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I'm really glad you enjoyed playing the demo!

I wanted to try and come up with unique enemies while keeping a consistent "theme" for each of the planets. Lejra has enemies that try to get in close range while Fabor has enemies that are slow but produce a lot of projectiles. The Trooper is definitely the highest-priority target, it's especially threatening since its speed gets buffed with the wave number, but it also has the lowest HP of all enemies so you can kill it fast.

The demo currently ends after the first planet, but I'm planning for the second and third planets you do in a single run to get tougher with more enemies per wave, new enemy types, and different boss fights at the end. I'm also thinking about increasing the active enemy cap beyond 3 and adding some environmental hazards for later planets, but I'm not 100% sure yet. I'm aiming to make the player's chosen level order much more impactful than it was in Dark Space.

I did try to give Volodiros some extra HP since it's pretty easy to hang around in front of him and pump him full of bullets, but I could increase his HP further or adjust his phase change thresholds if you think he goes down too fast. I do agree that he's the easiest boss of the three, and I also think that his planet is also the easiest one, but I feel like it might be due to the default weapon just being a strong pick there. I imagine Volodiros would be harder to approach with a melee-range weapon.

I did give Karkambian less HP than the other two bosses due to the i-frames in the jumping phases, but he is vulnerable for much less time than normal on Deadly Mode, so that ends up making his fight take a lot longer. There is a bit of a secret strategy you can use against Karkambian to speed the fight up a bit; you can bait him into jumping on the rocks in the corners of the arena, which does a portion of his max HP and stuns him for a little while.

The blue bar will eventually be an energy meter for secondary attacks and buffs on right-click, but there aren't any in the game yet, so it currently doesn't do anything, haha. It (along with the score) will have a purpose in the next version, once I get around to implementing the equivalent of the orbital system from Dark Space.

 The next update will be focused on adding new weapons and upgrades. I'm planning for enemies and bosses to drop permanent upgrades that you can manage on the menu to customize your loadout. In particular, Karkambian and Mizerantha will drop alternative weapons (including the fan-favorite snowflakes), Volodiros will drop something that utilizes the blue bar, and the "minibosses" will drop general or weapon-specific augments (for example, the Sand Ghost "orbital" will change the default weapon to shoot two converging bullets like the enemy does). I'm planning to put a hard limit on how many upgrades the player can have equipped at once, but I'm planning for the limit to be able to be raised by reaching certain high score thresholds.

Can't fix what's already perfect!

Monk OP

Just got 100% in the main story mode, planning to try the bad guys story at a later point. The end-game levels are definitely very good, I agree! The only thing I'd really criticize is that the "snaptrap" enemies in one of the chase sequences that's super zoomed-out are really hard to see since they're small and blend in really well with the color palette of the level. They were easy enough to avoid once I knew they were there, but I ran into them a handful of times without seeing them.

I did run into one particular glitch during my playthrough; I managed to clip right through the rotating "graham cracker" platform twice. I think I got into wall-jump position right before it started acting as a floor, so I ended up falling right through the platform entirely. Not sure if you're aware of this already!

I was going to suggest that the homing fireball projectile (the thing that gave me the most trouble for sure) should be an unlockable character as a joke, but then I got 100%...

I can't believe you're adding a third story mode! What are you, some kind of super-freak or something?

I see you've been working hard on polishing up the game and adding lots of features! I've been wanting to get back to your game soon (I remember the last version I played stopped at an empty room in place of the last world's first level, so it's been a while), and 2.0 looks like it'll be a great way to experience the endgame for the first time. I'm about to bump up your download count; keep up the great work!

Please delete Greenwood Forest   :pleading_face:

Haha, you too? I once had the ending theme for one of my GMS 1.4 games randomly get overwritten with one of the sound effects, and I had no idea why it happened... I knew it wasn't my fault!

I'm glad you think so! Dark Space 1 was the first game I uploaded to itch, and I've learned a lot about programming and game design since then. I've been wanting to reboot the Dark Space universe with a more refined sequel, so I hope this current project turns out well.

This game is a soulful experience

It was my own birthday, haha. I'm glad you like it!

