Revival! Dark Space Updated to Version 4.1!

Wow! It's been a year and a half now, hasn't it? Unfortunately, life happens and plans get changed; Dark Space fell to the wayside, complications with getting the soundtrack together cropped up, and I began to pursue new projects instead. After all this time, however, some of the original plans for Dark Space are finally coming together! The rest of the soundtrack is still underway, but the game now has two all-new boss themes for your listening pleasure. You can listen to an early version of one right now in the trailer (I put it together beforehand), and the actual in-game themes are even better! The composer, my brother Loogs, still plans to edit them slightly in the near future, but I think they already sound fantastic and am very excited to finally share some new audio with everyone! He plans to upload the soundtrack separately as more progress is made on it, and I'll link to that as soon as it's available. Aside from the new music, I've been in the spirit of making progress, too, and I have made quite a number of gameplay changes.

I had previously stated that I wouldn't be making any more gameplay updates, but time has this uncanny ability to change people's minds. Because it's been such a long time since I paid any mind to this project, I've been able to have more of a player's perspective and pick out things that I dislike or find unfair about the game. Along with other feedback I've received over the time Dark Space has been out since its last update, I decided to return with a fresh perspective and make numerous minor modifications to all sorts of aspects about the game in the hope of producing a smoother, more enjoyable experience for all. The biggest change is that you will no longer be gated from the final two stages if you receive a game over! In addition to balancing updates, I also realized how ugly and messy my old code was and put forth a big effort to rewrite it all for better clarity and efficiency (producing several more issues in the process that I had to fix!). The entire changelog can be found at the bottom of this post.

Dark Space is more-or-less finished at this point and I only plan to update it when more music and sound effects are ready to go, but I'm currently working on my second project, a puzzle game called Moth to the Moon, and expect most of my upcoming posts to pertain to its development. I'm even pretty close to having a new update ready for it! It's a completely different kind of game compared to the more fast-paced, action-oriented Dark Space, but I hope you enjoy it all the same! Anyway, thank you for reading this entire rambling diatribe; I'll return to add more music tracks and possibly redone sound effects to Dark Space with gradual version updates! Keep an eye out for me!

== VERSION 4.1 CHANGES ==

• Two in-the-works boss themes are now present! You'll be able to listen to them during boss encounters, of course. The rest of the game is silent... for now.
• The requirement of using no continues in a single run to advance to the fifth stage has been removed, which also means that the bad ending can no longer be obtained. After looking back at this first finished project of mine with a new perspective, I decided that blocking off the a third of the content from "imperfect" runs is a dumb idea. Enjoy!
• Your current score is finally now displayed above your current essence counter! You don't have to pause the game to see how high your score is if that's something you care about.
• Because many players have found Phrostere's stage to be more difficult than the other three beginning stages, it is now slightly easier on both difficulty modes; some of the environmental hazards have been adjusted or outright removed, especially towards the end of the stage.
• The game will no longer return to the main menu if you press Escape in the event of a game over.
• The shields of shielded enemies will no longer continue to be targeted by homing attacks if the enemy itself is defeated first, but a homing projectile has already locked onto its shield.
• Hate Face launches fewer projectiles less rapidly over the course of its attacking pattern.
• For consistency with other segmented bosses, it is no longer necessary to defeat the body segments of Mega Myriapod before the head in order to receive the maximum reward from the battle (but you still should continue doing this for the easiest time!).
• (Hard difficulty) Mega Myriapod fires slightly narrower spreads of projectiles during its final attack pattern.
• (Hard difficulty) Some of the formations assumed by the crystal platforms in Mhollohm's battle have been swapped around.
• The "anti-cheating" attack pattern of Mad Mandible has been changed. The main cannons will no longer fire, but the head will continue to produce an endless stream of splitting missiles until you return to the central space.
• An error with the laser cannon joints and end-pieces not assuming their "destroyed" sprites when all of the connected laser cannons are defeated during the battle with Mad Mandible has been fixed.
• The unlockable character descriptions have been edited to be more interesting and descriptive.
• A few minor rectifications have been made to the text guide that comes bundled together with the game... The movement of an object with mental powers is known as telekinesis, not telepathy! Good job, me.
• Speaking of rectifications, I decided to go rooting through the project files and made many optimizations to reduce the number of objects being processed, mainly by converting uninteractive object classes into drawn sprites and migrating the project from the old audio engine to the new audio engine. With Dark Space being my first "real" game development effort, I made a few downright bizarre decisions on how to implement particular aspects of the game. Did you know that each digit in the score and essence counters was initialized as an instance of its own unique class? Why did I do that?!
• Multiple other minor changes have been made.