Spell change, Vertical Axis, and a Title Screen

It's taken me a little longer than I had hoped to post, but it doesn't mean I've been slacking off! I have been able to get a lot of really cool improvements and developments in the last few weeks. School and work have taken their toll on my free time, but luckily I put my two weeks notice in on one job, which will give me less stress and pressure in general.

Alright, so as I was testing out my original spells (namely the intended "stream of lightning") and getting some feedback on it, I realized that the art and execution wasn't quite doing the idea justice. So, after playing with speed and values, I just decided to change the art to be a little more pleasing. And thus the ice barrage was made:

With the animated motion, it just fits the animation much better. I also added little snowflake particles, and it just makes casting the spell so fun! I plan on adding a bit more mechanic into all the spells, so eventually I plan on making this spell slow down the enemies it touches. I plan on making the different spells incorporate several different mechanics, so that should be a blast to plan out.

After making the ice spell, I started to realize that the game would remain quite static if you could only shoot left and right. At first I was hesitant to add the y axis into the game just because it obviously adds quite a few more animations, but... I just buckled in and made them. So it's still a work in progress to add vertical to all the spells, but it definitely makes it a lot more dynamic to break blocks and play that way. The vertical capability made me try out another function, rocket propulsion. Once I saw him shooting his vet of fire down, I couldn't resist adding a line of code to make him be pushed up into the air. This game is getting so entertaining, even in the test phases.

As you can see, I've also very lightly began the phase of making more of a tile set to hopefully open the way for construction to begin on the real beginning of the game.

On a programming note, once I started adding so many new behaviors to the spells, I quickly realized that the collision of the "bullets" was not cooperating with the system I had incorporated. For some reason I had programmed the individual blocks to "look" for spells to interact with, and in the end this started causing problems because an icicle that passes 5 pixels above a block would take away some hp from the block... Obviously allowing many a bug to happen over the course of the game. So, as I should have done into the first place, I looked closer into the behavior or collision checking, and re-approached the idea and simply made the spell do the "looking" for the destructible. Once I ironed out the kinks, this worked flawlessly. Now you can run around and break all the blocks you want, and now they actually behave the way they should! Hoorah!

This post is getting long, but just to show the accomplishment of today, here's the first (hopefully of not too many) version of the title screen. It shows a little bit into the feel of the game, and I'm hopefully going to try and make the rest of the game at least somewhat follow this mystic and mysterious feel that I'm going for here. I'm still just as excited as ever for all of this! My next plans are working on giving the title screen a little bit of functionality, and adding some basic UI like a pause screen.