Character Poll Finished! Some wrap up, SFX, and visual. Next Hscene, and Raptura boss theme sneak peek.

Heyo everyone! There's a good amount to cover here, but it's been another busy week. What you hear above is a section of the boss theme for Raptura. Also, the poll has concluded and the next character is confirmed to be our Goblin! Name TBD

Anyways! On to the progress report.

Despite this week being mostly technical, there are some nice visuals to show off. Here we go!

First thing that was done was finishing off some loose ends with the Raptura level, and the boss. Previously the rail systems merging was a bit shoddy, and boss patterns were fairly buggy. I polished those up. I also implemented Lana's scripted support during the boss fight. 

As long as you do not fail to give Lana support when she needs it, she will help you in the first phase of the boss fight (Not a lot, but she will take potshots.)

Lana is a "fighter" so I would like her to be very much a part of this level's combat. Future characters may not have this trait.

Here's a bit of a rundown on something that may not have been clarified: 

Lana's involvement with Raptura is static. Whether Lana is unlocked/locked, in your party, or not in your party, she will be present, and have the same scripted events in this level. Regardless of her position, if you fail to assist her, she will be considered "defeated" and will no longer take part in her events (party member or not) for the rest of the level. This will have more significance as more party members come along.

Which leads on to the "assist" part. Here is Lana's animation while asking for assistance

The party system was a bit expanded on with this. Every single level will have a "scripted" help, and an "RNG" help sequence. The scripted help will always be the character featured in the level. (Lana will ALWAYS ask for support just before the boss if you take the main route, and the Grunt on Catiya will always ask for help.), but there is 1 more location a character can ask for help. This is an "RNG" help sequence. In this sequence it will randomly pull a character that is considered "available". This means it may be 1 of your party members, or the planet's character.

Because there is 2 "help" sequences, there has been an additional sequence added to Catiya. 

If you have no party members (which is guaranteed on the first playthrough), then this sequence will not exist.

Yep, this means even though Catiya was done first, you can still go back and replay it with future party members. You may even get some flavor text that you wouldn't otherwise get.

And if you haven't noticed, there is something extra with the enemies. They now have a "charge up" animation. This is meant as an indicator for when they are firing rather than them just flying out at you. The enemy lasers are also much slower.

Aside from that, I made some changes to the purple claw enemies. They no longer do damage to you on impact, instead they will slowly drain your health the longer they are on you. They will be quite a bit less lethal now.

I made the charging reticle move a little bit more to be a bit more intuitive.

One other thing I did was add an "innate" cooldown on your primary fire. To 99% of players this does not mean much, but previously, auto-clickers had no limits, as you could shoot as fast as you could click(ignoring the 3 shot burst) technically.

After these touch ups I moved on to some of the Menuing in the hub.

Basically this is just to properly describe the character's Passive and Active depending on their slot. It seems simple enough, but the significance of this is mostly in writing the actual scripts to calculate it easily for all future characters. (Writing scripts for future use). 

Party members will appear on the score screen, and receive affinity if they are still "alive" by the end of it. At the moment, I am rolling with party members not actually having a health bar. There could be some interesting application if there was, but I feel like the simplicity of them not having bars may be a bit more streamlined. This may change in the future though.

In general I added all instances of Affinity gaining. (Choosing a route in Raptura, and conversation dialogue.) I did a few other things as well including scripts and flags for conversations, and putting in several new SFX, but I feel like this post has gone on long enough.

Let's wrap this post up. There's still a lot of loose ends I need to tie up here, but those will have to wait, as it's time to get back to animating!

Lana's 2nd Hscene is on deck, and he's a first look at what it will be like.

Thanks everyone! It was thanks to a lot of your feedback that many of these changes are in place. I'll catch you all next week with some motion to this new scene^^.

-Regulus