An area in the game has annoyed me for a longer time, and I wrote a post why and what to do about it: http://www.hempuli.com/blogblog/archives/1002 

In other news, I've very very nearly finished the last room in the penultimate area. It has been a lot of fun working on this place, I'm glad!

The answer to that is HEHEHEHE, while HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHE HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHE HEHEHEHEH and
HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHE HEHE HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHE

At the moment I've planned for there to be some secrets, but depending on my motivation there might be more or less

Thanks for the compliments!

@TurboGun: Currently the only proper testing is conducted by me, the composer, and a friend of mine (and I guess I should be disqualified as a 'proper tester' anyway). I think I'm going to try to get some real testing going on once the game is in a state where it can be beaten. Which might be surprisingly soon!

Today I reached 83% completion (counted based on rooms finished, so a bit wrong but hey), yay! Only one more room to go before the 13th boss. After that there'll be mere 5-7 rooms to do before the final boss! (Although even after that there'll be some bonus areas to do, I'm just trying to get the story-related obligatory content done as soon as possible.) Earlier I pondered making the second-to-last area something you visit also earlier in the game, and I've implemented some map changes for this to work. Hopefully it'll be cool to visit a place and then later on revisit it and see a drastic difference!

[66]

How many enemies/traps/monsters/robots/bosses would you estimate this game has by now? I'd imagine it's a decent sized number.

Actually I hadn't counted them before; thanks for asking. There are currently
66 enemies (some are variations of others but generally they're unique)
27 traps (spikes & lava counted, meh)
12 bosses

I have to play it to see how good they actually are, but for now they do seem great.  

A great fear of mine is that despite the gifs the game is going to disappoint! It's hard to say beforehand whether the game is satisfying to play or not :/

Today I created some new enemies and worked some more on the second-to-last area. Progress was kind of slow due to me having quite some other things to do and also being very very tired. I also did some planning on how to make some existing stuff better and how to approach certain design things, so there shouldn't really be that many design-related problems in the near future.

Could you already pre-load the next room in the background as the player gets close to the exit of the current one?

Not really, no, due to the way MMF 2 works. MMF does not support proper free scrolling (it allows infinite scrolling to certain directions, but the coordinate 0,0 is always in a corner and you cannot scroll to negative coordinates), and thus the next area would have to be loaded off-screen and then re-positioned to its correct place, which would probably have plenty of problems.

Yeah, he did. I really like the theme tune, although I guess one shouldn't say that of something that's going into their own game.

Anyway, big news of sorts! I finally took my time and optimized the room loading code; it has been very slow for a long, long time. I changed the game to only look for tiles according to the size of the room, whereas before the game would just assume that every room is of the maximum size. A very simple fix, yeah, but I was kind of fearing it'd be jarring how in this new system some rooms would take longer to load than others. This didn't turn out to be much of a problem in the end (I think!)

Have a gif comparison before-after:
3+ seconds

less than 2 seconds

@kleiba: A good point, I'd say. I just drew the animation as I went, and it might very well be that the laser is too large at the moment. The only thing is, even as it is now it is sometimes quite hard to hit enemies when falling or moving over/below them, so the beam must be at least somewhat wide. I could try making a tad thinner, though; that'd increase the "oomph" of the charged shot, too. Thanks for the feedback!

Oh, oh, I can do music. I can do chiptunes, if that's what you're into.

Unfortunately I already have a composer, Noby (https://soundcloud.com/noby), he's just been very busy lately. Your stuff sounds neat!

Wait what, this is my second progress post for today! Oh well. I managed to beat the design issue and have been working on the second-to-last area as well as the other submenus. I'll have to ponder about some enemy designs, since at the moment I'm slightly out of ideas. Eventually I'll also have to revisit some of the enemies made earlier and make them less dumb because some of them are pretty stupid at the moment (not stupid as in unintelligent, but rather poorly designed).

It was interesting to draw a larger picture of the player character for the status screen, I haven't really thought about what he actually looks like!

Thanks for the compliments!

Music

Hopefully there'll be some teaser stuff coming at some point of time.

Today I've been working on the in-game 'inventory' or pause menu. Earlier it has been just the map and the game time showing, without any further player input. However, I'm going to implement a couple submenus, like a legacy map you can scroll through, and a status screen where the game'll display some useless data about the player character. Working on the legacy map has been fun, but I've run into a bit of a problem with the design, which I'll have to look into later today.

The game reached 81% completion yesterday! Yay! One more room, and that'll be 82

I really like the panorama-like view of the ruins

The portraits could also be used to display information; the player starts reading a log made by some scientist and there might be some neat pictures to visualize whatever the log says.

I added some little moving bits!

Thanks for the compliments!

Today I've been implementing some small changes here and there while also building the second-to-last area. The new burst gun is almost finished!
 I changed some of the very first areas to feel more desolate and ruined; initially the very second room of the game already had standard enemies. I felt it didn't really convey abandonment, so I changed that up a bit while still trying to allow the player to try out the controls and such.
 There's a whole bunch of robotic enemies that are inactivated at the beginning of the game, and only start roaming the areas after certain conditions are met. The penultimate area is basically a robotic command center, so I started thinking of possibly allowing the player to visit that area before the robots are activated. It might add a lot to the atmosphere! Maybe there's an item to be fetched from there? Thinking about it!
 I'm also going to implement a portrait system for the dialogue box; even though the player itself doesn't talk at all, there are some entities who do, and a simple portrait system might make this a bit clearer.

All in all, I've made more progress in the past 1½ weeks than in several months before, so I'd say things are looking goooood!

Been following this since the Daily Click project announcement with mixed feelings of jealousy and awe. It really looks fantastic, I'm amazed you've been able to get this far with such high production values!

Early testing of the new gun:


I'm going to have to implement invincibility frames for the enemies for this to work properly; hopefully it's not going to be that big of a hassle (we'll see...)

Sweet! Congratulations on that!

Thanks for the feedback! Glad to see that the burst idea seems good to you.

I'd rather have to press the button every time to shoot than rapidfire through. Also have you tried changing the sound effects? I mean megaman and metroid, as far as I know, they feel good mostly cause of the sound effects.

I think with this burst weapon, I'd disable the rapidfire due to it no longer being required, as the burst would hopefully be and feel 'powerful' enough to not require spamminess.

We'll see about that! Hopefully the game'll last long enough but also keep the players' attention.

I wrote some words on a certain design issue on my blog. See it here: http://www.hempuli.com/blogblog/archives/986

[80% done!]

Sorry for the double-post, but I have news!

The game's now approximately 80% done! There're less than 100 rooms to create, which makes me very happy. To celebrate, here's another picture:

When it release? I'm tired of waiting:(

I should've just said "when it's ready" from the very beginning. Sorry! Early next year, I'd muse, depending on soundwork stuff and how much I'll rework the code before it feels good enough.

I misstyped a value and this happened:


Progress has been steady!