More Particles!

Hello followers of the development of Piercing Shots, I’m glad to introduce you the new features and plans ahead over the development of this long project that is keeping me busy. Currently I expanded the implementation of particles and they’re everywhere making the Game a little more juicy. My plan is to keep adding this juice to target the appealing part of the Game first, because it’s really hard to market the game, there’s a lot of really cool projects specially in the SHMUP market, but well, let’s try not to get discouraged, rationally speaking there’s a lot of missing parts of the game right now that I would like to add.

Patterns

Obviously patterns, seriously those things are hard to implement well, since every pattern can be mixed with each other, for example: Rings can be fixed or aimed or randomized or even stacked; making it harder to implement them without a lot of abstractions within abstractions, but I’m working hard on it.

Timelines

Secondly timelines are missing, those are basically what the level can spawn at intervals of time, it’s just harder to me to implement a generic abstraction to encapsulate every possible iteration of the game, for example: Spawners can handle a lot of the instance spawning, but what about timeline events?, like approaching a boss, that would require change a lot of flags for the game, isn’t?, well that’s the main issue, it’s hard to encapsulate every event on a single abstraction.

Enemy variations

Enemies are hard to encapsulate, regularly SHMUPS have these variations of enemies: grunts, popcorns, elites and bosses. I have a lot of sprites for those variations, but the main issue is to find a way to implement States for enemies and change them depending their class, so basically I’m dealing with an abstraction problem with these. Wish me luck to be able to implement this without loosing my mind!

Drops, Medals and Ranking

these are extremely important because of the scoring system, without an scoring system there’s no SHMUP at all!, assets exists for these so, it’s just a thing to code them, hoping that these features doesn’t take that much time, since there’s more elements missing from the main game that I would like to focus.

Dialog systems

this is extremely important and it’s the most time consuming task, because of the history that I want to convey, this is a required feature no matter what, meaning that the implementation should be strong and flexible since a lot of scenes will require this feature. And being honest, I haven’t even started to think how it would look like, so yeah this will be a rough one.

Top down platform “game”

with this I mean that the game should have a rest section for spending resources, this isn’t necessary time consuming, but the execution of this will take some time since it’s departed from the main source code of the project, basically I need to implement another game inside of an already established game!, and provide ideas of what the users will spend their resources. This will be the place for getting pieces of lore.

In conclusion there’s a lot of work for the future, but I feel strong about this. I want to finish this and be proud of making something from the arcade era of Shoot ’em ups. With these words I conclude the devlog, thanks for following the development of Piercing Shots, and I wish luck for other developers since it feels imposible to “make it” right now.