Catiya2 Breakdown, and some new fixes/changes. A bit of a tech talk too.

Heyo everyone! This week we got Catiya2 sorted out. There are still going to be some more events going on once it is complete, but for now we are just focusing on the enemies. After going into Catiya2 I will cover some of the fixes and changes I made this week to MITE Drones, Charge shot, and Nika.

Alright! Right out the gate we are introduced to a new object. These sand geysers will spew water up at you as obstacles.

Considering Catiya2 is played after Nova has some of her conquest under her belt, she brings some of her forces from other areas.

Her naval forces seen on Pearlus make an appearance here.

And as you see, she has recruited some of Raptura's technology.

She has also made some upgrade to their walkers. They now drop in. You will notice their missiles are especially vicious in this level. (The will likely move much faster, and track better)

A tango with familiar faces. It's almost like Nova is taking you a bit more seriously this time...

After the tango you are going to be in the alley waterways. These areas have been rigged with turrets, and even the pipe systems aren't safe.

Coming out of the alleys, you will come into a rather open area.

Passing through the waterfall will put you into the final segment of the level.

This place will likely be a bit more chaotic in the finished product. (I would like to add some events of Nova causing damage in the background).

The speeders in this level are generally more dangerous than before. Coming in groups, and shooting with more precision.

That should sum up the gist of the level. Now lets check in on some of the changes:

I have given MITE Drones a buff. They are as follows:

-MITE capacity increased from 20 to 30
-Firing MITEs now fires 3 at a time instead of 2.
-Damage lowered from 15 to 12
-Movement Speed increased from 50 to 200 (they now move 4 times as fast)

The movement speed was to make up for it's dead-time while chasing fast enemies, and for very distant enemies (like Molbon2 Golem)

Overall the consistent "damage" of MITEs per shot has increased from 30(15x2) to 36(12x3).

I still want it to be a management tool with "burst" damage, but previously the consistent damage, and speed made it almost unusable in certain circumstances. I'll continue to test with MITEs and balance things accordingly, but as it stands, MITEs still have a pretty fatal flaw that I hope to address before this build launches. The big flaw is that if an enemy, or it's collider spawns within the confines of our enemy scanner, it never properly registers, and will not be a target for the MITES. I already have some ideas on a fix, it will just be a matter of getting around to it.

Next, I made a similar change to the Charge Shot. For similar reasons as the MITEs, the charge shot's movement speed is increased from 50 to 150 (3 times as fast)

No further changes have been made to it, though, as I believe it is quite strong in terms of damage.

Upon testing the charge shot within Zol'gan, I found there was a bug involving the boss. The way Charge shot did damage was not the same as most other weapon types, and caused issues with some scripts. (This has been fixed)

Finally in the fixes, I fixed something that bothered me big time... Nika's Yarn is now retrievable in stationary, and side-rail boss fights(like Pom)

----------TECH TALK!-------------

If you are interested in some of the process for making yarn work well in Pom's fight continue on, but if it's a lot just know that the Yarn works on Pom now... haha.

The main reason I want to dive into this, is that it's a great example of how something seeming so small (and often not even thought about when playing), can sometimes be the more complicated things in game development.

Making this work on Pom was actually a bit more of an undertaking than I would have thought. The issue was that in the Pom fight, you actually move insanely fast right and left. So fast, in fact, that it was extremely difficult to position yourself to grab the yarn as you slipped all over the place like a wacky inflatable tube man.

I made some adjustment to some scripts to make Nika's Yarn act differently when on siderails.

Nika's Yarn will stay parented with the player's rail/play-space (meaning it always moves "with" your rail position. This seemed like a simple fix at first, but what would often happen is: because the player is constantly moving on the X axis, the yarn would fly at hard right and left angles (meaning it would always fall outside your "play-space".

Basically in Pom's fight, because the yarn was directly attached to the player-space, it would always stay out of reach if shot out of the play area like this, and with the player always moving towards the edge of the screen, this would naturally happen a lot.

I had to make some changes to Nika's core scripts to account for this. These changes simply will only apply when on side-rails. Instead of shooting where you are aiming, it will shoot straight forward.. this guarantees it will be within play-space. From there, instead of moving backwards, it will instead move Directly towards the camera's position. This should ensure it does not move from the player's perspective, making it visually more readable of it's location.

Surprisingly coming up with these solutions took a decent amount of trial and error with how Nika's Yarn currently exists as an object.

---------End of Tech Talk!--------'

Alright! That was a bit wordy, but that should do it for this week! Next week is going to be based around the Hscene I showed previously.

 I am going to be breaking it up, rigging/animating it, so stay tuned for that!

I'll catch you all next week! Thanks a ton for the support everyone!

-Regulus.