Devlog No.071 (Patreon)

I'm curious how everyone feels about the raw movement of Aria. The way I have it set up gives her a little momentum so turning around isn't quite instantaneous. I did this because the original design was to have some slippery terrain and a bit more emphasis on movement. However, as the game has developed I do wonder if tighter control over Aria would be better for the baseline. I can still always add in slippery ice stuff later. Right now the big reason I ask that is that I went back and played various platformer games again. Since ADD is shaping up to be a little more metroidvania esq just with some linearity to help guide you, I thought it might be a better idea to swap to removing the friction from the horizontal axis.So when you press left, she goes full speed left even if you were going full speed right at first. And vice versa. I could always maintain the gentle friction while Aria is in the air instead, and keep the slight acceleration when you first start moving. Also keep those elements for things like flying to maintain the sensation that you don't have full control while you're inflated for example. This kind of thing wouldn't affect her blueberry form either.On the subject of her blueberry form, I'll likely tweak it a bit more too as I'm planning to adjust the physics a little. So going up a hill will be slightly slower and down one will make you go faster.

In general, I've just been thinking about messing with the movement mechanics more and I'm curious about what would feel best. The whole reason I bring this up is with the implementation of Aria's demon form. Which, I've all but completed. It's effectively done and I have the initial area you get it in done save for the storylet parts of it. While fixing up the melee attack I kind of realized that even though you have a lot of movement freedom while attacking, it's still short range and doesn't stun enemies. You can effectively reach a good bit further than the wind blade, but that's a heavy sensation of overly risky gameplay that feels awkward.

If you decide to back up for any reason, well the attack currently only aims where you are aiming. I can change that easily enough to aim the direction the player is holding OR to make it so that it attacks in the direction you press at the time and then maintain that direction, but that also feels a little exploity. Like you can run backward and attack behind you. Feels odd.

So this kinda brings up the movement. If you can press left and right and immediately face those directions, it gives you a lot stronger control over immediate reaction and thus also stronger control over your distance while fighting in melee without allowing the player to retreat and attack simultaneously.

As I said above, I can change movement so it's specific to forms too. So I could make it so demon form has immediate direction changing for example while letting Aria stay how she currently works. (Which in Aria's default case, she will attack in the direction you are holding, but this doesn't work for the demon form as I talked about since it lets you attack behind you while running)

Mind you, I do think it's ok to make it difficult to avoid attacks since demon form fully stops energy drain and also blocks all damage at the cost of mana instead. That makes it valuable in itself to just use it as damage mitigation. So while I am a little worried about how it functions, and I'll probably experiment a bit more, the fact it's a spell that you're not meant to have on at all times makes me feel that it's ok if it's a little unweildy.

I think I mentioned before some mild issues with daemon form. There still are a handful, but mosty cutscene related. Like if you're in daemon form when you walk in on the gargoyle, temporarily you become Aria's base form due to how the cutscene works. Lots of small things to adjust there. Also you can't inflate at all while in daemon form now so that's all fixed.

Though one thing I went ahead and did is I made it so that the filimuri bullies will no longer be able to grab you in daemon form. In fact, they'll actually just get scared and run away. After briefly hesitating, they'll run back to where they came in and then jump into the background and leave. I might adjust this more so they only do this if there are no allies around and instead just push you while you're in daemon form. For now though, they just sorta leave. (They'll still shove you around if you stand in their way while they are leaving though)

Regardless, right now demon form needs testing.

In addition to getting that all done, I've also finished one of... I think three shrines I have planned for this update. This one is a demon focused shrine. I added a new mechanic here to help keep Aria's demon form challenging since the double jump and teleport give her a ton of mobility and freedom. Push blocks that kind of force you to go in a certain direction. Also I've added in little electric ledges which you can't grab onto and also a mechanic where if you drop daemon form for any reason, you get teleported back to the start of the section. So definitely 'daemon' focused.It was difficult to build the shrine and I might have to mess with it a little since there's some issues in regards to her hitbox and the teleport. Anytime you try to teleport into a narrow and tall segment, it's possible for it to fail due to the shape and the way numbers round. Thankfully there's only a few small spots like this so I'm hopeful it won't be annoying. I'll have to see if I can fix the issue or just gently nerf the challenge so it's not annoying. Challenges should be a challenge to your skill and thinking, not figuring out the exact spot to make something work.

Aside from that little issue, teleport works pretty smoothly. I've adjusted it so that if you impact an enemy during transit, the game attempts to eject you out of the teleport into the nearest valid space. Though it works pretty well, there's always the possibility that an oversight of mine might cause trouble. So if you're playing and you somehow get pushed out of bounds, just let me know where it happened. I think I have enough solids properly allocated to where it shouldn't easily happen, but you never know. I do admit to being a little worried about the teleport overall, but it SEEMS to be working fine. Needs more testing.

