I'm working on a game called HeroSquare. It's a metroidvania type of game about exploration, fights and finding secrets and upgrades to your character. The battles feature a lot of bullets, and that's where the main battle mechanic comes in, as you'll be parrying plenty of bullets to send them back towards the enemies.

You can read a lot more about it and play the latest demo at https://anothercastle.itch.io/herosquare

Here I plan to post kind of random updates and little bits of what I'm working on, also to chronicle it for myself :)

Today I'm sharing a couple of essential features of my game:

The first is bullets flying everywhere! 

In this room the objective is to touch the two flags to remove the gate on the right. 

This is made difficult by the three enemies shooting bullets constantly. Here you could choose to engage them all, but it's probably smarter to evade and try to get to the flags as fast as possible.

Using bullets + parries to advance

In this room you first have to evade / battle a set of enemies, until you come up to the wall at the bottom. This wall can be broken with a parried enemy bullet. After which you encounter the final trap of the room.

Working on some new enemies for the 2nd zone :) These guys can take 2 hits and shoot quite fast, so evasion is generally going to be a better strategy than fighting them.

I added these traps which require you to move carefully to avoid them. I rather like how they look. Pretty simple, but required some planning so that I can get arbitrary shapes laid out with them. The system I came up with uses arrays like [1,0,1,1,] to describe the patterns, which I find pretty easy to type in a config file.

The latest enemy/mini-boss is a COSMIC HORROR HORSE.

I wanted to create a SMB! Bowser style enemy where you have to go under them, and this what I came up with.

I continued exploring the previous theme and came up with some regular enemy designs. Here's my take on a thwomp :)

Here's another encounter I'm working on. Here you have to use the "slow motion" power to be able to hit the enemy :)

With the previous enemies I ended up creating a small system where I can make arbitrary shapes out of squares. To push it further, I wanted to see if I could some up with a more complex enemy for a boss fight. 

Here's the Salamander, I'm still tinkering with the gameplay, but I'm quite happy with the visuals :)

Still working on the green zone, here combining different elements for a bit trickier room :) The other option would be to to try and destroy the enemy, but that's a bit tricky because of the confined space here.

these I call "tetris-traps" 

Started to work on a new area of the game :) I wanted to give the player something quite different from the first 2 areas.