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Thanks for playing!

Mass Effect and Star Fox were definitely major influences.

I spent a lot of the time on the intro. I'm pretty happy with it overall, but I'm already thinking of even more things to add. I really want to get an "XCVG Systems Presents" text in there, and I think I need to extend the part with floating bits with a fade or two between camera angles to slide that in.

Being able to freely swap equipment without penalty is borrowed from Tyrian, another game that was a big influence on this one. A lot of how the equipment works is similar to that game- having upgradeable shields, needing to upgrade your generator for sufficient power. Instead of front/rear weapons, though, we have left and right, and sidekicks will have much more variety. Some will be weapons that you'll have to fire manually, others will have different effects. There's some inspiration from Starscape here, which didn't make it to the moodboard. Sidekicks are planned for the Bits and Bobs update if we ever get there.

I thought I did implement showing weapon stats, but it wouldn't surprise me if I never actually did, or if I broke it somewhere along the way.

Despite this update being called Story Mode, I didn't get very far on figuring out the actual story parts. The defeated bosses will show up in the Companions screen to talk to is a feature that's tentatively planned, but I didn't get to working out the details let alone implementing it.

Something I'd really like to add that's been brought up in previous jams is the variety of enemy movement and firing patterns, which is currently very limited. That'll probably be the focus of one of the milestones: adding new enemy types that fire in different patterns and don't do the same thing the whole time they're on screen. I'd also like to make the bosses more interesting, as a bit of a personal challenge, because I don't think I've ever made a truly interesting boss (the closest was the one in Shattered 2, but it wasn't super well received).