Just managed to get Strato-Scruffy to work on my computer and played through all of it! Ten out of ten game

I think I remember you saying something about adding health drops to enemies in one of your devlogs, which definitely seems like a good idea in hindsight. There's definitely a few moments throughout the game where you can get chunked by a bunch of cheap hits, although the rest of the game feels easy in comparison. It's probably for the best that a really old and somewhat janky game like this is on the easier side, so as not to turn into something too frustrating.

Also, this is my first time actually playing the game. I remember seeing your various videos and clips of it on your old YouTube channel way back in the day, so it was a pretty surreal experience to actually play the game for the first time, over a decade later, haha.

This is the game that introduced me to your channel back in the day, haha!

You're welcome! I hope my wall of text didn't come across as too negative, since I did have a very positive experience with the game overall, but I wanted to try and focus on the newer additions and didn't want to repeat stuff from my other comment.

Also Happy New Year to you too!

Just finished playing through all the levels! Yeah, I did find two small bugs:

I assume that the volume is supposed to increase or decrease in flat increments of 5%, but sometimes it offsets and increases by 4% or 6% instead. I'm assuming that might be some sort of rounding error?

This small tunnel in the Barrel Canyon level where the rolling spike balls filter out instantly kills you if you touch it. I assume the game thinks that I'm being crushed between the platforms.

Aside from those, I thought that most of the new levels and all of the bosses were solid! The game definitely has a steep difficulty curve, as increasingly difficult level designs combine with new, also increasingly difficult mechanics. I found myself starting to feel frustrated with the ice and the darkness mechanics in World 5, though. You seem to maintain the friction if you jump off the ice, and your jump ends up being locked into an arc that you can hardly adjust; it's completely different from how jumping off any other ground type works. This ended up really messing with me at multiple sections of the level and caused me to jump with nearly no horizontal speed and fall right into the adjacent pit a handful of times. I don't think the darkness is too bad, but I feel like the player could use a slightly larger viewing radius. I found myself being unable to see some of the hazards, especially the big spike ball enemies, until I had already moved right into them. I started feeling the frustration of being stuck with 0 hearts every time I respawned at the checkpoint at the final section of the level, and I ended up giving in and taking the 10 hearts freebie after dying a whole bunch of times.

The bosses don't seem to scale in difficulty nearly as much as the levels, especially since you always have two free hearts to grab and the fight checkpoints after you've done half of the boss's life bar. I felt like Larry was an extremely easy boss and not much tougher than Cinge from the first world. Francis was definitely an interesting fight, but I quickly figured out his pattern and didn't struggle with him at all after that. In my opinion, Mega Klaw is probably the most challenging boss of the bunch, but compared to the normal levels, they're all pretty easy.

Nice! Downloading it now and planning to check it out sometime soon.

Glad to see that you're still moving along with this project! I've been meaning to try out the game again at some point since you've pushed out all these updates for it.

Is this really a Scratch game? This is probably the best one I've played on this site so far! Congratulations on making a surprisingly fun game!

I decided to play with all three extra difficulty settings on, which probably made the game more enjoyable. I chose to keep the axe in my first run, but I kept getting lots of upgrades for bullets. It wasn't clear if they would benefit the axe's projectile, so I chose to ignore them.

I got to the Venomite battle on my second run, but I ran out of time to finish the fight before the next wave started automatically, which made Venomite's health bar and the boss music go away. I feel like more time should be given to finish the boss waves with the Enemy Territory setting active, as I got run over by the mobs that spawned in while the boss's patterns were still going on.

Just an advisory for anyone interested in playing this game - the two downloads are exactly the same, with the exception of one technical setting.

The first download (the "VSync Enabled" one) should run perfectly fine for everyone, so I suggest that you get this one. The other download may run at an unchecked framerate on certain systems (basically meaning that the game speed could be faster than it's supposed to be) and is mainly just there for posterity and because this is a silly jam game with no proper in-game menu to toggle the setting.

You're welcome! I just noticed you added browser support, but when the game finishes loading, I receive this error each time:

An error occurred running the Unity content on this page. See your browser JavaScript console for more info. The error was:

RuntimeError: indirect call to null

Hello! From the video, this looks very cute and well-animated. Has this only been compiled for Mac? I didn't find any other executable in the download.

Glad you enjoyed the game! I did end up altering the three-slugs room during development to allow you to defeat them with falling arrows (arrows will dislodge and fall when you fire at a wall up close, and I ended up liking it as tech to defeat certain enemies), but I do think the lava-themed rooms with bats ended up being a little harder than they needed to be. I have gotten a similar comment about how shooting the bats in the room with three of them only makes the room harder to complete than it initially is, haha.