I designed the teleport in a way to where I tried to make it not extremely easy to bypass enemies. I'm likely to adjust future enemy design to compensate for your extra freedom in demon form (such as more projectiles or using level design that discourages bypassing enemies), but I don't want it to be oppressive. You can already skip some types of enemies by just walking through them persistently at the cost of HP. I'd really rather that if you are bypassing enemies that it has some kind of cost. There is always the potential that I make demon form's cast free of mana and that teleporting costs a point of mana or something. Again, more testing required.

I've worked a bit on one of the new basic enemy types. As suggested by a few patrons, a new enemy type will show up who has spines that will apply inflation to anyone hit. In the case of an enemy, that means the usual stuff. In the case of Aria, it means boob inflate, then blimp (if you already have boob inflate on you). You can expect these enemies to fire off their projectiles like a shotgun towards Aria, then be unable to fire again for a decent amount of time. If you destroy them while they have their spikes, then instead their spikes will burst over a small area and be able to hit enemies too. Normally friendly fire would be really welcome for even their targeted attacks, but I feel like that will limit design so you can only make them hit other enemies by blowing them up while they have their spikes.

To compensate, their attack will have a short little chargeup and they will also wait longer after their spikes come back before firing. So if you prefer, you can let them miss you, then wait, then hit them.

Returning to them firing a 'shotgun' at you...

This will function more like the candy snek girl shotgun effect. That means... you can get hit by multiples of them. So yes... if you get blasted by the full effect, I intend it to be possible for you to go full blimp immediately, though you will be protected from popping from a single volley. (Doesn't meant there won't be another enemy type who doesn't try to take advantage of your blimped form though!) Speaking on this shotgun effect (And the candy snek's shotgun too) some types of attacks don't cause an invulnerability trigger. In the case of demon form, that means each pellet drains 2 mana. I want this to be her intended weakness so you'll need to avoid shotgun effects.

With this in mind, I'm not 100% sure just how many 'spikes' the spikey shroom here will launch, but if I decide on a lot after testing, that could mean you get blasted while in daemon form, have it knocked off, then get blimped as normal Aria immediately. We'll see how this plays out after I've got it all programmed, but it's something to be concerned with.

Also I didn't mention it yet, but the bell priestess projectile doesn't cause impact damage. So it won't pop you. That means that I believe it will be VERY dangerous paired up with the player accidentally getting blimped as then you will need to avoid this projectile AND there will probably be ghosties about! I'm a little worried about this, but again, we'll see how it plays out.

Here is the spikey shroom enemy visual directly inspired by a patron suggestion. (He won't be moving around at all)

I forget if I mentioned it previously, but there actually has been another spiky shroom in the game already since I started working on this update actually. However, he's just a basic shrooma type. I decided to keep him around and add this new shrooma look as well. Here's the other shrooma type.

This guy is already fully implemented and working. He just hurts a lot if you touch him and when he dies he fires off projectiles around himself. He's not really special though and you can see him as just another shrooma. (Granted you wanna be careful killing him)

I've also added in a new NPC gal to chat with. She doesn't say too much, but I added her specifically for right as you're leaving Kirizimi. She'll just talk about the church in Kirizimi and encourage you to go there. The reason behind this is just to have a little breadcrumb which will hopefully lead the player to the temple if they haven't gone already and find the booba statue there. (If you come back to Kirizimi after visiting Khilspere, you'll actually find this new NPC in the temple too so I may do a little more with her down the line)

I've most definitely said it before, but I still intend to add a few more basic NPCs to the outskirts area of the Kirizimi entrance and the hotsprings area so they are still in the plate.

Back to the demon form, I went ahead and prepared a short video to demonstrate her demon form and show a little of the new shrine. I won't spoil the whole thing though, just kind of show off some of the more skill sections that don't require you to figure out the puzzle too much.

With demon form now practically done, I'll be moving onto other things. Obviously I will work on Evel'lahn's blueberry tf, (which, if anyone would be curious, I did record myself doing her portrait, though I didn't cut up the footage or anything. I could turn it into a video if anyone would like to see the timelapse for that) but for the game mechanics and whatnot, there's still a good chunk to work at. There's the spiky shroom that I will probably throw myself into since I think I can do him fairly quickly. Not too, too much work there I don't think. Then I have one more big enemy type I have planned and possibly another recolor of some kind. The big enemy type probably not going to start on them just yet.

Then there are two other shrines I have planned. I actually quite want to work on one of the shrines a lot so I will probably move into working on that shrine after spiky shrooma. And there's several areas still to fully complete, but they're coming together gradually as I progress the enemy design. It's hard to want to work on levels while I am still working on the enemies otherwise I think I'd have them all done. (Well, not really because they will still take some time, but more so that I would have just focused on finishing them is what I mean)

And the other really big thing is the boss. I'm tempted to just show off her concept art and music, but I'm holding off.

And there's other stuff to do as well, but I'm not sure what will make the immediate cut. I'm starting to get just a bit impatient with myself, though it'll be fine I'm sure. One thing I can say I know for sure is going to take up like a full day of my time is just charting all the new map segments and properly doing the data entry. But I'm not touching that until the levels are done which won't be done until the monsters are done...

So... expect more enemies and more shrine work next. I think that's all for now. Check out the video if you don't mind some mild spoilers!