Yosh (Roughly translates to 'm ready to party in Japanese).

Hello all! I'm here to share the development process on my game, "Dust: Battle Beneath".  A roguelike shooter. Like spelunky (not really) but with bullets (spelunk has guns and bullets actually but...) ,yeah! I've already started on it a little but I'll still post screenshots on how it was in the beginning.

Description 

Dust: Battle Beneath is a 2D sidescroller shooter roguelike . It had local multiplayer over wifi, a bad tutorial and offline training with bots. In Dust you have to change your bullets and build to win. It's planned to have online multiplayer through p2p and the main game is going to be a roguelite. 

So far it has some roguelike levels to decend and traps and enemies and fun! Yeah! Let's party!  game is designed for android and PC. The game can be tested here. Any suggestions or opinions are welcome.

Features at time of writing:
--a little buggy bots
--bots with "personality"/physical traits and special names
--desktop support
--touch support
--key configuration
--building
--shooting
--different bullets and blocks, like flying bullet and iron blocks
--turrets
--character customization
--half baked tutorial
--gore
--local multiplayer over wifi

In the beginning there was only dust until one star appeared and started to lay foundation for the entire underground.

This isn't the actual story by the way :P . The game started with me testing around movement and all I had that time was a star and a messed up underground. Borrowed art(anything I found in my file explorer) was used at this stage before the dust was shaped.

The dust was molded into caverns and dungeons. Empty places for battle to begin in its simplest form and thus we have...

As you may see, blocks can now be gotten from crates. And the map is just a sqaure. Soon we will see how I come to...

Stay tuned and see you soon!

I'm back with another segment, and I'm still at how it was in the beginning

At this point I was testing explosions at 11fps -_- . We can see that the map has tunnels and the like. If you look over to the darker walls you can see that the world had not evolved to its own assets ...for that is the dirt image from minecraft. But it has not been in vain! The star of creation did not come here to lead this new found world into a place of nonchalant ground! No!

This picture actually comes after all this

I've made my own chibi assets at this time(my own quick and dirty assets, I use chibi to convey my feelings). Here there is now a bullet and block UI, and the gopher looks like a dirty dwarf. It has to much darkness in its heart!. Actually what happened is that I changed the colour to red when the origional was brown to test whether colour can be changed easily but no...

At that time I fixed the wall graphics(light brown ones) some more. Then I purified the gopher sprite (made it white) so that it can have colours easily. I also added experimental hats. I don't have all the images for this because at that time I didn't think to take images but I do have:

Yikes. Anyway this is what it more or less looked like:

The star of creation has seen it unfit for lower beings to know all that happens in the world so it has implemented FOV! Cool...I guess 😒. FOV is optional. That arrow points to a block crate that spawned.

The player is now white, but is coloured brown, so now it can be coloured all sorts of things. Red, green, banana...Hey, don't tell me banana isn't a colour :( .

The pictures resolution has also increased here...looks fine...I hope😀

Moving on boys and girls...Now about these crates. I redid their graphics too(it was just a picture of half a door from minecraft before). I also added a health crate and was in the process of adding turrets. Let's see...

The health crate is shot at to get health. The more you shoot it the more health you get and the more damaged the crate gets. Innovative, right 😐

Now, the great start noticed a void surrounding the map and to prevent the falling of the entities of the underground the star implemented a wall!!

Cleaner joysticks.The right is for shooting. The arrows by the right joystick are for placing blocks to build! Indestructible grey stone is under the player while it struggles with a lot of dust, and battles to go further beneath. See what I did there 😌

There is also now a camera and pause button. Yay! All those debuggy stuff is gone. Yay! But what's the point? Yaayy...wait a minute! This is training! Test your skills! Build! Jump!... Before sticking it to the man with your gun! ...Yay?

Fine! Fine! You want others? You want bots that sing and dance and clap your cheeks. You want to see where the multiplayer aspect is, huh? Well, next time (and for those reading in the near future they just have to scroll down...cheaters), you'll see...😠.

Next time:

Stay spooned-I mean tuna-I mean TUNED. Honestly... this keyboard😒

OOKAY, so around now it seems that my past self was trying to do the main menu.

So that wasn't very popular, I decided to use this as my final menu:

It seems like I just started having fun around this time:

Atleast I accomplished some polish in the menu. The game loads with an opening chibi cutscene!

Now, my past self, for it is the wish of the first star, will be working on bots!

