Hey Kinoko fans!

Although I’m going to try and get through it fairly quickly today – I’ve been at the business accounts for the last two days, with the end of our first proper financial year approaching in a month, and I’ve still got a little way to go yet before I’m up-to-date! – it’s been another busy month full of all kinds of new developments for Star Heretic, with many of them of a more visual nature. Our user interface has had its first beginnings of an uplift in well over a year, and we’ve thrown in some placeholder, stock visual effects in order to help us start envisaging how abilities and their effects might look. Behind-the-scenes, we’ve overhauled our objectives system, and alongside and integrated with it, we’ve developed an achievements system that, eventually, will be able to integrate with Steam when the time comes for that sort of thing.

For the first time proper, we had the opportunity to introduce some outdoor lighting and atmospherics this month, by turning one of our Fungaia scenes to night and implementing its stormy weather. By itself, I was really happy with how this turned out, and I actually drew the rain particle myself, so I can finally say that I’ve made an artistic contribution of my own to Star Heretic. What we need to get our heads around next is lighting – we’ve made the scene dark, now we need to brighten it back up again with things like fireflies and glowing mushrooms, in a way that looks natural and pretty.

I think for both of us, our favourite new addition to the game this month was the implementation of scenery animations. For a while now, Chel’s been working on assets for Fungaia’s environment such as mushrooms, plants and trees, but they’ve always been static. That is why, feeling inspired by Fungaia’s new weather effects, I decided to have a go with beginning to script some reusable motion effects for Chel to add to any object in the game world. For instance, we can now attach a ‘mild breeze’ effect to any mushroom or plant, and it will sway gently from side-to-side as if blowing in the wind. Chel went ahead and added this all over one of our Fungaia scenes, and I have to say it’s completely brought it to life! It really is beginning to feel like we’re looking at a lively, vibrant world, and not just a screenshot with an animated character on top of it.

Water also got a massive upgrade. Ever since I played ‘Ori and the Blind Forest’, I wanted to achieve a similar effect with our game’s water, at least in terms of how the water’s surface displaces when the player jumps in and out of it. That’s exactly what our water now does, thanks to a series of hidden nodes along its surface that become raised or depressed around a central point whenever Kinoko surfaces and dives respectively. As I was doing this, Chel spent a bit of time this month working on Kinoko’s swimming animations. Those aren’t quite done yet, but I have seen them in progress, and they’re coming along great. She also produced some water plants this month, which are also benefitting from the new motion scripts, so the depths are no longer empty and lifeless.

Hanging vines feature prominently in our Fungaia levels, intended for Kinoko to climb up in order to reach higher places – so we also implemented those this month. Chel produced some nice art for them, and, even though Kinoko doesn’t have more than just his placeholder sprites for it yet, I implemented vertical climbing up and down them, and the ability for the player to grab onto and release from them. Wall jumping – which was developed some time ago, but broken by some of our more recent tilemap changes – has also been restored, giving Kinoko more ways than ever to platform his way around the worlds of Star Heretic.

Another new addition to the game this month was the ‘bellarina’ enemy. Google Docs keeps trying to autocorrect it to ‘bellarina’, but I promise, it’s ‘bellarina’ – think ‘baby bella’ mushrooms and… well, yes, ballerinas. Anyway, like all the other enemies we’ve developed thus far, the bellarina will be encountered during the game’s opening chapter, set on the planet Fungaia. As with our other recently-developed enemies, the ballerina was animated by the talented AtroxChobatsu before being lined and coloured by Chel for insertion into the game. Mechanically, it’s an enemy that actually goes out of its way not to hurt Kinoko. Our aim when designing it was to have the challenge not so much in fighting it, but in scanning it for the codex. We can’t wait for you to see it in action!

And so, with work on the bellarina complete, that brings us up to five enemies now that are fully animated, alongside a handful of other, more prototype-ish ones. We have one further one in the works that will also be fully animated. Whatever we do with the prototypes, we’ve now got at least six enemies lined up for our next demo, which I’d say is about where we want to be, at least for now.

Now that we’ve got all these enemies to play with, we’re more determined than ever to get on with completing the starsprite abilities! I know I’ve been bringing up these abilities every month for some time now, but they really are that important. Chel was working on concepts for more of these just a few days ago, so as of right now, we do actually have some pretty solid concepts for more than 20 out of the total 32 planned abilities. Although we’re not going to be too strict about this, I have a clear ‘template’ in mind now where each starsprite has one projectile ability, one area of effect ability, one ability affecting Kinoko, and one ability affecting affecting either itself or other starsprites. Again, it’s only a template, but I feel it’ll help with the player’s memory if we can continue to map all projectiles to one button, all Kinoko abilities to another, and so on.

So yeah, I’ve said it before, but the focus next month really will be on starsprite abilities! We’re in a great place with the enemies themselves, so the next and most important thing now is really to make them interesting and fun to fight. That’s certainly my number one goal now, since in all sorts of other ways our game is really getting to a place where we want it to be. I’ll finish getting the accounts squared up and orderly, and then starsprites will once again be my main mission!

And that’s about it for another month! We’re actually taking a holiday in the middle of next month – our first actual holiday in something like four years – in honour of a pretty important milestone in our lives together, so I might very well do next month’s update early in order to say what I want to say about that… we’ll see…

Anyway, until next time!