GUN WIZARD Day Five Progress

Another day of GDevelop BIG Game Jam #7, with another GUN WIZARD update to show for it! The past 24 hours have seen the following changes:

• Enemies now drop experience, and levelling up offers a choice of upgrades.
• Related to the above, guns now spawn more slowly at the beginning of the game. You can increase the frequency of each variety by picking the relevant upgrade - but may have to pass up other bonuses to do it!
• The selection of guns now includes an assault rifle, which can punch through knights’ armour and deal more damage to cyclopes. (I’m considering requiring an upgrade before these will spawn: they’re not game-breakingly powerful, but the combination of automatic fire and armour penetration is a pretty big step up from the other weapons that can at best do one or the other.)
• Despite my best efforts, I haven’t been able to implement an infinite textured background. However, the play area is VERY LARGE and if you manage to reach the edge you’ll find a little Easter egg (which kills you).
• Guns now ✨sparkle✨ when they appear. This has no practical effect. Just enjoy it.
• All collectible items are now gathered from a distance, and that distance can be upgraded. I find this makes the game feel vastly better even with the modest starting range.
• Guns and experience now disappear after lying on the ground a while. This was mostly just intended to improve game performance, but having made the change I find it provides an incentive to stay in one area and fight rather than race way across the map.

As with yesterday’s update, I suspect the current state of the game is just slightly too unforgiving to give the wizard the overpowered feel that I’m going for. However, I’m planning to revisit the system for spawning enemies and the plan is to make it so it’ll initially be nothing but rats, then rats with a few cyclopes, then some knights on top of that, and so on. That should give a bit more breathing room at the beginning to choose a solid selection of upgrades (and build up a respectable gun vortex) before the real challenge starts.

I’ve also made an effort to seek out artists to replace the placeholder(+) Kenney graphics, so who knows! GUN WIZARD (or at least some portion of it) could have a brand new look tomorrow. I’m actually a big fan of the Kenney assets, but the sprites I’m using at the moment are 16x16px scaled up to 32x32 and I’m not positive the big chunky outlines really work at that size. Plus I feel as though I often just don’t make the effort to get a team together for these things, even though that’s a big part of the appeal of these events.

I’d still quite like to get a musician on board as well, but at this point I think I’m set on phonk as a genre. It started as a joke, but it’s grown on me through all the playtesting. Anyway, if you know anybody who could throw some tracks together before Sunday, send them my way!