otherworldly forces speak through me

I've been learning GLSL again recently, to allow for all the fun radio FX I've been doing, even if they're still kinda janky. I HATE FLOATS!! AND THE FACT THAT GAMEMAKER'S GLSL CAN'T GENERATE RANDOM NUMBERS!

I also redid the tutorial area! Made it way more explicitly a tutorial, for better or for worse. It’s all autumn themed, and I really simplified/streamlined it a bit. I really didn’t want to waste too much time without the player having the bell whip. It's like all skippable now too. So fun

my friend Taffy, who put together a wonderful track for the trailer, also made a great song for the main villain, Noctelle. But other than that, it’s all stolen right now for my beta testing haha.

And I wanted to go kind of Link’s Awakening so the second “act” of the level is within a sidescroller area, as you climb to the top of a church, the stained glass windows of an ancient religion scrolling past you. (missing lots of important sounds in this clip)

I ended up finding a good structure for the graveyard level, though! It starts you off in this place, all foggy and quiet, and you run into this gate that sends you on a quest off to the nearby church.

But so I scrapped that version of the level too. What I ended up going with was instead limiting the bones' axes... A bone appears, and follows you on one axis (which I choose beforehand), then fires in the other. It all feels a lot more straightforward. Also much easier to whip at!

Then, when concepting a boss fight, I tried redoing the level with the different attack patterns of the boss but throughout the level. This led to some interesting stuff, but instead it felt like I didn't have the room to fully flesh out each of these mechanics, and EVERY pattern felt half-baked.

The main thing I ended up redoing a lot was BONES. The graveyard has a lot of bones getting flung at the player, and they went through a lot of incarnations. For a while they'd aim then fire right at the player, much like the tile enemies in Zelda.

going to hell and back getting this radio screen working and even then his stupid sparkles clip out of it