September-November Progress Report

Hello everyone! It's hard to believe it's already been three months since the last progress report. Turns out time flies when you're doing some serious soul-searching after a surprisingly life-changing event while contending with onerous online courses!

Before I dive into the changes for this month these two months this progress report, I do have a bit of an announcement to make: 2022-10-10 marked the second anniversary of Devil's Emergence's development! I know, it does seem like a long time to spend on a simple danmaku game, but considering the fact that this is the first big game I've ever made, that this is the biggest project I've ever made, that I wrote this engine from scratch, and that I may or may not be medically predisposed to poor time management, I consider this to be an incredible achievement. For reference, this was the state of the game (and the engine!) two years ago:

(The assets used here were solely used as placeholders and were not created by me.)

The fact that I went from barely being able to move Mokou across the screen to having a functional vertical slice of a STG is still mindblowing to me. This is the longest I've worked on a single project willingly, and I hope to see it through to the end.

Anyway! Now that that's out of the way, let's see what's new! Note that the updates listed here have not been released yet.

Progress from September 1 - November 21

• The level scripts were updated to account for the enhancements to Laria discussed in the previous progress report
  • Laria also received preliminary support for splitting scripts into multiple files
• MIDI support was improved
  • The game will now show a warning instead of crashing if the current MIDI device is inaccessible
  • The game only attempts to connect to the MIDI device when enabling the MIDI sountrack
  • Lyrica, the library that powers MIDI support in Devil's Emergence, was released to the public!
• Music improvements
  • More instruments were added to Red Dream
  • Fragrant Plants ~ Orange Blossom is now fully mixed and mastered
  • The drums in Bitter and Sour Struggle no longer overpower the electric guitar
• Collisions were optimized slightly to remove allocations
• The logical and graphical portions of menus were split to allow for custom menu UIs
• The controls menu was finally implemented! You will finally be able to edit bindings in-game
• The title screen's code was cleaned up significantly
• The game over screen now has a short intro animation, as in Lotus Land Story and Mystic Square
• Fixed a bug which caused some deathbombs to not register
• The player character now drops items on death
• The Item Get Border Line was implemented
  • It only works if you have full power, as in the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil
• Changed how spawning and despawning entities while updating other entities works internally. This might result in better performance
• Bosses now emit sparkles before exploding
• Tweaked the initial velocity of items
• Started work on sprites for an Easter egg
• Adjusted character speeds to match Mystic Square
• Added placeholder character files for everyone
• Optimized text rendering
• Dark purple was added to the main palette! Title screen Reimu should look much better in the trial version
• Moved almost all Devil's Emergence-specific code out of the game engine
• Created a shot-type editor, Shed, to make it easier to tweak each characters' shot type. This is an internal tool, so it probably won't be released to the public

All in all, a lot of big features made their way in! I'm starting to run very low on features I need to implement for the trial version, so the only thing really holding me back is my artistic ability! Sadly, that's quite a big blocker. I'm not too fond of drawing sprites, and I have to reboot my computer whenever I want to work on the game's music, so it's difficult to push myself past this point. Because of this, I'm not entirely sure I'll be release the trial by the end of this year (gasp!). Still, there's plenty of time left in the year!

Until then, thank you for reading! See you next time!