 Well, that's all for today...Don't feel sad, what I just posted was -like- a month's work -_-...for my past self. 😀

Next time:

So, play runedd! Dang it! This peyboard 😬!

By now I had implemented different bullets. The one on the following is a bouncy bullet. But how dry can just shooting get with no effects. Well, I decided to add a short line-trail to the bullets.

After that I added a spark to the nozzle of the gun when a shot is fired:

Well when anything(except for tiles) get destroyed they emit chunks of debris. Players emit red and the colour of their avatar coloured debris . But now I wanted blood to spraaaay(spray) across the walls when a player dies. Well it wasn't thay easy. First I tried to just copy each debris as it flew , each time step, to a table. It...wasn't very effiecient. That's like thousands of debris each second (30 fps) (or 30 fps x 15 debris dropped x 10 life span of debris per second -> ~4500 new things to draw every second).

A little bit too much because the debris was moving too... fast?  Well slow it down and only make it appear on walls and we have:...

I decided to reduce the interval in which the lines were drawn giving them more of a curve but taking a little bit more CPU but better...

Currently the blood is implemented though doesn't work well in fog of war. (The streaks are stored in non-background tiles and they're longer than the tiles so I made background tiles draw after them to block out the lines, but I can't do that in fog of war for ... some reason). I'm thinking to remove the blood streaks...Is that okay?

I also tried checking whether drawing on background is better than on walls:

Didn't really make sense because the way I implemented the streaks make it go through walls...

Then I tried on both...

Blgghggrh :P 😧

Okay, we're coming to an end. But as a bonus there was also this one time when I tried using the colours other than red, so that the character who died would be known.

Yeah, I guess it kind of looked like bird poop sometimes -_-.

Well that's it for this issue. It seems I'm getting closer to where I currently am in development...

Next time: character customization, errors and a surreal blworld. Dang it! This keyboard is acting pup againt!

Quibly! Betore if disgraces me! 

Stay turned! I pid it! Oh, plait...no...teyboard!!!!!!! >:( 😬😬😬😬

It seems I've been a little bit more busy on the coding the campaign currently

It seems I have promised errors:

I also promised ... lets see here...memes!

Oh, wait, no. Settings and character customization with hats and different colours! From the colour of your gun to the colour of your tum tum!

Man, that was really hard. Even now the hat to face alignment isn't perfect. 😥

Now you can choose whether your mouse clicks shoot when you play and you can change the controls. This was about the time where I was implementing desktop stuff.

(Todo: change "Controls..." to "Key Maps" or "Key Config")

Speaking of key/controls configuration:

Wow, from tracing back errors to character customization! That was a lot of work...Really! 

I guess I'm done for today,see you next time on ... EAT .. THAT ... M--oh, sorry, wrong place.

Next time: Whateber the star sees fit. -_-

So...it seems that I'm pretty up to date in this devlog, though I've missed a few details like the endless struggle of fixing bots and the triumphant victory of getting multiplayer to work! Almost quit so many times and did other projects. It seems there's always a side project I'm doing at the same time as this but it never lasts and then I just do this again 😯.

So now, I'm actually doing work. Got to revamp the controls and fix the bots. They can now build walls to defend! YAY! 

A while ago I started implementing the roguelike levels aspect and started added special rooms that have turrets at the corners and invincible walls except for one opening, so the player can only go through it on one side. It was okay! 😃 Then I spawned a bot and saw how it did in pathfinding, since it wasn't on the same team as the turrets it went to shoot at them which caused LAG! I could have just left the lag and changed the team so the bot won't look for the turrets again, but that's terrible because it's pazy and then there would be a problem with companion bots you meet along the way😑... So I had to think🤔.  

It turned out that the bot was having trouble finding AN IMPOSSIBLE path becausw the turrets where ontop of indestructable walls, so I removed the indestructable walls behind the turrets. That was dumb of me, but atleast the solution was easy. Imagine if I left it! Yeesh 😰! It would have come back to bite me...hard. 

So I will continue to improve bot AI and these rooms. See yah!

Next Bime: An emotional segment!😭

Well, heklo there!

Been very busy with this.

It seems that I fixed my menu a long time ago to be more ... clean?

So, something very emotional has happened with this game ... and 😣 ...here it is

So, the player sprites change emotion depending on their current situation (low life while being shot at=cry, making a kill=evil smile, barely escaping=uncomfortable smile), but they still need work. I need to add more conditions for the emotions and right now emotions only change when the player/bot gets shot. Maybe I should add emotions to the turrets! 😀 Nah.

