EeveeEuphoria
a possum irl
Another progress update! Things are starting to slow down a bit on my end, as... yeah this has been a gigantic undertaking. I'm impressed with what I've been able to do, but I'm starting to get to the point where I'm a lil worried this might not live up to my initial ambitions. But, it's better to just get this done and hope people will like this regardless!
Anywho, new thing on the board here! For Metal's Mayhem specifically, the Pong arcade machine will have a random chance to spawn rings in the arena! Collecting them will net you a buncha rings for you to get upgrades with! Specifically, the starting rings will give you 5 per ring, then for every defeat on the bot you get, the rings will respawn, with the initial respawned batch awarding 3 rings, and any after that giving you 1. So, the best strategy is to clear out the board first, then win against the bot!
You'll know this is available when the arcade machine has a flashing exclamation mark! Doing this faciliated making a whole system for that, so, maybe other NPCs will have special events available to them, I'll have to contemplate that.
Another thing I've gotten done is adding the boss levels! I've settled on beating 3 levels yields a boss level, in which beating it will earn you a "Boss Token"! What do you do with said boss tokens? Well...
You get permanent upgrades, in the form of badges! You can equip one of these badges to help you throughout the run! The sash upgrade, of course, will allow you to equip up to 3 instead! As you may notice, a couple of the badges also say that you can not unequip them, since they award you something upon equipping. I'm honestly struggling a bit to think of other badges to slap into here, I've actually removed one just today since I wasn't liking how it changed the behavior of the chaos effects!
I do want a bunch of badges in here, to help facilitate replay value. So, I'll have to brainstorm a buncha more badges to vary up the gameplay.
For more technical stuff, I've moved all of the global mobj hooks off into their own separate thing, which means this mod should be more optimized. I know things like the "Time Stop" global effect caused lag, so, hopefully this will alleviate that! This'll also make this work for future SRB2 versions... or at least, lessen the load needed to port this to that :P And I've also been working a lot on finding and squashing bugs, just today I've been documenting quite a few nasty bugs that'll need special attention to fix.
As for future plans, I might plan on releasing a playtest version of this update! I can't find all the bugs on my own, and I'm sure a lot of people on here would be eager to try this out a bit early, so... I might release a playtest sometime early April. No guarantees though, I might change my mind on this! Though it's more likely than not to happen, especially as I'll want feedback on how the gameplay loop is, since that's extremely critical... and being the developer who playtests my own mod a lot, I'm obviously biased as to how this plays. Game design is tough!
And I do foresee the April deadline being achievable, though that said I might want to move some planned features to a future update to this. An update to this update, if you will. I hope I can get most of everything done, but some priorities on features will have to start going into effect very soon if I want this released in a playable state!
That's it for now, I hope to get this in y'alls grubby hands soon, since this has been really fun to work on, and I'm really proud of the work I've put into all of this. Many years of work have accumulated into this update, making a whole game mode that is pretty unique, I'd say.
Anywho, new thing on the board here! For Metal's Mayhem specifically, the Pong arcade machine will have a random chance to spawn rings in the arena! Collecting them will net you a buncha rings for you to get upgrades with! Specifically, the starting rings will give you 5 per ring, then for every defeat on the bot you get, the rings will respawn, with the initial respawned batch awarding 3 rings, and any after that giving you 1. So, the best strategy is to clear out the board first, then win against the bot!
You'll know this is available when the arcade machine has a flashing exclamation mark! Doing this faciliated making a whole system for that, so, maybe other NPCs will have special events available to them, I'll have to contemplate that.
Another thing I've gotten done is adding the boss levels! I've settled on beating 3 levels yields a boss level, in which beating it will earn you a "Boss Token"! What do you do with said boss tokens? Well...
You get permanent upgrades, in the form of badges! You can equip one of these badges to help you throughout the run! The sash upgrade, of course, will allow you to equip up to 3 instead! As you may notice, a couple of the badges also say that you can not unequip them, since they award you something upon equipping. I'm honestly struggling a bit to think of other badges to slap into here, I've actually removed one just today since I wasn't liking how it changed the behavior of the chaos effects!
I do want a bunch of badges in here, to help facilitate replay value. So, I'll have to brainstorm a buncha more badges to vary up the gameplay.
For more technical stuff, I've moved all of the global mobj hooks off into their own separate thing, which means this mod should be more optimized. I know things like the "Time Stop" global effect caused lag, so, hopefully this will alleviate that! This'll also make this work for future SRB2 versions... or at least, lessen the load needed to port this to that :P And I've also been working a lot on finding and squashing bugs, just today I've been documenting quite a few nasty bugs that'll need special attention to fix.
As for future plans, I might plan on releasing a playtest version of this update! I can't find all the bugs on my own, and I'm sure a lot of people on here would be eager to try this out a bit early, so... I might release a playtest sometime early April. No guarantees though, I might change my mind on this! Though it's more likely than not to happen, especially as I'll want feedback on how the gameplay loop is, since that's extremely critical... and being the developer who playtests my own mod a lot, I'm obviously biased as to how this plays. Game design is tough!
And I do foresee the April deadline being achievable, though that said I might want to move some planned features to a future update to this. An update to this update, if you will. I hope I can get most of everything done, but some priorities on features will have to start going into effect very soon if I want this released in a playable state!
That's it for now, I hope to get this in y'alls grubby hands soon, since this has been really fun to work on, and I'm really proud of the work I've put into all of this. Many years of work have accumulated into this update, making a whole game mode that is pretty unique, I'd say.
