Polishing the game post-jam.

In this update, my intention was to make the current game more fun, to balance it, make it more fair and enjoyable, here is the changelog:

-off to a great start, the quit button doesn't work anymore you will have to exit via f4.

-redid the sprites for almost all the enemies, the background and the title screen, they look much better.

-introduced a pause system, now you can by pressing escape and unpause, or you can go back to the title screen.

-added a levels menu, now if you can't beat a level you can just skip it and select the next.

-increased the range of the melee attack a little bit, from 24 pixels to 28 pixels.

-added inv frames for when you get shot, this gives you time to recover.

-white enemies now shoot white bullets and spawn with white particles

-redid the tutorial text, it is now black instead of red, it is easier to read, I also turned antialisng off for the text, now every pixel is either fully colored or transparent(I should have done this in the jam, but I didn't know about the option).

How do I plan to turn this into a full game?

The idea for the game is this, Wallachia (the kingdom of which the historical Dracula was king) is attacked by a demon invasion, you, as the vampire king, must fight this invasion going from area to area on a map of Wallachia.

Each area is kind of like a level, but not quite, when you first select an area it is attacked and the demons have control, so you must fight them, like in the current version, after you defeat the area, the demons will leave and humans will appear, they will give you dialogue and sidequests, the reward for which will be upgrades or new abilities. Once you did the all the things which you can do in an area, you can play it in white mode, which is a much harder, optional version of the area(minus the sidequests).

You will have lots of areas to explore, such as rural town, mountains,  forests, fortresses, etc.

What do I have planned for the next update?

-a camera system

-creating at least one area

-making the level selection screen a map of Wallachia

-maybe some upgrades and new enemies?

-changing the title to Dracula: Invasion in  Wallachia, I didn't change it yet because this is just a better version of the jam game.

game link https://barbu-david-constantin.itch.io/draculas-dungean

Hello people, this is the second devlog for Dracula: Invasion in Wallachia (I changed the name, it fits better).

In case you don't know what Dracula: Invasion in Wallachia is, it is a game that I'm working on in which you play as Dracula, vampire-king of Wallachia and your country has been attacked by a demonic invasion, you must liberate every area in the game of demons, and once you do so you can interact with NPCs in that area.

In this update, I took a look at the combat system that I had in the game, it was fun, but not nearly complex enough for it to carry a whole game or to not get boring after a while. I considered hp and damage upgrades (I might still add those), but that didn't feel like enough, so I took some more "inspiration" from Hollow Knight ,not unlike the main mechanic, the charm system. In Hollow Knight Charms are power ups that you can equip and give you unique abilities or power ups, they cost notches, and you can combine them any way you want. In my game, I considered that instead of them costing notches, you will have 3 category of skills and you can equip only one from each category at a time.

The categories are: 

• white skills,  this skills are just power ups in different areas and are passive
• dark skills, this skills are passive, but they drastically change the gameplay.
• red skills, this skills are active and you can use them

There are 6 skills in each category, I will start with the white  ones:

1. Increased range, your range gets increased by 50%.
2. Increased blood gain, when you strike an enemy you gain 50% more blood.
3. Increased damage, your damage is increased by , you guessed it, 50%.
4. Increased hp, you have 50%  more hp.
5. Doubles the blood you can hold.
6. You thought that I run out of things to increase by 50%? Wrong, I increased the movement speed.

Now, let's  get to some more interesting stuff, the black ones:

1. Your spells power and size get doubled.
2. When  you strike enemies, besides blood you will also gain hp.
3. You gain some friends, 2 bats which will help you by occasionally damaging enemies.
4. Now you have a shield what rotates around you and will block enemy bullets.
5. When you heal, you will also summon a powerful spell  around you.
6. When you are at 1 hp, your damage will get tripled and your blood gain doubled. Because of the doubled blood gain you will be able to heal quickly, but you may want to stay at 1hp to deal massive damage.

Now, here is the really juicy stuff, the red abilities:

1. Doing you best to impersonate a JoJo's  stand, when you heal, time slows down, allowing you to asses the situation and easily doge enemy bullets for about 5 seconds.
2. Feeling scared? Now you can turn into a bat by pressing Q , the bat can't attack and is immune to damage, it also moves twice as  fast but will only last a few seconds. This skill allows you to escape danger and traverse difficult terrain.
3. Adding more companions, you can summon a blood gargantuan using 99 blood (3x the cost of a spell) This creature will fight for you and is terribly strong
4. On the topic of summoning, you can also, at he same cost, place a healing turret that will, uhh, heal you. More exactly heal you at most 6 points of damage .
5. Is it to hard to approach some enemies, do you need to beat the @%#@ out of them but want to remain at a safe distance? Now you can switch your melee attack to a ranged one, however with only 1/2 of damage and 1/4 of blood gain. (Last JoJo reference, I promise)
6. With this skill, you can transform the bodies of dead enemies into kamikazeing ghosts, which will go to the nearest enemy and blow them up, at the cost of 11 blood.

These are all the abilities I have coded at the moment, however I can't release a bulid  for them to be tested out because currently there is no way for the player to switch between them in game, next devlog I will release one for them to be tested and played around with, I am currently working on some kind of inventory for this skills, and working on name's for each one, if you have any ideas leave a comment, I still want to add more of each type.

These skills will be unlocked by doing optional areas, mission, so  if you don't want some there is no need for them to be unlocked.

However, this is not the only thing I have been working on, I also added a camera that follows the player, I think I made it  good enough, I also re-did all of the code for the enemies, so instead of them all being separate objects, now they are only one object, and the enemies are structs, so it will be a lot easier to add lots of different types (I'm working in Game Maker Studio 2).

Next update, I'm planning to add the ability to collect and switch between skills, a demo of the game where you can explore a bit of the first area (The Castle) and test the game a bit, and if I get around to it, make the enemies a bit smarter, right now they have the intellect of a potato.

If you have any feedback, suggestions or ideas leave a comment, I would greatly appreciate it!!

Expect the next devlog in 1-3 weeks.

Also, I don't know if I should post in this topic or make a new one, the community devlogs are pretty confusing, here is the game link:https://barbu-david-constantin.itch.io/draculas-dungean

Hello people, this update is a small one, I added an inventory system and you can now switch between skills in game, it is a small feature but it was such a headache to add since I have never done it before.

Hello people, I'm happy to say that I have finished a kind of playable demo of my game, as kind of a proof of concept.

In this demo, the players info is displayed in the top left corner, and its a really bad way of displaying things, I added it more for testing purposes. All of the skills should work in the demo, in order to switch between them go to the throne near spawn and  you can select any ability, and a description of it will appear in the text box, the inventory sprite (and most other sprites for that matter) is a placeholder, until I can draw something better, I will also add icons for each skill instead of numbers.

Once you selected a skill combination, go look around the area and there will be a white circle, hit that and some random enemies will spawn, so that you can test the abilities. In case you need to fill up with blood, hit the red circle near spawn.

I am really happy with these skills, may add a few more in each category if I get more ideas, but, what I am really happy with, this skills allow for some more complex and challenging enemies, I hope I can get to work on them, but I have a bad track record of doing what I intend to do, so I might do something else.

Hello people, I decided I won't continue with this game. I really wanted to finish it but at the moment I am unable to, I overscoped myself, I should do more small games before I try to finish something as big as this.

In the end I'm pretty happy with what I've achieved, the updated version is a good small game, and the demo version gave me a lot of experience in creating abilities and systems, I had a pretty nice story set up for this game which I'm very sad I won't be working on. Maybe I will go back to finish this someday.