Well, that's it for today. THAT'S A LOT FOR ME ACTUALLY...BUT HERE'S ONE MORE SCREENSHOT 'CAUSE I'M A NICE GUY:

This game can be tested at its "current" (buggy) state here: https://love2d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=91793

Next time: Something in the forgotten ages (It seems my keyboard didn't trouble me this whole post, not from the start! Atleast I hope so...)

Hello, blonkoids! (Blonkoids? WHAT?)

Today I did a lot. NOT LIKE I DON'T DO A LOT OTHER DAYS, I just fix bots and the campaign while doing other things.

Today I have made the bots able to spawn in a level in the "roguelike" campaign. Now enemies spawn near-ish to the player and the spawning is handled by an intensity counter, which counts the current intensity in the level; and if the current intensity is smaller than the total available intensity then an enemy(ies, sometimes more than one, like 3 goons) of a certain difficulty(intensity) that fits total minus current is spawned 😀.

So the harder a level is the higher it's intensity. All level data is in a "lua table" so it's easy to make, and I might make it moddable though a lot of people might not really care :P .

But what I spent +2 hours of my normal life doing was not this simple, foolish (not foolish-sorry-please don't error or give me an unfixable bug) task! I was redesigning...

How does it look...? *Sigh* . I personally like it. The reasons I changed it were

1) Needed a replacement: The origional was meant to be a place holder, made quickly and dirtly. It was overstaying its welcome.

2) Different shapes for background and character: One article (gamasutra I think?) about art said meanings of shapes in art, blah, blah. Square is serious(like a knight), triangle is dangerous(like bowsers shape?, that's what they said) and circle is innocence/playfulness(mario, kirby, etc). But that's not why! The article also said that it's good to mix 2 different shapes forbackground and the character to create a...clashing...effect? Well, it made sense. A circle in a triangle world, Frodo in Mordor(which, at time of writing, I haven't even reached. Yes I want to read the books first...kind of. I already finished the hobbit and the first lord of the ring book so...yeah. 2/4 I guess),etc. So now I had a blocky character in a blocky world 😐. CHANGED.

3) Wasted resolution: The origional is at...like...160*256 pixels. It was scaled up so I could add emotions and hats easily.

4) I'm sure there was a fourth reason...BLGGHGGRH!

NOW I NEED TO DO AAAAALLLLLL MY HATS ALL OVER AGAIN. But that's not that much. I'll see how it all goes down.

Anyway this is how it looks in gameplay:

Still needs improvements. Maybe lower the gun and redo the hands? I hope it looks fine.

I also checked up on a "comic" style I implemented a while ago but decided to not do, well now I think I'll use it. Maybe the reason I didn't want to use it was because it made the game run slower on mobile but now I mean to release it for PC.

How you like that? Well it was a liiiiitle too thick, especially in comaprison to the player so...

Veola! (Viola? Voila? Wala...?) Success!

That was a lot, don't you think? Well it's time to get jiggy!

...

That means leave...

BE BONE..I MEAN FONE-I MEAN GONE!!! DANG ITT!!!!

I'm back.

YES!! I've been getting the campaign up and running more and more. I added a more roguelike "fog of war" for the campaign.

And I also added trap blocks that look like normal blocks but when shot at they reveal themselves to be ... traps!

Traps can do different effects but the one I worked on today was Gas. Gas spews out and can heal or damage you or whatever.

See yah next time!

Yes, you can not get rid of me that easily. MUHUHAHAH.

I've still been working on the campaign but programming progress has been slow due to lack of electricity where I'm at but that doesn't matter! WHY? Because I've been doing PLOT!

Yes, oh, yes, Plot soup. Mmmh. I (used to? Still kind of do) sketch manga like comics with their own story and I've studied through the internet on good plot writing and for different types of plots, story archetypes, character archetypes, etc. 

Ragdoll Man! A comic I drew a while(like 2 years) back that's 100+ pages. My drawing style has improved since then   

I also did a rough sketch of concept art. Haha.

The concept art and my workspace  , though I don't have a stylus and can't draw well on digital  

This one was short, but I make progress. Though now I need any idea I can think of for bosses, wether theme or attack pattern cause I have a lot of bosses in design now and I have ideas ranging from a guy who uses turrets to a mecha battle (like those really big bosses that can't fit on screen in 2d fighting games, e.g. last boss in marvel vs capcom). I wish someone could give me ideas  .

