Long wait, big update.

Well folks, it has been a long, long time since I last updated here, but I have been (I'm not gonna say hard at work, because it's been pretty leisurely) working away at this project, rest assured.

As the title of this update says, it's been a long wait, over a year, in fact, since the last devlog (at least here on Itch) but the update to the game itself is quite big. No playable demo yet but the game has changed.......Somewhat significantly, yet it's still the same game at it's core, which is the most important part to me.

You see, for those who have been following along and for those who are new and just reading this post because I'm about to share it around when I'm done writing all of this; The game as you may or may not know was being developed in GB Studio, I had plans to make a physical cart for it to sell in a limited capacity and sell the game here on Itch and maybe branch out elsewhere depending on how it all went. Making a GameBoy game was very restrictive and that lead to a lot of rapid progress in terms of art / asset creation and core game design pillars, set goals yadda-yadda. All good things. Very great things! However, those restrictions eventually became a hindrance in one very important spot. The game engine itself. 

Now, I absolutely adore GB Studio and really want to revisit it with not such a demanding project, however with a hard engine limitation of there being only 5 Unique Projectiles in a given scene / room, was a game breaker for me (literally and metaphorically)  Now I'll explain a bit: For those that don't know, in GB studio a projectile is an object or sprite that things can "fire" and it travels a distance before disappearing. In a platforming action adventure game where you, the player, shoots as your main attack (it's also how you do a "melee" attack, but the timer on the projectiles life is basically just a couple of frames) having only 5 unique ones that you can make is very limiting because it also includes enemies projectiles as part of the 5 total.

For quick maths:

The player - 

• Left and Right (count as one)
• Up
• Down
• Shotgun Left and Right
• Up
• Down

So right there, that is just 6 projectiles. Yes, the up and down are considered unique to GB Studio for reasons I'm not gonna really get into, so dude just trust me.  So that right there already won't do for this project as this game is borderline centred around the "shotgun", Or at the very least, the runnin and an gunnin. There are changes to the game that could be made to make it work in GB Studio for sure. I could cut down on the number projectiles from the player by getting rid of the up and down shooting, and honestly, I thought about it AND tried it. It works and still feels very much the same albeit reduced functionality. But what about upgrades? They count too. There's work arounds for them (I think) but that still leaves other things I wanted to add as well, like things you can throw and go boom and also have the enemies be able to shoot you.

All that being said, there wasn't really a clean solution that I could find or come up with to make the game still feel like how I wanted it to feel with the limitations of the engine itself. It would be more akin to Megaman or Shantae games and that's not really the vibe I'm going for here. So what did I do? Well I'm glad you asked! I switched to GameMaker

Now hold on, before you click away! I know, I know. How dare I abandon a gameboy game like this! Well in truth, I'm really, really, I mean really trying to not. I'm keeping pretty much all of the limitations of the gameboy in tact, for the extremely most part. Being unleashed into this game engine has certainly been a wild ride for in terms of learning how to code and trying to stay in my lane with the scope, but I think it's ultimately going to be worth it, it's just being made in GameMaker now, and that is why it's been so long since any kind of update (unless you follow me on Bluesky or in one of the random discords I post in....Or the TIGForums...or......)

So what has changed? For the overall game design, nothing. It's still going to be what it's going to be, I just took.....one? Liberty with the controls and added IK(check out the gifs below!) for the arms so you can look around with your mouse and aim. That's pretty much it. Having access to all these keyboard inputs and potentially gamepads / controllers means nothing to me honestly. I'm keeping the controls limited to what the GB had: D pad, start, select, A, B.......Kinda. No really, it's mostly true! Overall I added a half a button and that's just for ease of use if anything. I COULD make it all work with those controls, but having the mouse itself be A and "B" at the same time feels good and spacebar being your jump (which would be the A or B button) just makes sense on mouse and keyboard. Sure I could have made it so you press "select" to jump and have A and B be your main shoot and shotgun shot go off,  while double tapping select switches your A button attack to another thing. But that sounds pretty clunky doesn't it? But that's it!I swear. IK arms so you can look around and added a half a button (I say that because of the explanation on how it could work fully with GB controls in the last sentence)

Ok, with all that out of the way, thank you all for reading if you read even a little bit! There will be more to come in the next bit, but I dunno when that will be exactly.....I'm aiming to get a new demo for yall to try so you can get a feel for it and let me know! For now, enjoy these gifs, this is where the game is at currently, hopefully you still like it. 

Thank you, and stay hydrated