Does your controller come with software to map buttons to keyboard inputs? I know others who wanted to play some of my games with a controller as well, and that ended up working for their needs. I have been interested in implementing custom keybinds for future games if it feels warranted, but it's something you have to specially program for in GMS. I would have to rewrite and reorganize a bunch of this game's code for it, and yeah, it's just something I wanted to quickly throw together.

I have a friend who occasionally schedules posts on Twitter to showcase random GIFs of his game development in process. He says that it's something you have to regularly keep up with if you want to see some traffic, and games that are visually interesting are more likely to get noticed. I tried using it a long while back to show off some of my own game development stuff, but I found it to be too much of a hassle to keep up with, especially because I don't particularly care about trying to get attention.

As for more text-heavy devlogs... I'm not sure if there's any special place you could go to post things like that. I have gotten some hits from all the devlogs I made for my larger games here on itch, but part of that might be because I'm in the pool of "featured" users on this site, so anything I do shows up in a special featured feed. Honestly, I think the best thing you can do is to just continue making games if you're passionate about it! Your follower count will only go up if you keep putting stuff out, and I've had several bursts of traffic on random things I've made across my time on this site.

The bugs are really no problem! My playthrough of the game wasn't negatively impacted at all by any of the little things I came across, but I just wanted to mention them in case you ever wanted to touch this game again. Sorry to hear about the issues with RPG Maker MZ; I didn't know that it had compilation issues, and I can see how that would be really annoying to try and work against.

I did think this was a very quality RPG Maker game, so I'm definitely going to look forward to anything you have coming next. Is there anywhere else you share game development stuff? I would be interested in keeping up if so!

Congratulations on releasing the expanded version! I just got to play through it, and I really like all the changes you made to flesh out the story and characters more. As always, I love the custom sprites and music for the game, and all the new additions for both are just as excellent and help to make the game feel more engaging and vibrant! The new enemy sprites to represent their remaining health are very cool and add a good feeling to the combat. The new maps and scenes that flesh out Edward's backstory and the post-game events definitely help in making this feel like a more proper RPG.

I do feel like the game still leans toward the easy side, and I never felt much of a need to spend money on anything aside from recovery items and a few accessories, especially with all the nice items to be found in the dungeon and forged with demon dust, but I don't really consider that to be a problem. It's definitely better that a turn-based battler is too easy rather than too hard, and I appreciate having the opportunity to be able to manage my character's attributes in several different ways. However, I did find that I had to reconsider my selection of equipment for the "extra fight," and I especially liked encountering a challenge that forced me to think about my approach.

I didn't run into any significant problems during my playthrough of the game, but here's a short list of the small issues I encountered, if you ever feel up to modifying the game again at some point:

• A few indoor tiles seem to have odd collision, mainly the brown and gray shelves found in "The Skeleton Closet."
• The initial story trigger of talking to the boss in the UPD building repeats if you speak to the boss again. It didn't affect my actual position in the story but just felt odd.
• One of Dan's dialogue boxes when talking to him after the demon den sequence displays twice in a row.
• The "enraged" status effect has a messy text pop-up with the word "undefined" appearing in it after the enemy's turn.

Just got around to playing your demo!

The controls feel tight and the gameplay is solid. I really like how you had something new to introduce in each of the demo levels, so that kept the demo feeling fresh the whole way through, and each of the levels was able to stand out from all the others. The visuals are quite clean and pleasing to look at as well! Some of the levels being labeled as "secret" do make me curious if you have plans to include future levels with branching paths in the full game, as everything here is linear, and I don't really see room where you could hide exits to secret levels. Overall, this is a very promising demo that feels very refined compared to your games from the past!

Wall-jumping and attacking large enemies are the only things I really found issue with. There doesn't seem to be any way to disengage from a wall if you touch one while airborne, so you either have to wall-jump or wait until you slide down the wall. This isn't a significant issue in any of the current level designs, but it was something I noticed that felt off. The loss of control when attacking the large enemy or the boss make sense to me since it's intended to push you away, but their hitboxes are so large that I got stuck inside them and ended up taking hits fairly often. I ended up doing a ton of damage to the boss in a short time because I would get stuck bouncing back and forth inside the hitbox, which was pretty funny, but it definitely didn't feel intended.

