…and in “that took slightly longer to get in place” corner, I finally have the drone and appropriate effects working fantastically. Playing through the test stuff tonight and it’s weird, I’ve crossed that line. The one that takes a game from a jumble of things on the screen into something fairly coherent.

Creating the drone was fairly rapid, I already knew precisely what I wanted to do with it and had all that up and running in around 20 minutes, requiring only a little bit of faffing with the timing so that you’re not too overpowered. Ideally, the first thing you want to do on each stage is to collect the drone, not only does it provide a small amount of rear cover but it also activates your full arsenal. Obviously, having it set to “press a button to wipe everything out” would have been a little bit on the shit side and that took the bulk of the time spent doing the drone-y bits. Number tweaking, the bane of my existence.

Tinkering with the effects sequences I needed took a fair bit longer however and I ended up spending a large part of the day fiddling with this. From the small borders that surround the drone gem before you collect it to the power up effect, that was one heck of a lot of small tweaks here and there until just right. It is now just right. Being a one man band, whenever there’s new art needed or a new effect or whatever, it’s down that particular tool and onto another one time. There’s a lot of bouncing inbetween and it’s time consuming sometimes.

I’m a little behind schedule on getting a playable demo out to some testers (wanted it for yesterday but obviously, that hasn’t happened) so it’s looking like that’ll be sometime Sunday/Monday now.

In the meantime, here’s a pic.