Progress Update: potion seller, spell upgrades, onomatopoeia

Hey all, I'm back with another progress update.

Progress towards

Progress tracker - what work is ahead of the small test build. It might grow or shrink a little depending on circumstances.

Small - 1 day of work

Medium - 2-3 days of work

Large - 4-7 days of work

✅ MEDIUM: Create new Purple Tentacle animation

I've decided to complete this - instead of doing 4 full alt-animations I've done 2 for now since it's not essential to the upcoming test build. I'm aiming to have all four done for a fuller future release though!

✅ MEDIUM: Create a Blessings system

This is done now! I might add some more Blessings before the test build is out, but otherwise it's complete. Currently, there are 11 Blessings / upgrades in total, but the idea is to expand these in the future.

✅ MEDIUM: Create new Plant Walker animation

This is done now.

✅ SMALL: Finish inventory and potion making systems

This is now done - you can equip and drop items, and brew potions from the item inventory.

🟦 NEW MEDIUM: Complete level design

This is a thing I probably should've had a progress entry for - I've done plenty of work already, but I'd like to add some more. In particular, I want to create a small temple section with some moving parts, a small challenge arena, and some more hidden parts with collectables and maybe an NPC or two.

🟦 LARGE: Create a small trading hub with shop, service, and quest NPCs

I've made the last of the trading NPCs here - the potion seller. She just sells simple health, energy, and revitalize potions, maybe more consumables in the future. The ogre lady is also here now and she's going to be one of the quest NPCs - she will give you various quests to complete. I've also added outfits to all the current hub NPCs.

What remains: more furniture/interior stuff, the sitting Guidess needs to be redrawn, a quest needs to be added.

🟦 MEDIUM: Make magic moves upgradeable

I have an upgrade effect for all the magic spells I feel are appropriate, I've decided to skip one or two where I haven't thought of an appropriate upgrade effect yet - so the only thing that remains here is polish and testing to ensure it all works as intended, and making sure the UI communicates upgrade effects well.

🟦 LARGE: Create Purple Man water mini-boss

I made some progress on the core animation here, but it's not done yet. I'll likely be focusing on this before the next progress update, so I'm hoping to have it done then.

I've tweaked the battle a bit so that it's more balanced for pre-upgraded magic spells, but I'll probably tweak it some more.

⬜ NEW SMALL: Add sound effects to various new things

This is something I know I'll have to do before release so I'm adding it here. It includes sound effects for the player menu, magic spells, pickups, and other things I may be missing.

⬜ MEDIUM: Create a tutorial to teach movement and magic spells

No progress on this one this time.

✅ LARGE: New run animation

✅ SMALL: Finish playfighting player menu

Otherwise

I've been tweaking entity behavior a bit - entities now try to avoid overlapping, and push each other away. This means you shouldn't get a stack of multiple entities on top of each other when they're trying to reach you. The Purple Tentacles are also a bit more competitive - their sideways poke move now also involves dashing.

I'm playing around with onomatopoeia - sound effects shown as floating text, so if you can't hear the game for whatever reason this should help communicate what's happening.

That's it for this one - we're now at 6/12 tasks done and getting close to done with the two larges and one medium - hopefully we're only one progress update away from talking about a release date for a test build (we'll see). The next one should be around the 6th of May, see you then!