I will be away for some time, but before leaving I did manage to reach 90%!

So close. I saw on your twitter feed you said you repolished a lot of old areas. How much more polish you think ESA'll need after the last boss? I imagine it still needs scoring too.

EDIT: I was going to list some things but actually I'll list every thing to be done that I can think of:

• I'm going to redo the temple area, that's easily the singular largest thing to implement (although about half of it is already done!)
• I'll also have to refine some bosses to make them fit the new gun better while reducing their annoyingness.
• There are a couple smaller rooms that I haven't made yet (mostly secrets and such)!
• The ~seecret~ collectible items need to be implement so that they actually have a function.
• There's a lot of dialogue to be written; fortunately the game doesn't really require much skill in writing.
• I need to add an options screen
• Finalizing the game's intro cinematic.
• There're lots of little graphical things I'm thinking of adding to make the game look nicer (e.g. little critters)
• If I have time and/or motivation, I think I'll add some more secret things. A secret, ultra-difficult late-game area would be a lot of fun to design!
• Gamepad support!
• The ending

Just a little bit of news: only 2 rooms to go to get to the final boss!

I have a question. How many hours of gameplay need for a complete walkthrough of the game?

Impossible to reliably calculate, but my "main save" that I use to test the game's progression has about 3½ hours of playtime; the time is unreliable because as the developer I know all the little tricks and secrets, but also because extensive testing adds some extra time to the total.

Based on tester data, I think the average playtime might be something like 5-7 hours for a first-timer.

Thanks for the compliments!

A wild cross-post emerges!

What data is that progress chart based on? Commits, hours, features?

The crosses mark devlog/twitter posts where I've announced the game's current completion percent, which in turn is basically the percentual amount of rooms completed.

The parallax seems a bit jumpy, or is it just the GIF?

Looks good, but can we see the old tileset for comparison? Also, what kleiba said about jumpiness.

Yeah, the jumpiness is from the GIF's optimization; it looks smooth when playing.

There're some old gifs of the original tileset in this thread, here's one:

Testing a new theme & tileset for the temple:

Heh, I really like the concept of an absurd action ability used also for puzzles! Very inspiring, this.

I think we've talked about this before, but will you at least have a donation page or something if you aren't charging for this? There is so much charm in every single gif that I can't help but think you've put your heart and soul into it. It's looking very, very solid and I'm more than excited enough about it to help support.

I'll probably at least mention the donation button on my website.

Hey, man. A demo version before the release is planned?

Sadly no; I've been implementing stuff without that much regard to the player's progression, so I feel that it might give a wrong impression of the game if I released a demo; also the game is relatively open-ended, so deciding where to end might be problematic.

Oh, and I also made a silly tool to further visualize the progress on the game:


To be honest, looking at that the progress has been much steadier than I thought; although that obviously means it has been steadily slow all around, haha. Oh well, I feel pretty happy thinking that when I started this thread, the game was at 26% and now we're here.

[86%]

Yeah, I guess eye-glow would add to the menacing look; I'll add that.

Today has been a very productive day, and I've finished some rooms while implementing small fixes here and there, changing some awful areas and making existing ones more flavourfull. Also I added frogs as harmless critters to make the jungle area feel more lively!

Today I also reached 86% completion! I think I'm going to stop using a percentual counter, since the last 10% will probably take quite a while, what with the final boss and all the polish the game'll need even after finishing every room for good.

All in all, progress has been good!

Congratulations! I hope you do well

I always wonder why don't these guys make their own games if they know so much

Sorry for nitpicking but that is never a good argument against anyone (not to mean that it wasn't silly that people whine over everything). Criticism can be given without the know-how to replicate whatever is being criticized. 

I really like the artstyle you've got going here, although what ANtY said is true at the moment. Are we going to see larger ships, mothership-like?

I'll make it so that once you activate certain things, some old, easier paths get closed off and you'll have to use other means to get around. Hopefully this'll add some more 'metroidvanianess' to the game.

Will there be back doors into these areas after their primary access points are cut off? I'd hate being shut out entirely. Perhaps they could be reopened upon completion of the game at least? Will ESA have a free roam mode once the primary campaign is beat, like the GBA metroid games? I'd like to have a record I've beaten that I can jump into at any time to visit my favorite parts of the map & characters.

Those paths will become one-way-only, but you can still access the other side. Mostly what I meant was that the player needs to take new paths through the station and thus experience stuff they otherwise wouldn't. In this context I really dislike missing stuff permanently, too. There'll be a save point and a teleporter literally one room before the boss, so that can technically be considered when you hit the 'freeroam' phase.

I've been a bit more busy with studies and studying-related things, and this will continue next week. However, I've been tweaking little things here and there in the aftermath of my disappointment with the temple. I'll start reworking that area only after I've finished the rest of the game, though, so don't you worry about that.

I've technically finished the penultimate area apart from the boss, I'll just have to implement some story-related code in order for the area's main "puzzle" to work. It's not really a puzzle, just a little something to make the area less of a linear romp.

I also added some new things to already existing areas, making them get a bit more interesting as time goes on; for example, I'll make it so that once you activate certain things, some old, easier paths get closed off and you'll have to use other means to get around. Hopefully this'll add some more 'metroidvanianess' to the game. Obviously limiting the choices the player can has in order to increase difficulty may become a bad thing if overused.

Speaking of which, after this game gets the attention & recognition it deserves, & the fanfare wanes a bit, it'd be cool to get my hands on that level editor

This'd be cool but I don't think I'll have the motivation to rework the editor to something an another person could understand. We'll see!