That's it for now, see yah next time! 

So it's been  while but I've been really busy ... and stressed out. I'm just going to pretend the whole world is seeing this and give it my best! Yeah! Pokemon! - wait, sorry. 

Now to dive into the technical issues.

I've redesigned alot of graphics, from tiles to guns to hats! And added more stuff so that the campaign is now a little bit fun and is feeling all roguelite-ish.

Some things I've added:

-pressure plates

-locked rooms

-tnt crates

-posion traps

-a radio!

-spikes

-buttons (as well as pressure plates, they open locked rooms)

-double jump(animated as flip)

-appropriate screeshake on landing

-cracks to damaged tiles

-falling to far causes damage

-a scoring system with a placeholder star

Still to do until I release a new beta:

-levels 1-5?

-boss battle 1

-emotions for the new sprites

-add more bullets (easy peasy, I might do this right now :P )

Some tips I've picked up along the way of developing this dusty battle beneath:

-Keep a game world responsive

Everyone hears "make a game responsive all the time but now I'm saying what some people already know and what some others don't. Make the game WORLD responsive. Try and make game world feel alive. When the player does something they should get feedback from the world that their actions had an effect. It didn't change anything gameplay wise, but it felt much better when I added cracks to tiles as they get damaged. Making the spikes blood soaked when something dies on them, etc. This is similar to make a game immersive, this is more of a "how to make the game immersive kind of tip". One major way of making a game immersive is to add response to the players' actions. As much as I - I mean you - WE - can :)

-Control health

Now this depends what type of game that's being made is. I had a big lifebar of 100. That time it was meant to be a multiplayer 2D shooter, but when I decided to make it more roguelike like (haha, everyone knows (roguelike+like) = roguelite) when playtesting floors it was preeeettttt boring. Then reduced the health ... TO 6. Now every move feels like it needs care. Every jump down a tunnel could end you up on a spike, every unprepared encounter could end your life. Spelunky (funny enough I hadn't even played it (classic) until recently, so I wasn't really basing my game off it, but it's a good goal) has you start with only 4 hearts, you could die (your character..not you) before you even get to the 2nd level. It feels like you're playing a mini strategy game.

-Control the environment

The environment, what is it? It consists of the challenges and rewards in the game. The balance of nature. CONTROL IT!! At first I made my spikes an instant kill, but then I realised it didn't make sense in a game that's a little bit on the fast-paced side. so I made it just take away 2 precious health points. Though a game like spelunky can make spikes an instant kill because it's a game about being careful. Landing on a spike, even for new players, can be easily avoided with ropes, carful movement, etc. Landing on a spike when I gave a friend to test it out was mostly unavoidable and ended up killing him immediately. By making it not an instant death but reduce 2 health the spikes became something to fear, not something to loath :P ... Maybe they're still something to loath. I dunno. Things like reducing accuracy of enemies for a fairer fight instill balance.

The challenges should fit the game. Every challenge should come with a reward. Whether it's gold, new equipment, information, progress or the blood of your enemies, a reward should be waiting around the corner of a challenge. That's why right now I'm battling to do something with empty rooms at a dead end. Even the tiniest reward can help. Get past bats and spiders just for a nugget of gold in Spelunky? Walk through a dark cave full of lava so you could get that cobblestone in Minecraft (you do?) Kill a bunch of ogres to find an ogre shaman that you've never seen before waiting there to wonder you to death in Brogue. Collects stars for a new level/area in a bunch of mario games? Reward! Challenge! Balance! I am ... the Avatar - wait, no.

chess?

I gave advice so nice I'll say it twice (wha...?) See you, next time! (He didn't say it twice...)

Hello ... fiends -friends, I meant friends!

 < You have no friends here ... )
 < Wha...what? )
 < I smite thee )

 < Hmmm... )
 < What is it, tiger? Have you been inflicted...)
 < ... with bad tidings )
 < I say we give him a chance... )

 < You have no friends here ... )




Anyways, I just came to post some changes I've made to the game to make it more "immerrrrsive".
Limited resources make each play through worth playing...through...you know. So I limited resources!!! Muhuhahah.

