by inflation, inflates' sort of thing. As I talked about before, she protects allies from being inflated by absorbing inflation meant for another ally. For each ally that is getting hit, it transfers one stack to her. She also gains one stack when hit with it herself. So if there are two allies and her, she gains 3 stacks. When she gains four stacks, her belly swells up. Two more stacks at that point and she will full blimp. I am thinking about lowering the stack requirement for her belly to puff up so it's more common since I'm sure it will be desired to see. Though as you can see with how many ghosties she spawns, you can't just hit her with one spell cast and she'll blimp. Instead she'll go up to five charges (just one shy of blimping). Again, subject to change after she's in your hands to toy with.

In regards to her blimp form, right now it's very basic. She just waits longer to float off and wobbles up and down. Actually, when I was examining my inflation system I realized just how horribly programmed it was. It was interesting to look at my old code and go 'why did I do this?' forgetting that back when I started I didn't grasp a lot of concepts. For now, she has her own dedicated inflation object. Later on I will go back and have to clean up the gobbo, and other, inflation objects and unify some of them. I don't have a different one for each enemy type, but there's like three or four of them right now and I can see how to properly unify them now. But that's a task for another day.

Back to her blimp, I'm still thinking about how I should actually do it. I've thought about making it so that when she blimps she tries to hold herself down with magical chains or something visual to give the player feedback to know they have some time before she floats off. I've also debated making it so you can just, jump on her and then freely fly her around for a little while. I'm not sure just yet, more work and thought is required. All I can say for now is that I don't know that I'm fully done with it yet, but I may not really modify it until later.

In regards to the other mechanic, I've added a 'flinch' system to her. And you'll likely see more of this later down the line. Effectively, she has a 'flinch' value and a 'flinch resistance' value. When she takes damage, the flinch value goes up by that amount. When it exceed the 'flinch resistance' value, then she gets stunned briefly like a normal hit. So it's possible to interrupt her still if you are aggressive. (Though in some fights, getting to her to do so will be harder. Again, this is the value of stage design which I hope I can do well!) In addition to this, she also has a flinch adaptation value. Whenever she flinches, her flinch resistance increases by her flinch adaptation value. What this means is that as you damage her, she'll become more resistant to flinching. So even though being aggressive will help put her down faster, it doesn't necessarily make it ideal in every scenario.

As far as her attacks go, the first one is a homing projectile which will latch onto Aria and drain her energy quickly. This projectile starts off with a sizable delay before it starts to decay. Once it's begun to decay, the amount of energy it can drain will rapidly decay with it. So a weakened projectile is far less dangerous than a fresh one. After testing this quite a lot, I think that I am going to actually nerf how quickly she launches new attacks and make it so the projectile doesn't decay quite as quickly. This way there are less of these flying around in the air at once giving you more of an opening to attack her and focus on only the one projectile.

The power of this projectile right now is very high so she's actually a bit of a threat on her own. I tested her a bit by putting a golem in front of her and a thaery above and she's quite deadly. Which, by the way, she doesn't steal the inflation effect from a golem. So if you make the mistake of hitting the inflate in a case like the above, neither the thaery nor the bell priestess will inflate BUT the golem will hyper charge. So you'll be in a bad spot. THOUGH if you just wait for ghosties to spawn... the added thaery will let you inflation bomb them and the bell priestess will blimp. (Still have to deal with the hyper charged golem, thaery, and remaining ghosties, but it's something!) Probably better to just deal with them while not using the spell!

As for the ghostie spawning... so long as you are a decent distance from her, she'll read through a list of spawned ghosties she has out. If she has less than two spawned ghosties on the field, she'll summon more. (For the time being might change) As of now, when she does her summon spell, she will summon four ghosties in quick succession. You can interrupt her during this, but the new flinch system makes it difficult to predict. While you're fighting the ghosties off, she'll fire off more of the homing projectiles. Once you've defeated the ghosties though, she'll usually fire another projectile off (to give you a little breathing time) and then she'll try to summon more.

In practice, the ghosties aren't THAT much of a threat, but because I had them summon 'high' they can be if you are right on top of the bell priestess with certain weapons. (Like melee) Also, as you can imagine, some weapons won't function very well against her, but I plan to add a few more unlocks to help them. In particular, I find the phantom blaster to be falling behind. I have an idea to buff it's power against crowds. Likely to have it 'lose a power level' for each enemy it hits and continue on through them as a kind of pierce. Also plan to give charge cards a small buff through an unlock. A simple 'chain' effect is the plan here. Having it so whenever you defeat an enemy with a normal card, it bounces to another enemy nearby.

Shiver bow doesn't need any help and is likely the strongest weapon against her currently due to the mixed tracking, good mobility, and significant damage from super combines. I'm still monitoring the shiver bow, but I think when it first comes out, it will probably be overpowered in a lot of cases. Don't be surprised if I nerf it. The orb weapon I think is pretty well balanced since the flame trail can not only help defeat ghosties as they come down, but will also hit the bell priestess as you do so. It also has an unlock coming for it that will help it a lot against vertical targets.

