ZOE - A Drawn On Film Shmup - Steam Demo Now Live!

[Retchy]

Hello, just thought I'd post a little update on my progress with ZOE. It's been so-so lately, I've been focusing a lot on game structure, achievement systems, checkpointing for restarting waves etc - all stuff that needs to be done at some point I guess, but there's not much to show for it visually.

I did manage to get a rough version of the Knife level together tho', and have recently started working on the boss fight for it. Here are a couple of the enemy formations and one of the boss attacks.







I also started working on more enemies for the next level which will be based around the marker pen boss. These are a few quick prototypes I put together with rough visuals. Some of these enemies will have basic physics so they bounce around a bit when they're shot, and the enemy laser shot is becoming a bit of a theme for the level...



This is a prototype of the mid boss points bonus attack for this level - the camera pulls out and you have to take all the balls out before the time counts down, to get the points bonus. It's sort of a mini game of Asteroids in the middle of the level...



These are a couple of the above prototypes with more finished visuals.



And here are some of the menus and options and stuff I've been working on, if you're interested in menus and options and stuff.



Cheers for lookin'!

[Ark]

Looks great will your main character be the only object giving off shadows on the ground?

[Retchy]

Looks great will your main character be the only object giving off shadows on the ground?

Thanks! Yeah pretty much, but ground based enemies also cast shadows as it helps ground them visually. The player shadow is used to help line up the ground pounds, so it'd get too busy if all the enemies had them too...

[M.Knight]

I'm not sure if it's just me but I can only see the first two gifs in the previous post, the other ones are just the "Image" placeholder text and trying to access them through their direct URL redirects me to a Google page where I have to log in. Google Drive permissions issue maybe?

Either way, this looks as cool as always! The enemy formations are really full of life

[Retchy]

I'm not sure if it's just me but I can only see the first two gifs in the previous post, the other ones are just the "Image" placeholder text and trying to access them through their direct URL redirects me to a Google page where I have to log in. Google Drive permissions issue maybe?

Either way, this looks as cool as always! The enemy formations are really full of life

Thanks M.Knight! And thanks for the heads up, you should be able to see them all now(?), was just a permissions thing.

[Retchy]

Hello, I've got quite a bit done since the last update so thought I'd sneak in another post before taking a break for Xmas.

I got the knife boss pretty much finished apart from some fine tuning of patterns and difficulty but I'll go back to that sort of stuff once everything is in place I think. Here are a couple of the attacks (the camera movements are just in the gif, it doesn't actually do that in game).





Player death actually has an animation now and feels much better for it. I went through some convoluted, over animated versions before just settling on this splat effect - it always takes me ages when I start some new animations to remember that keeping things simple always seems to work better with this style. I added a bit more to the brush death as well to give it more impact - it was one of the earliest things I did coding-wise, so it was fun trying to unpick old me's bizarre programming and shoehorn in some new stuff. Hopefully won't have to touch that again!



And most recently I've been sorting out some more visuals for pen level enemies. Quite happy to get the pen design in here for the mid boss attack as it feels like the level's starting to come together now. Those death bullets on the blobs need to be more aggressive I think.



These things need some work in terms of behaviour but I'm happy with how they're looking (before and after shot here). The idea is that when they're in the 'up' position the player can't shoot them and will pass under them, but the timing is a bit too annoying at the moment, and I need to sort out their attack. Maybe some aimed bullets.



These laser ball thingies need some size variation and maybe a spread of bullets when they're being damaged. They feel a but janky at the moment as well so need a bit more tweaking.



That's it for 2021, just a couple more enemies to do for the pen level and I can start putting that together. I feel like the end is in sight and I might actually get this thing done next year! (I've said that before)

[Ark]

The marker effect, clever

[Retchy]

Hey, just thought I'd post an update on the Pen level enemies, as they're pretty much all done now.

I updated these these laser ball things so that they now spew out bullets when they're damaged, making them a bit more interesting and challenging to destroy.



This swinging spider dude will only start swinging and shooting if the player is on the ground, and if the player is on the ground the BIG enemy won't fire it's laser so there's hopefully going to be a bit of strategy involved in taking these out.



These were just going to be simple bouncing enemies until I noticed they formed a face shape sometimes, so I leaned into that and made their eyes follow the player and shoot at the top of their bounce.



And just for fun, here are all of the enemies for this level in one handy gif! The one that slams into Zoe starts homing in when it's in range but will slow down when you shoot it, it's not quite as brutal as it is here as I just had to squeeze it in to this 2 second loop.