Though with limiting resources I had to be careful. When I made enemies drop loot the player just got so much blocks to build with they didn't have to manage them, so then I made the loot they dropped *really* minimal and that helped.
But the main thing is the bullets!! Before I added in infinite (1500, meant to be edited to infinite later) amount of bullets that let the player blast their way through rooms, and made bullet drops useless. So I tried to make them limited! Yay! Now the players can run out of bullets and would have to plan how to encounter a room, rely on head stomps more and get stuck in between blocks - wait what?

That last one ... is a problem. So I made it not a problem!

Something I was meaning to implement a long time ago, breaking blocks "by hand". I haven't added the animation yet (moving hand) but when you have no ammo you just break blocks that you're right next to and aim at.

Limited bullets should still allow an all-out raid on a room, catching all the moles unaware before they have time to figure out what the dust just happened, but now it's not always an option. Should I leave this enemy and save my ammo or should I blast the aggressive ball of ... fur? ... hair? Mole skin? ... into smithereens!! ... and waste all my bullets in the process.

It seems to be shaping pretty well so far, but now I'll have to kill you. Oh, sorry. I forgot who I was typing to.  Hopefully soon I'll have the first 3 levels and boss ready to playtest ... hopefully Ill actually have it playtested ... hopefully my game will be recognised by all and I'll rule the Tristate Area!! ... or world ... whichever comes first.

On top of all that I added a bunch of stuff

To something like

 Something like that, I'm still working on it okay.

Or do you think the other type is fine? I'm open to any ideas...or pineapples, whichever come first.

Bye!

GIF TIME!!

Splash screenn!! Still needs a liiiitle work.

It may look a little bit crazy because of all those debugging tiles. :)

I added emotions. Though because of gif nature I don't think it can be seen to well, the player is crying while delivering death blows 😭

Byebye! Hope you don't run away and fly! Unless you're on a plane....landing in Dubai. Okay let me stop, but atleast I tried ;)

You know when you're on a killing spree, just doing as you please,and then when you least expect it BOOM! You're cornered, out of bullets and have low health?

What do you do then?


Been making memes! Yes, sometimes you need a little motivation to get that ... soap ... invasion? I dunno.

Anyway, I redid the OP (first post), go check it out! Unless you're from the future and already did 

Demo will (probably) be out soon so keep your eyes 

Keep your eyes banana? Keep your eyes yellow? Keep your eyes fruity? I don't get it?

Heklo again...Yes! HEKLO. No Typo. Just pure genius :)

I think I once said that I'm not doing fire (if I didn't then I sincerely apologize. Fire made the game go slow) but recently I made a new type of fire that uses the bubble-like debris to make an effect. I also did it with smoke, but I might need to change the graphics for that because then everything may look underwater-ish.

Oh, and ... BOOM 🤓

Angel mode :P

Not really useful in anyway. That was me checking which tiles the player could see and I thought it looked cool.

So I've also added some story items, better bot AI and ... COMPANIONS which also lead to mini missions, like "Take me to the exit"...Yeah. If everything is structured then it's easy to add things on top. WAIT-What do I mean? 

Well, when I did my AI for a long time I was just basing everything, attacks; running away; defending, off the main player (did I use those semi-colons well. I think...) when originally it was based off teams so AI could easily change sides by changing the team variable. So I had to revert to that ideology and since some of the older parts already had "team this and team that" it was preeeetty easy. Now to change an AI to the player's side all I need to the is make the variable the same as the player's (and call resetTarget() function because then it might still chase the player around) and DONE.

Also, I've added emotions for these new sprites. Don't know if I already said that...but look - A MEME

And the meme template is from my game, so atleast any who don't like memes thrown in their face can appreciate that ... right? 😢

Next time I post A DEMO SHOULD BE AVAILABLE. So look forward to that but until then...

A TEASER!

BYE.

Roses are red,

Explosions aren't blue

It's DUST: BATTLE BENEATH!

Check it out on itch.io where the beta is and ...

.

Oh, we were rhyming?

WELL THAT DOESN'T MATTER.

🎵*It's been a loooong time since I saw you my friend*

*And I'll tell you all about it, just please play Dust Battle Ben-e-th*

*OoooOOOOOO O Oooo ooooo...*🎶

Sorry for wasting your time, but, hey, IT'S THE DUST BETA! IT'S OUT. I've expanded all the previous ideas a little and made the game  even funner and I studied a lot of game design videos ...and..and added as much juice as I could spare and ... and ... and ... Just go check it out!  (Picture has link)

And post feed back.

If you don't want to play the game then atleast check out the itch.io page. It's cool (not the coolest by far, but cool).

