Stage 2 is finished, and a new version was released a bit ago. Now the focus has turned to stage 3. It's a cave scene, dark, with rocks and stuff. There's a new enemy in there that looks like a big blob of flesh that explodes into blood and gibs. Here's a looksy:
Look at that sad looking blob. In the game I call it a failed human, the story being that uhh, God made some other things before settling on us, and they found their way into the cave and you have to fight them. They're the first biological enemy in the game, and stage 3 will be different by featuring them. Here's a screenshot showing one exploding into blood and gore.
Gross. This required making new blood splotches and gore bits. I whipped up a particle system in Blender using particles, metaballs and a hokey-looking blood material. Here's one of the animation strips.
The gore bits are random blobs with a sickly meat-like material applied. I made several variations, for variety.
I've been doing lots of work on the art side of the project lately. There's several new seraphim boss enemies - variations on a theme. I'm trying to make unique graphics for each of the bosses and midbosses to replace some of the repeated graphics used in the two existing stages. Aside from that, I've been focusing on tightening up the graphics on level 3 adding visual flourishes and special effects like flashes when firing the ships' weapons and a 'charge-up' effect bosses can use before firing off especially tricky bullet patterns.
Azazel has a new spaceship :) It's mostly the same as the old ship, but with extra details and better materials. The ship has some floating options (using the trusty godot icon as a texture for now). They should help make the difference between regular fire and focused / slowed fire more distinct. The idea is the options will alternate between spread and straight fire so you'll deal more damage when focused, but the spread is lower. Basic stuff, but it wasn't in until just now so it's about time. Eventually I'd like to make at least one alternate ship to choose from. That'd be nice. Probably going to be colored blue. Tradition, you see.
Started stage 3 with the boss this time and working backwards to discover what types of bullet patterns need to be introduced / taught to the player during the stage. It's that time during the course of the game where the traditional shmup difficulty spike occurs, so everything is tending towards faster and deadlier and harder to read, with lots of fancy trajectory alterations and sub-bullets firing off.
That's it for now.