Melee I am going to be ok if it's weak versus her since melee has it's special mechanics for parry on some enemies and also destroys armor very quickly. It's worth noting but the projectile the bell priestess launches cannot be destroyed by melee, but it can be blocked by bubbles. So maybe it'll incentivize using the bubble shield to go with melee. (Even more so when I add one of the other new enemies to this area)

And as far as how ghosties work, they are fairly dumb and fragile, but they hit very hard. So don't let them touch you! Their AI works by picking the players position, then traveling to it with a delay after they reach the spot. They also have a high variance to the 'actual destination' based on how far away the player is. So if you are very far away from the ghostie when it starts to 'track' you, the actual destination the ghostie goes to can be quite far off from your position. Never so far off that it can get completely lost attempting to find the player. It always 'slowly homes in' on your position. This is mostly just done so they don't feel blandly stacked directly on top of one another and you lose how many there are.

As for their inflation... well... simple and straightforward! They inflate... and then they go pop! However, I did add in a bit of programming to them so they 'push' away from other inflating ghosties. As you can imagine would actually happen to two inflating targets. They take up more space and push one another away! I do have it on my list to reconfigure gobbos and other enemies to use similar systems too so they don't stack up on top of one another, but I'm waiting to do that until later since anti-clumping will be harder when you take into account collision. Ghosties have no terrain collision so they just moosh away from one another. Very simple programming on them involving checking around themselves for others, putting them all into a list organized by range, then pushing away from the closest ghostie to them. Which I thought something like this would be laggy, but apparently not.

On that subject... I feel like my game has been lagging a lot lately during testing. Which is very annoying to me because I'm not sure what's causing it. I think it may just be my computer slowly dying. It's rather old at this point, but I think it'll be fine. My biggest worry isn't the performance I have to deal with, but what a player will experience.

Now you may think that it has to do with non-optimal programming... but... I actually don't know. As you can see in the video, I specifically made a new testing area. Well that testing area is quite small! It doesn't have a lot to it. In that case, it still seems to slowdown sometime and appears quite random. In bigger level segments it makes sense to see slowdown. Then I could say 'Oh maybe I have too much going on', but it seems random. It makes me wonder what the issue is.

I have been doing more debugging lately and even a lot of looking into the actual debugging menus and measuring exactly what is happening in the game at the time, but uh... it's still not clear. I think that it has to do with Game Maker somehow though, but as to how to fix it? I don't know yet. I'll have to do research. I tested it with steam's FPS measurement AND I checked the FPS in the debug and it shows the FPS at 60+ (well in the hundreds, but you get the idea) .

So the sluggishness that randomly seems to pop up has to do with Game maker somehow, but I don't know what the cause could be. Either way, I apologize for anyone who might experience the slowdown. Just know that I'm concerned and I'll be looking into a way to fix it.

As an aside, the game install size is slowly ballooning up (heh) and I will let you know, that is almost entirely due to sound and music real estate. I am careful, for the most part, to convert everything to .ogg, but if you ever wonder about the game size, well that's why it's so big. I'm ok compromising on sound quality somewhat, but I've read in a few places that .ogg is the best middle ground. So I typically convert from .wav to .ogg format and am done with it. I do also trim a LOT of files before doing so. Sometimes sound effects have roughly 30-50% of space after the sound effect. Sometimes this is done for fade outs of sound effects, other times it seems almost imperceptible if it's just dead air after. I tend to trim these down a lot. So the file size is increasing in spite of this.

I do think I may have a small handful of music/ambience files which are still in .wav format though which I'll have to manually go through at the end to check. Also if you're curious about which audiogroup is the largest, you can see it in the .zip files.

Since ambience files are so long, they take up quite a chunk. They are more than all of the sfx data combined! Though... there is one ambience file which is only used in the game settings menu that I could trim down and I believe that one is probably a .wav file . There's also a couple of ambiences that are in the files but not used in game yet (snow stuff). So while I'm sure I'll find more ambience to add, I don't know if that size will go up TOO much.

The music file size though WILL go up. I haven't even added in the next boss music yet and it will have some variant files to help smooth out the boss fight I have planned so yeah. Plus I plan to get more music made and added as well. I'm sure there is at least one file in there that is still in it's .wav form too.

On other subjects, Foss is still coming up. I just got so focused on the bell priestess that I didn't work on her. I'll get some work done on her soon though. As this next build is filling out, once it gets close to the end, I always feel that urge to SPRINT to it so it's entirely possible I'm going to make a liar out of myself and not actually focus on catching up on the NPCs until after the next patch. Sorry about that if you care. I promise that after the next patch comes out that I will be putting a lot of focus on the NPCs in general. I will be starting to implement their TFs into the game and also focusing on getting the ones I have to design and PUFF done! This next patch is shaping up to be rather big in terms of all the modifications and smoothing out of everything. Content-wise should still be pretty good too, though I'm wondering about how it will feel compared to Candimus and Kirizimi.

Anyway, that's all I really have to say right now!