Hey Kinoko fans!

I’m going to be sharing a couple of ugly screenshots in this one, but bear with me! I’ve spent the entire month of February working on some of Star Heretic’s most crucial features, but with Chel having been really quite busy with the character animations, I’ve had to tackle these on my lonesome thus far. What matters for now is that they work, and it’s progress! Now, with that little guilt-ridden disclaimer of mine out of the way, let’s take a step back, and look at what Chel and I have achieved this month…

Firstly, we reworked the inventory! That’s a work-in-progress, as with everything else in this blog post, but it’s a much better inventory system than what we had before. Because Chel created some of the assets for feeding starsprites their treats (a way of boosting their friendship/experience via a consumable resource), I initially wanted to add those treats as a new inventory item, but then I got it into my head that our old inventory was completely unusable, and impossible to maintain, and needed a rebuild – and that’s not just scope creep, it genuinely did. For one thing, every item Kinoko could ever obtain needed to be added into the inventory UI manually – no part of the inventory was being placed dynamically! Unacceptable, and that was just the tip of the iceberg!

Our new inventory system is… just so much better. Like for example, it’s dynamic now, by which I mean that the individual item slots are rendered dynamically as needed, taking into account which items the player actually has and in what quantities and then getting details about those items from a single, written set of data. It also has categories now, and – although I haven’t done it yet – it’s not unfeasible that I could now add facilities like sorting and filtering, if we ever wind up with enough items that these become a necessity. Like I said earlier, it’s ugly – but it works, and that’s what’s important! We can make it pretty later.

Whilst I was doing all this with the inventory earlier in the month, Chel was working on more of Kinoko’s animations. She’s been posting more of her work in our paywalled channels recently, since we’ve gotta raise funds for our game and all, so I’m not about to undermine her by posting them here! If you want to see what she’s been up to, then seriously think about becoming a member of the Kinoko Fan Club over on Patreon. You can get in for just a single American dollar per month – quite the steal, if I do say so myself! You can also [sort of] get in by boosting our Discord server, since that bags you access to the same channels, so that’s another option. Something to think about? 👀

Following up on the inventory, I did do some work on the starsprites’ abilities this month, but that quickly sent me off on another little side-quest – that being the game’s autosave facility! I mentioned last month that each starsprite type now has one projectile, one area of effect, one utility, and one ‘ultimate’ ability. The ultimate ability of the yellow starsprite is Celestial Anchor. At one stage during the game’s development, Chel and I were envisaging Celestial Anchor as the game’s save feature, but we redesigned it at some point and it became a single-use teleport instead. This meant that saving itself needed to change, since the yellow starsprite is no longer used for that. Thus, the game now autosaves on a five minute timer, and at certain specific gameplay moments. Nice and simple!

And then, following on from my work on abilities and the autosave facility, my focus shifted once more to enemies. It’s completely natural of course that I’ll have to keep going back and forth between abilities and enemies – as abilities develop and evolve, I’ll need a wider variety of enemies to try them out on, and as more enemies are developed, I’ll want to introduce more abilities to take them on with. This month, though, I took one look at enemies – this being my first proper look at them for the first time in a little while – and realised that they, like the inventory, could be done better. That’s why I set about designing a modular new enemy system a couple of weeks ago now.

I finished that redesign just recently. Most of it was code-based, with little visual to show for my effort, but the main thing it achieved was to make things less repetitive and faster to set up. I have a documented process now for creating new enemies, and a handful of modules (such as enemy health, and the patrolling behaviour) which can be attached to any enemy for instant functionality. That saves me having to keep writing similar functionality for every new enemy, making it so much easier and faster for me to create new enemies, and more straightforward to make changes to them.

Though I did say earlier this was almost entirely code-based and thus non-visual, one new visual thing did come out of it – floating enemy health bars! We had floating health bars at one point before, though those ones were implemented in a clunkier fashion. I took them out when I decided to pin the ‘active’ enemy’s health to the HUD instead. Ever since Chel and I started really thinking abilities through, though, and since we decided that every starsprite type would have its own area of effect ability, it became apparent that Star Heretic is going to involve more multi-enemy encounters than it is single-enemy encounters…

With that being the case, I realised just yesterday that it’s time I began optimising combat for these multi-enemy encounters, and set about building an ‘arena’ mode. As it stands, this ‘arena’ mode – which spawns in random enemies on a set timer for the player to fight – exists purely for internal playtesting purposes, though it might pop up in our demo. The main thing I want to achieve with it is simple. I want to start thinking about how the player deals with multiple enemies at a time, and how enemies interact with one another, and I want to know how abilities factor into this and what exactly we’re going to do with all those area of effect abilities.

And so, it’s only been a couple of days, but we do now have a mode for internal testing which spawns in enemies at random! Though it’s not technically part of the game, I’m going to spend at least the first half of March playing around with this arena and optimising the enemies for it, since it serves as a better simulation for the kind of combat encounters we expect to see in the final game than anything we’ve had for testing with before. Maybe, hopefully, I’ll have more to say about this next month!

And finally – though it’s obviously not our main focus… – Chel’s finally begun working on the next part of the Star Heretic comic in her downtime. Remember the ‘The Birth, Rise and Fall of Galaxy’ comic that came to a thrilling conclusion last June? That was just the prologue to an entire comic we’re slowly working on, and production of the comic proper – chapter one, codenamed ‘A Star is Born’ – has officially begun. As with the prologue, Chel’s doing all the art solo, and I’m writing. Without giving too much away, chapter one picks up where the prologue left off, on the planet Fungaia, where a piece of Galaxy’s shattered remains were last seen coming to rest. There, we come to meet with the kuparkukes of the Enoki tribe, and our protagonist, Kinoko…

Anyway, that’s all we have time for this month. Being honest, it’s already 17 minutes past midnight, so I’m actually late, but my mind’s basically in British Summer Time (i.e. GMT+1) already, I’m so desperate for summer, so I’m going to go ahead and date this blog post as February’s anyway and there’s nothing anyone can do about it, so there!

Until next time!