Spooky Forest progress: science and ghosts

Hey all!

I'm back again with another progress update. This time I'll be talking about easier/improved rhythms, new and improved animations, gameplay experimentation, and interface improvements.
Let's start with...

Rhythms

The combat interface has a new wave VFX when Supering - it's similar to the pink waves effect introduced in the previous update, and it's paired with the combat bars being on "fire" while the Supering is active. This means it should be easier to notice and understand Supering being a special thing that you get from rhythm combos.

I've added something I should have a while back: rhythm delay tweaking. If you feel like you're missing rhythms because you have to keep predicting them, now you don't have to anymore. This is especially useful if you have a controller or a screen with input delay, which is more common than it probably should be unfortunately. You should be prompted to tweak rhythms when you start the game in the next bugfix update once that's released, so the rhythm hit window is adjusted accordingly. In addition to this, I've also once more made rhythms a bit easier to hit by increasing their minimum hit window.

Edge no longer has the "abuse" effect anymore as a trade-off for not being able to spam - it now has a delay between each use, no matter how much of the energy is used.

Spooky

I've also been working on the upcoming scientist ghost quest. I've made the ghost NPC/entity now and the animation core loop is done, but that's just for the first animation. The plan with this quest is that you're supposed to use the Ghostlight lamp to find the ghost guy, and once you have, he will give you more quest stuff to do. I'll be adding some new movement-related interactables in the Pumpacle zone that you can activate and see with the Ghostlight so that it becomes a bit more fun to traverse again.

The vampire manor has progressed a bit. I have made some already and hope to add plenty of interactable environment parts for this, as it'll be a bit more puzzle-y for its associated quest. You'll be searching the manor and unlock more and more of it as you do. The teaser GIF is of the vampire manor's small lake.

The Minecart animation I mentioned previously is also pretty much done, but I haven't had the chance to work on the rails minigame level design yet.

Interfaces

One thing I had been meaning to do for a while was auto-hiding the levels, money, and item interface parts when they're empty or inactive and that work's finally done now. This means there's more space on-screen to see the world.

The quest interface will let you see quests from any regions you've visited via a region selection in the upcoming bugfix update. Completed quests and quest steps are also grayed out so you know they're done.

The controller selection screen now pops up if you use a controller for the first time during a game session, so that it's clearer you can (and should) select a specific controller. It's not ideal yet, I'll have to improve this again for coop anyway, so in the future I plan to make a dedicated controller selection popup/menu.

Gameplay experimentation

I've started working on a change I hope will make the game a bit more fun: making all monster effects into abilities you can keep and toggle on/off. You've seen this in the Spooky Forest already, but with some level design tweaks I'm working on this should be doable in the Jungle too. So if you want to reverse gravity somewhere else, you can (with some limitations)... which also means there's going to be a region ceiling and maybe more upside down stuff up there? You might notice some work on this in the bugfix update, but it won't yet have the effects turned into abilities until that work is done and tested.

I'm not super satisfied with how interactions with entities work so I'm playing around with an idea I had - giving the player some "fighting" moves that fill (instead of reduce) a healthbar for the entities, which also affects how easy/short or hard/long the rhythm combat becomes once you enter it. I hope it makes things a bit closer to how other platformers work, while staying faithful to the animation-centric game it is (as well as no actual violence), but it's very early experimentation right now, we'll see how it works out and if it's fun. This is some work I started doing in the experimental new "difficulty" I mentioned previously, at this point I'm sort of just treating that as a place to play around with potential new features.

The rest

The jungle boss Erisia-winning animation has been redone now - it's bigger and more dynamic now. The wooden lift animation has improved shading, and has also been simplified to one speed to make rhythms easier too. The final one here is the Floating Stone face bubble has been improved.

I also added a small change to the bar minigame: a customer satisfaction board that goes up to 100, and once it does, you unlock a small event. It's not anything new content-wise, but it reuses old stuff in a new way.

I've also added automated testing for the bar minigame, because I keep breaking it - now I can just run the test to see if it works as it should while I do something else. This also opens up the door for more testing like this in the future, so if something is complex and prone to breaking I'll probably add tests to it to ensure it works adequately :)

That's it for this one. There should be a bugfix update and hopefully the small content update, between now and the next progress update. Either way, the next progress update will be on December 9th. See you then!