And if you don't want to check out the itch.io page (you... you..MONSTER) Then check out these quick concepts arts I made a while back and some other art. DUST: BATTLE BENEATH!! Woot.

Here are some points about the beta (from itch page for...documentations sake):

WHY SHOULD YOU PLAY?:

• Deadly scenarios

• Bullet ... many of the bullet

• Questionable  motivations

• Rogue*lite* levels

• Rough arcade mode

• Stupid enemies that will kill you

• Not so stupid enemies that will kill you

• very very stupid comrades that will kill themselves

• Gear and loot in each run

• Nap time!

• Will you seriously kill the crying nerd?

yikes. FONT GO BIG.

Again, here be the link, you can get it working on almost anything:

Run and gun roguelike, DUST: BATTLE BENEATH,

https://hmmmgames.itch.io/dust-bb

Oh and facebook. It's new so get your friends and family that are on Zuckerberg's spyware site to like it for no reason.

Unfortunately for me no twitter or other stuff for ... reasons.

Bye, see you next time after I get some feedback!

WELL... WELL... WELL.

I've released the Beta. Now, after so much work let's see

WHAT.

I'VE.

LEARNT.

...

FROM PLAYTESTING

[b]PLAYBACK REPORT[/b]

1) I MESSED UP: Ahhhhaha. What actually happened here is that, for screenshot purposes, I increased the spawn rate of moles in the first level and then it seemed I didn't fix it.

This lead to people being ambushed by multiple enemies all of a sudden. Pacing RUINED.

2) Don't use inconsistent lines for graphics: Kind of learnt this after some experience (though already did most graphics for Dust), all assets should be of the same scale. Is that right? I hope so.

3) Clicking sound is annoying: (for empty bullets I think)

4) Juiving works and tweens are key: in-wuad, out-wuad, tweening. Wait, I meant quad. (Have I been saying wuad all this time?) I must use tweening for everything!! (Especially UI)

5) Moles need more behaviours still: They used to just spam bullets and blocks. In the beta they call if they find an enemy, move to suspicious sounds (block breaking) and stay in a specific range of you for battle. I all thought it was very natural and nice, but I need to add more behaviours?

6) Don't cluster HUD.

7) Poison gas and some other stuff aren't clear.

Now some of these could have been fixed but I had to close my eyes and release the beta or else it might have never made it out.

That's all for most of the reports. Next time...hmmm..maybe I'll post some fan fiction? 

https://hmmmgames.itch.io/dust-bb

Welll... well..well...welll...weeell...well?

I see you're enjoying watching me fail (or maybe not) but nof for long! For the next time I post it will be with an update to the beta (which I should have named alpha, but oh well) that fixes most of the annoying bugs and mostakes and baby blue screens.

I also added a lot of equipment with an easy table system that stores the hat/costume, activation and deactivation of each equipment in it, making it really easy to add as much as I like.

Here's a screenshot of a bunch of peeps with a crate equipment hat (mimics also look like that).

Well until next time (also serious about that fanfiction...whatever that means).

And take a look at the mew UI...the new UI.

Yeesh. The filte on my screen makes it look rougher than it is. Meh.

Yo, yo, who's reaady for an update yo! ... I shouldn't have typed that. I need more sleep. But my honour won't allow me to delete it, yoh!-dang it, I did it again.

https://hmmmgames.itch.io/dust-bb

It seems I have done a lot ... in some ways.

Yeah, a new beta-that-should-be-called-alpha-or-something-like-that build!

This fixes quite a few problems that everyone has told me about and then some.

And on top of that there's a gallery for sale with cool pictures of the Dust world!

Here's a preview of the gallery so you know what to expect.

Ahhhghrghh. BUY IT! BUY IT DANG YOU. And if you don't buy it I'll-I'll-I'll send my robot patrollers after you.

But for real, if you don't buy it or donate then atleast check out the game. It's really improved...

https://hmmmgames.itch.io/dust-bb

And now for all the messups I have made, check out the change long-I mean log:

• fixed minimap intrusiveness

• fixed bots AI some more (no longer do they rush thee so)

• fixed bug that caused first room in first playthrough to not give back the controls to the player

• watched Encanto, pretty okay, but between me and you, we don't talk about Bruno

• fixed implementation of screenshake

• fixed companions AI a little

• fixed radio talking too much (a little)

• Fixed clicking sound when dialog is on

• balanced the levels to be quicker and funner

• improved explosions (kind of)

• revamped in-game UI (especially for DESKTOP users)

• changed the way "Big Guys" (bigPatrollers) attack

• ...

