It's that time of the month again, well sort of. I am slightly late... I was intending of getting this blog post out two weeks ago, along with the video, but I wasn't yet satisfied with where I was in development to actually do it. So I delayed it. I believe that FoD is at a point now where another update is due so here we go.
The development since the last update has been huge. A ton of things have been added and changed within the game, I am not even sure if I will be able to cover all of it within in this blog post, but I am going to try. The first, most noticeable, change to the game is the new scale of all the sprites and images. We have scaled everything up so that the enemies and textures are now larger. There was a lot of criticism about the original scale, and we have been planning on doing this for a while so we finally got around to doing it. It was a much needed improvement.
A couple of the characters have been redone. The Goblin of floor one, and the Rock Man of floor two have been redone. Jerry felt that the animations for these two characters could be improved so he redrew them and they are both looking much better.
Two more stats have been added to each character. These two stats are the ability to dodge, and the ability to parry. Dodging can be done by any enemy, but parrying can only be done by enemies that have weapons. Through the use of items however, any character can parry, but by default only the characters with weapons can parry. The difference between the two is that dodging can be done when attacked from the front and the behind, while parrying can only be done when attacked from the front but also stuns the enemy briefly.
Enemies now flash red when hit. This addition was made in order to make the combat feel more satisfying... we actually just finished implementing this about 15 minutes ago! Ha
One of the huge additions to the game are the elite enemies that are now within each level. Every level has it's own unique elite enemy. These enemies are stronger than the average enemies within the level. They are bigger, take more to kill, but give a larger reward for killing them, which I will get to in a bit. I will also go into more detail about each specific elite and what he does, but before I do that I must talk about the new items added to the game.
A major part of this update has been the item system. Originally, if you have been following, the only items where those found within the shop. The only way to get these items was to collect coins and buy them from the shop. This system is still in place, but these are no longer the only items within the game. Within each level there is a mystery chest that when opened offers one of four random items that will all increase a certain stat. Each elite enemy has the chance of dropping one of two types of items. He first has the chance to drop a powerup gem. Essentially, this is a small colored gem that greatly increases a specific stat for a small period of time. Elites also have the chance to drop items that can not be found within the shop. These items consist of stat boosters, passive items, and usable items. As of right now, only the stat boosters are in place, but usable items are on the way. This is very exciting for us because the item system is a very important part of this game, and can really make or break whether or not a run is successful, so by adding these new items it increases the options for the player.
That is pretty much it for the additions. Before I go into each new enemy in greater detail I would like to touch upon optimizations that have been done since the last update. With the growing code base, and the amount of sprites that have to be drawn to the screen and what not we have started to reach the point where performance is becoming an issue. This is bound to happen with every game at some point or another, and it finally happened to FoD, so being the programmer of this game I made an optimization run. It took about an hour or so but I got rid of a ton of old unused code, fixed up a few algorithms, and just cleaned up. The game is now running much better which is good news because we were having some really bad performance at times, but that seems to have gone away.
Now for the elites. The elites are all based on their floors, and their designs are meant to reflect the theme of their floors.
The first elite enemy is the Plump Goblin. He is a large, overweight, mega-goblin that rides a floating platform. He is the summoner of his smaller counter part, the regular goblins. The Plump Goblin has two attacks. He first has the ability to summon more goblins from Nexrolis' dimension through the use of a portal. Next he places a pentagon where the player is and brings up lava from it causing to the player.
The next elite enemy, on floor two, is the Ascender. This elite has a shield around him, which after a certain amount of time he shoots off from himself to his sides leaving him vulnerable for a short amount of time, giving the player the ability to attack him.
On the next level, the bog level, there is the Tree. The Tree is the only enemy in the game that does not actually move. He sits in place and has two attacks. The first attack is his slam in which he slams his arms down to both of his sides attempting to hit the player. His next attack is a ranged attack in which he erupts bile from his trunk into the air falling onto the player.
On the meat room floor, the 4th floor, we have the Nibbler. A giant mutant rat that stands up right, has one arm, and a sword. The Nibbler has two attacks, His first attack gives him the ability to jump up in the air and do a falling strike onto the player. His next attack is a normal slash when he is on the floor.
The final elite on the 5th floor before the final boss fight is the Skull Guardian. This elite has two stages. In his first stage he is flying and shooting a laser from his mouth. He stays in this state until he is hit by the player. After that he becomes a ground enemy, attempting to crust the player with his skull head.
That pretty much does it for update number seven. There was a lot that we got done in this last month or so... I hope that I managed to touch upon it all. There is still a lot of stuff to do, but we are coming close to having a finished product. I am not entirely sure what this next month is going to bring, but I have a todo list to finsh and I am hoping that it is my final one before launch.
I will also be doing a video update for Youtube which will pretty much cover what this blog post covered but will actually show the game itself instead of me just describing it. I'm probably going to do that later though since it is 1AM here right now....
Well I'm out, until next time, thanks for reading.
- Frankie
