May-July Mini Progress Report

Hello everyone! As promised last time, this month's progress report is going to be fairly short, as most of my time in June went towards my entry for the fourth Touhou Pride Game Jam, Ducks 'n Aro. ... Erm, well, that was the plan, but I didn't end up making very good use of my time. Nevertheless, I'm still trying to polish off that game, so please watch warmly until it is ready! After that's done, I'll finally be able to get back to work on Devil's Emergence. I miss working on it so much~

Fortunately(?), while working on Ducks 'n Aro, I happened to run into a few bugs in the engine, and fixing those also benefits Devil's Emergence!

Note that the updates listed here have not been released yet.

Progress from May 13 - July 1

• A couple items from April that I missed in the last progress report:
  • Items should now fall at the correct rate when running above or below 60 FPS.
  • Similarly, sprites should now animate correctly when running above or below 60 FPS.
• Music can now be played straight from cutscene dialogue scripts. Version 0.1.0 used a workaround that caused an unnecessary one frame pause.
• Wrote a rough draft for the dialogue in Reimu's first stage.
• Characters are no longer hardcoded whatsoever, meaning that they can finally have unique stats, shot types, and graphics! Ducks 'n Aro is already using this system for its two playable characters (though early versions have the same shot type for both characters ^^;).
• Drew more playfield sprites for Reimu, including turning sprites and options.
• Fixed a bug where options weren't rendered.
• The MIDI version of the soundtrack was further refined.
• An early Yukari portrait was drawn, but will probably be replaced.
• Something to do with the high score screen?
• Audio volume is now slightly louder on Linux.
• Moving through a menu using key repeat now emits the appropriate events, fixing bugs in the high score viewing menu and the character select screen.
• Added a method to pause the current music track and temporarily play another one. This will be used to implement the game over theme, as was done in Ducks 'n Aro.
• Collision for item collection now uses a special collider type rather than reusing the "player hitbox" collider type.

Fairly short, but it's still progress! Writing my jam entry was (and is) fun, but I honestly can't wait to get back to work on this game. It just feels so cozy, especially after staring at a relative behemoth of a game (clocking in at a resolution of 1280x960!) for so long.

Until next time, thank you for reading, and thank you for continuing to follow along! See you next time!