• ...

• sorry, I fell asleep

• added robot patroller thingy

• ate breakfast late, don't judge me

• added some accessibility options (like turn of screenshake, etc)

• added some video options to help increase performance

• added indicator for if you're shooting or building

• Watched "Arcane", okay though not as good as "Invincible"

• added some equipment that can change runs

• You're a gopher, they are moles. It's different, alwaaaays has been BABY.

• added mimics

• other small bug fixes and additions that I forgot about or too ashamed to list out.

Hopefully if this does well for the next update I'll add the second boss (also read as: second boss will be added if someone manages to reach the first boss.)

Chow (I spelt that wrong didn't I?) Cio! Ciau! Ciao!!!!

Dang it.

Oh, yeah... THE FAN FIC

Chapter 0.1: He was leaving. 

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Moe knew he had to leave when the ceiling blew up.

The gophers had infiltrated the lab section of the mole tunnels and he couldn't let all the information he had gathered during his research go to waste. Of course he wasn't the only scientist the moles had, but he was the only insane scientist the moles had and insane is what "The Project" needed.

He pressed the ominous purple button and put on his gas mask, now starting for the hidden tunnel to another section while his room filled with a caustic fluid. They would wait for the dust from the explosion to clear, then enter the room to see if anyone was inside. The stupid thing Moe had done was that with the fresh caustic gas he triggered (which would not manage to kill the gophers) it was clear someone was recently in the room, so they would go searching for him. The insane thing he had done was, with the gas, trigger a chemical reaction with a strange liquid in a test tube on his table, which would somehow manage to sound an alarm after a certain time had passed, and that, in turn, will manage to kill the gophers. That, in turn, will actually manage to kill everything in the sector, but Moe wasn't going to be in the sector for long.

At this point it seems of small importance to note that Moe was tagged "insane scientist" by the head Moles to undergo "The Project". But to become an "insane scientist" in the mole society all you had to do was apply for the job of a "normal mole scientist" without any qualifications whatsoever (except that of lack of planning).  You were then tagged as one of the "insane". And just in case this point wasn't clear enough, The Project needed insane.

Moe shimmied as fast as he could through the tunnels, cleaned his glasses and lost all hope for the future.

 There are many reasons he did this. For one, his glasses were a little dirty after all the shimmying and he could barely see what was in front of him. Another reason is that, just to be sure every moment until his end was captured, he needed the glasses as clean as they could be. Of course there are many more reasons why the insane choose to clean their glasses at certain times but these were the fourth and third most important things to convey.

The second being that Moe was still in the sector and the first being that the alarm had begun to ring.

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How did you like it? Byes.

https://hmmmgames.itch.io/dust-bb

It seems my hard work pays off...or not. I don't know. But anyways with the completion of thefirst area of the game comes he second part which is themed Circus, baby!

Yeah. Woot...woot...woot? All the areas are linked by an over arching story because of the way I plan to do the plot. 

See, there are roguelikes like Nuclear Throne and Spelunky which have a plot/reason why you keep on coming back (Nuclear Throne has each playthrough be an alternate universe where the mutants are deciding who goes to get the throne or something, which is kind of deep that in the sense of you only having two characters unlocked could be that the others died in the attempt to take the throne, and also the way they're around the camp. It gives the sense of one last get together or something. And in Spelunky the main character has a curse...or something). And then there are roguelikes like Hades where it has a clear story told to you. But I want to make mine a little in the middle.

It has a full story with twists and turns and stuff. But I want to minimize the dialog because this ain't no RPG if you get what I'm s'ying.

The gophers are attacking the moles for an unknown reason. Their forces aren't depleting. With each gopher that dies in battle another pops up take it's place. They're people out there ochestrating this ... "war". The gophers just follow orders and are set on completing any task given to them because that's their way as a species and ... ... There's a story. Written...errmmmm...down.

The circus theme has to do with circuses and clowns and acrobats and a magician and stuff. Just...let the sketches I did for ideas do the talking.

It will probably look better in implementation...probably.

Oh, yeah. If you check in the comments the Dust page you'll see a limited time free key for the gallery. (If it doesn't work then too late.)

Here's another free key if you can't be bothered to open the page now. BYE - BYE.

*Byes*