Devlog #040 (Patreon)

I added a bunch of cool things since last time, but the biggest addition is what you see in the screenshot, HE Fights!

Every now and then, an HE fight will appear instead of a normal fight. In this mode, waves of heart eaters will appear one after another until you have destroyed enough of them. You won't be able to stun them the way you did until now however, as there is no grid in the background.

A new mechanic I added, which is also available in normal fights, is the ability to shoot stars from the end of your heart using the right click. Shooting these stars at a heart eater will damage it, and eventually stun it. After that, its the usual: click on its core to destroy it. You can also aim toward a different direction by using the mouse wheel, and you can shoot a bigger star which goes through every heart eater by holding and releasing right click.

You always begin a HE fight with a golden heart, meaning you have to get hit 5 times to die. However, unlike in normal fights, your heart doesn't regenerate by itself: you'll have to grab smaller blue hearts dropped by heart eaters to heal.

These mechanics might seem like a useless addition for normal fights since there is already so much happening, but that's not actually the case: not only does it give you the possibility to focus on killing heart eaters in a very simple manner if you feel overwhelmed, there will also be many other kind of heart eaters in the final version, and all of them cannot be defeated by clearing blocks.

I'm really happy with how natural all of this feels, possibly because of how simple it is.

So yeah, these HE fights are completely functionnal, meaning that I'm done with the fights for now. What little is left to add will be for way later in development.

You might have noticed on the screenshot that HE cores look a bit different. I made some changes to how heart eaters look and work:

- New summoning animation, easier to see.

- New death animation, looks cool, and HE now die instantaneously, no delay.

- HE cores have dots around them, which serve as a timer to see how long you have until they disappear.

Finally, losing an HE fight will send you back to the last check point, and you will lose some money, and winning will grant you a different reward from normal fights : shards.

You will be abe to spend shards to create all kind of different items by using the alchemy system. Before I work on the alchemy part however, I'm going to enhance the inventory. As it is now, it's very confusing and ugly, and I can't stand it anymore.

Once that's done, I'll have to improve the exploration part of the game, make myself a room editor, work on the title screen and a new logo, implement a save system, optimise a bunch of smaller things... And there might be a few more things that I can't think of right now.

There is still quite a bit to do before I go back to drawing. I'm sorry if that's what you expect from me, but coding is a very important part of making a game, if not THE most important. Once all of this is done however, I'll mostly just have to add content. And so around when the next demo is released publicly, the monstergirl voting event will begin, whether I have reached the 200$ mark or not!

Just thinking about this is very exciting, but I need to focus on the inventory for now.

Hope you enjoyed the update, see you! :)