Made the bosses for the first two areas. Opted to go with more bullet-sponge type bosses rather than puzzley guys. Only loosely testing one of the abilities picked up in that level. The first boss just has a couple routines it runs through. The player is just looking to get shots in while avoiding damage. The second boss has one state where it's vulnerable that the player can activate and a couple other states for attacking the player.  Next up is the Area 3 boss.

The hand drawn map was the very first thing I made for the game. I think it was around May of 2018. I had a loose idea of the upgrades and abilities I wanted the player to have, but this was the first time I actually made a place for them to all go. The final version is pretty different, though I'm sure things will move around more as I test everything. Looking at it all now, it's smaller than it seemed as I was drawing it up. I did want to keep the game small, like it could be completed in one sitting. So I'm probably not going to be adding a sixth area or anything. Maybe I'll add a few more secret rooms or short cuts to speed up backtracking.

Area 5 artwork donzo. The way to the surface leads through a volcano. What a massive inconvenience for the player. Got some big rooms with several parallax layers going, along with some lava ember particle effects floating up off the pools. A couple backgrounds are animated with glowing lava cracks. Not much but it helps make spaces feel more alive when there is some extra pieces moving around in it. I have to go back through the areas I've made and see if I can come up with some animated background objects to plug in. I'm thinking about working on getting the crystals in Area 3 to flicker when the camera is moving. Would definitely be a cool effect, but it would be tough to get it to look right. That has been one of the more tricky aspects of doing all this artwork. I'll draw all these different objects and drop them in the stage, but they won't often look like they fit right, and I end up having to play around with the tint and contrast/brightness until it l

Area 5 skeleton pretty much done. At least the first draft is anyway. Don’t touch the red tiles. Hot lava. This level is the inside of a volcano by the way. Pretty rough route to the surface for the player. There’s something about the last level of a game where lava just seems like it has to be there. I think the first final level I remember playing was World 8 in Mario 3. The music and the fire everywhere created about as much dread as I could handle as a kid. I’ve been thinking of trying to get a sneak preview of the final area before you are ready or powered up enough to handle it. That’s a great feature in many games. Get a look ahead at what you will eventually be having to face. Whether it’s an early run in with a big boss, or just a brief passageway through the final area, I always enjoy that sense of foreboding.  Yeah I’m gonna do it. It’ll be sweet.

Made up some new bad guys for area 4. So far I've leaned on the corgi game kit for most of the AI behaviors, but for this area I've wanted to start learning how to make more complicated actions. First guy is the Enlarged Floating Brain, who will float around until it spots the player. It will them move over and fire a light ray at the player. Light damages the player, probably because it's really hot or something. Also got this phage dude, can get blown up on one hit, but if it latches onto your head, regular laser blasts won't knock it off. Kind of a way to remind the player they have alternate ways to attack enemies. Then there's RoboRobe. He phases in and out moving around to random locations and firing a homing orb at the player. All these baddies are a step up in complexity for me. They use raycasts to detect the player and then run an "attacking mode." Next step will be making certain behaviors that are triggered by specific pla

Area 4 frame made up. I pretty much make the frame out of black tiles and test it all out.  There are a few things I look for while testing at this point. Make sure all the jumps can be made. Check for any awkward movement through narrow corridors. See where the camera goes in some of the bigger rooms, and ensure the player can see what I want them to notice (ledges, visual clues.) I'll also load in some of the ability barriers at this point. I like to get a good sense of where certain obstacles are going to be in a room so I can plan what the background image should look like for that room. In earlier areas, I waited until after some of the art was done and re-tiling to accommodate the size and functionality of certain barriers added some time.

Area 3 enemies are mostly done. Just some tuning/balancing left to do. I mostly have them placed where I want in the level. I try to have a reasonable mix of enemies that are just bullet sponges and enemies that are puzzles that ask for a little more attention from the player to take down. On that spectrum, I tend to lean toward bullet sponges, especially since this is a metroidvania game where backtracking is encouraged. It seems like that backtracking will be more appealing if the player doesn't have to keep stopping to square dance with each enemy over and over as they try to progress. I more prefer to build the sense of empowerment by basically giving the player more powerful bullets, that blow up the sponges much faster than the early weapons in the game.  

I've got the artwork for areas one, two, and three completed. Zooming out on the full map is pretty encouraging. I'm finding out just how tricky level design can be though. There are a lot of things to try to keep in mind as you build each room. Is the player getting lost too easily? Hopefully not, though that's something I'll have to determine mostly through watching someone else play. I have kept the critical path fairly linear. Whenever the path requires backtracking, I try to give the player another way to move through the rooms. Is there an architecture element that explains the shape of the room?  Sometimes, though I think I'm not the kind of player that stops to ask why this room exists in this world. I'm down for a police station that used to be an art museum that was run by an eccentric puzzle maker who liked funny-shaped keys.  I'd rather it be fun than make perfect sense.  I do try to avoid the more obvious issues, like "why is t

I started off having the player as a white square as I was figuring out how to add abilities and change code around. It didn't take long though before I really wanted to draw up a player sprite with movement animations for some of the actions I was developing. The suit design always had the fishbowl helmet, but went through tons of little tweaks to the shape and colors, though I found out pretty quick that there isn't a whole lot of room when you commit to the player sprite being only 32x16 pixels. I settled on the pretty simple orange and blue with a grey and green blaster. It felt like if I tried to add anymore detail, it would just muddy up the look of the character. The walk cycle and other animations from player abilities were a lot of fun to draw. I've had a little experience with flash animation in the past, and there are a lot of good resources for pixel art animation. One of my favorite's is a video series by Dan Root called Video Game Animation