Making progress!

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Bring me minions of darkness!

Pixel drawing is starting to feel a bit more fun than I used to. I'm not saying that I'm good at it, but I have had a good time with it! Let's get straight to the enemy concepts and short introductions of each one:

The red one! The basic of the basics, regular speed, and the weakest of all. The yellow enemy is the faster brother of the red enemy. These are going to be the "starter" enemies.

Then the tanky one. Orange is the slowest in speed, but it has more health points than yellow or red.

Yet, these two are more "elite" types of robot enemies, but their specialties are not yet decided. More health points and damage output are guaranteed, at least.

Also, the player got a new look:

Unexpected issue

Now some more serious problems: I noticed that enemies are a bit blurry when they move around on the scene. Godot imports every image by default with the "Filter" tag enabled, but that is not the issue. In fact, enabling "Filter" seems to reduce the blurryness effect. I tried different settings to get rid of this annoying effect, like enabling pixel snapping or changing the renderer to GLES3, but nothing seems to work.

The high velocity of the object seems to be the main reason for the blurriness. If the velocity is reduced, the issue is gone, but then I have a other problem: the high velocity is one of the main factors of the game, and reducing it too much affects lots of the gameplay. I did testing with my laptop also, and the problem is there too, so it does not seem to be a hardware issue.

That is the one major problem to solve. I hope the video below represents the issue better.

Smaller thoughts about major matters

Last time I mentioned weapon systems, which I have been working on, and so far planned weapons I have managed to do. I might update some animations, so there is still some work to be done. I won't spoil all the fun and the mystery of the game, so I won't publish, at least for now, what the rest of the weapons look like.

I should make up the new name for the game. The old one, which is a placeholder, is starting to stick in my head, and the whole name is a very generic phrase anyway.

This blog also should get some springtime updates; maybe a new font?

I had plans for gamepad support, but it was on hold for a very long time. I thought at first it would be a lot of work to get gamepad support up to date, but apparently I was wrong. The implementation process was way easier than I thought, and the game is much more fun to play with a gamepad!

Summary

The ghosting or blurry effect is worrying me a bit. The high movement speed is one main part of the game, but somewhat blurry sprites (at least with my monitor) are very annoying. I'm not sure yet how to fix that, but let's hope I find a solution for that. Maybe I need to find a balance between high velocity and blurriness; we'll see.

That's all for this time. Happy Spring!

-Teemu, TheAspen