Hello! 

Now that I've got to a demo-able state I think I'm on the final stretch of developing my game: Spinny Wizard Game (demo available here...) I'm trying to get a bit more in the habit of sharing my progress towards the full version. Here's what I've been working on since the demo release:

New Spells

I've got a short list of spells I'd like to add in to the game, and they're always a fun thing to play around with if I'm struggling to motivate myself to work on less glamorous areas of the game (looking at you tutorial systems). 

A while ago, I played around with an idea where the point that orbs orbited around lagged slightly behind the player's actual position rather than being completely locked in, but personally found it a little too imprecise to have as the standard way of playing. However, that makes it a great candidate for a spell - Trail - as it gives players the option to master a slightly trickier motion for orbs that can create some movements that are a little trickier for opponents to predict. This was a nice easy one to code because I'd already done the hard work and just not tidied it up properly, so I just had to uncomment a few things really!

The other new spell is Pin. Again a bit of a riff on changing the centre of an orbit. As the name suggests, this spell will pin the centre to the position where the spell was cast until the spell is released, at which point the orb rushes back to the wizard.

Puzzles

A long time ago, I tried to make the co-op mode more interesting by adding a puzzle element. The idea being players would have to activate a series of interactable objects in the right order to stop more shades from spawning. It's a part of the co-op design I like and I think has legs (ironically, given the notable absence of legs from the rest of the game), but it's never playtested particularly well. From what I've seen most people thing they've got to activate the puzzle orbs at the same time or within a time limit, rather than it being order based, so I've effectively just change puzzles to work that way. 

But that's not all! Rather than simply hopping onto a sigil and pressing the "interact" button, activating puzzle orbs now relies on doing spinny stuff because at the heart of it, that's what Spinny Wizard Game is all about. Instead of just switching on puzzle orbs, they're now "charged" by spinning your orb while stood over their sigils, with a few of these requiring a specific direction of spin (although I think this is an area that's going to need a bit more experimenting with). I quite like the charging process as it acts as a nice counterpoint to the activation fading as the puzzle times out as well!

Interactable Changes

I've added some more visuals for when a player is "locked in" to an interactable object off the basis of some of the "spin to charge" style changes. This also means that you can now spin your orb while locked on to an interactable sigil. I'm planning on adding a few more spin-based interactions to these, although a lot of that will probably be in non-demo co-op levels. In a slightly confusing addition to that, I've also modified things so you don't have to be "locked in" to an interactable to interact with it if that interactable is expecting some sort of spinning (this is probably going to need some iterating on for readability!)

Enemy Behaviour

The code behind the behaviour of enemies in co-op mode is a bit all over the place. There are a few different ways the shades in co-op mode behave and each of those different types is coded separately, despite there being plenty of similarities between what each one is doing. A lot of this has been me trying to figure out the "best" way of doing things for each of the different behaviour types. But that's becoming a bit of a nuisance, so I'm trying to break things down so that there's effectively a central set of modular behaviours that I can plug into shades more flexibly. I'm hoping this will mean in the future I can build a bit more variety into what the shades are doing, and it should also mean when I've got ways to improve the behaviours I've already got, I only have to code that once (looking at you, shades randomly walking off edges / into each other's orbs).

Bugs

Turns out a bunch of spells just ignored cooldown timers! I think that's now corrected!

(Possible I've introduced a bug around either the omni-shield or flip shield spell, so watch out for that...)

Cheers, keep on spinning!