ProjectDragonfly Update Mar2022

Didn't get as much work done this month but I managed to figure out a lot of the item functionality mainly which I feel good enough about. So right now, making a new item is really easy unless it's complex or requires an event I haven't planned for yet which is totally fine for now. So with this I've been able to import most of the items I designed in Game Maker which are mainly simple stat buffs, simple event based items like on-hits and a couple of more complex ones.

The one exception here is homing, I don't know the best way to handle homing since the way I did it previously was very inefficient. Previously, homing would check a shot's position against every enemy object's position EVERY frame and adjust its angle to move toward the closest target based on how close it is (the closer the target, the faster the angle would change). This did make for a really nice looking effect with shots kind of slithering between enemies if they'd miss but I am worried about performance if there would be more than 4 enemies or something. My first thing to try would be to have shots mark their desired target once they're created and then change target only if the target dies or maybe I can detect if the shot has missed then it can pick a new target but then we're getting into actual rocket science and I'm not about that. We'll see.

One thing I put a bit of focus on was the summons or minions (or options) not 100% on what I'm gonna call them but they are summons in the code at least. I made a few in Game Maker but they were kinda scuffed I don't think I finished them fully, here however I've got a pretty good system down I think. Firstly, since summons can make use of the quadtree collision system, making a summon that is able to protect you from bullets became a lot more doable. The main thing is though that the summons are now completely controlled by the items, which means all the summon actually does is have an attack timer and tell things if it's ready to attack (so that it can have scaling attack speed). The item would then control how it moves and what happens when it attacks, this allows for really specific effects for summons.

The last thing I worked on were a couple of shaders which you can see with the item sprites above. Basically I made one that takes in a palette of 6 colours and then colours things based on their original luminosity. Yes, if you use a palette that doesn't go from dark to light it's gonna look real weird it doesn't detect how close the original colour is to the palette colour at all so you gotta be careful with that one. The other shader is just that subtle quivering effect on the items, it's a very simple vertex shader that just moves the vertex points a little randomly. I'm thinking about going for a black and white sketchy style for the art style and I think this shader or something similar will go a long way to give it just enough life to be effective.

So items are largely figured out, I think even though enemy types and shot sprites are something on my list, I want to make the boss system next and have a working boss with multiple attacks and stuff. Shouldn't be too hard but it has the opportunity to get messy and I wanna avoid that.