Oh yeah, I had one more comment about the flying enemy that shoots fireballs on the Skyway level; there's no visual warning before it fires another projectile, and although it's not really an issue since its attack is on a consistent timer, I feel like adding an additional sprite frame right before it attacks would be an appreciated warning and detail.

You're welcome! I remember finding your channel back in the era when the YoyoGames Sandbox was still a thing, and I had been wanting to try and put something together with the old Game Maker 7. I was a pretty clueless kid at the time and didn't really know what I was doing, but I looked up to a bunch of people who were putting out fun stuff and was hoping that I could be like them someday. I distinctly remember you had some scrolling shooter game called Strato-Scruffy that I thought was really cool with all the unique bosses, so I guess you could say that my goal was to make something at least comparable to that, haha.

Pretty much everything I made at the time was hot garbage since I was a dumb kid and didn't really understand a lot of the stuff in Game Maker's drag-and-drop interface either. At some point I decided to give up on programming a game at the time, and I went off to use some of the PC RPG Makers for a few years while mainly working on my art and spriting ability.

I did eventually return and picked up GameMaker Studio 1.4, but I still didn't ever share anything I made with the public for two years or so. Eventually, I guess something clicked, and I started using GML to make new games instead of the drag-and-drop interface. I finally started liking my output well enough to make an account here and posted a scrolling shooter back in 2017 (Dark Space).

Since then, I started feeling more of a passion to continue with game dev, and I've been making more games in GMS 1.4. I finished my proudest project (Moth to the Moon) late last year, but my brother and I recently started planning to add original music and overhauled sound effects to the game. A few things are done for that, but nothing that's ready to go public yet. I'm hoping to at least get a trailer out when all the new sound effects are ready. Aside from that, I've also been trying to put out some smaller games on occasion to keep my abilities fresh.

Yo, are you that Scruffy guy who put up videos on YouTube, like, ages ago? I have memories of watching your stuff when I was just a kid, too, and you were one of my inspirations to pick up game dev for myself.

It all started coming back to me once I saw your artstyle and characters here on itch. It's nice to see that you're still going! I'll have to check this out. The gameplay looks pretty nice from the video!

Congratulations! Looking forward to trying the full game.

This game is blessed

Just got finished playing this game. I really like it! You put a lot of effort into this project, and it shows.

I'm very impressed with the game's visuals! Everything looks beautiful, and I appreciate the attention to small details, such as the background paintings keeping watch on you. The movement animations on the demons are also pretty swanky.

I only have a few small gripes with the game, not that any of them negatively impacted my experience at all. One of the rooms (in your first screenshot on this page, actually) has a jump that feels weirdly precise and awkward to make compared to the rest of the game, and there seemed to be a key I couldn't reach in another room, not that I needed it. Also, I rescued all 150 prisoners early on the third day and returned to the safe room, but I still had to idle for a few minutes and wait out the timer.

Also, is it just me or does it feel like the rooms change slightly from day to day? I could have sworn that I fully explored certain sections of the mansion, only to find new prisoners where I thought I already went through. Maybe I'm just dumb, though.

Nice to see your progress! Looking forward to trying it when it's ready!

"Whoa, are you still playin' this thing?"

There is a chance that the copy of the game in the first download will run at an unchecked framerate (speeding up the gameplay and making it pretty unplayable).

The second download (with VSync enabled) should function normally for everyone, so if you find issues with the first download or simply don't know if it's working properly, take this one.

Wow! Stumbling upon this game was certainly a pleasant surprise! This is a wonderful concept for a puzzle game, and the visuals and audio really make this feel like a complete package. The controls do take a little bit to get used to, but learning them and seeing how Medusa is able to interact with her environment definitely pays off.

One little quirk I noticed is that it was possible to jump onto a pull-able block that is three tiles high by jumping into it at a precise angle. This didn't cheap out any of the existing levels in the game, though, so it's not really important.

The visuals for the game are very charming and well-done! Most of the microgames feel impossible and incomprehensible, but I imagine that it's all to convey the dynamic between these two lovely characters.

Also, this is the greatest soundtrack of all time.

Cute game with an enjoyable concept! I had fun playing it.