Dev Log #34 - New Beam Art

New spritework for all the different beams have been made and added to the game, check them out in action in the .gifs below!

Regular/Charged Power Beam

Regular/Charged Ice Beam

Regular/Charged Wave Beam

Regular/Charged Plasma Beam

Splitter Beam of all different beam types

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Dev Log #33 - New Year, New Demo

Happy New Year to everyone around the world,

Previously there were some big updates to the backend of NiTL which included complete overhauls to the player wall-jumping, collision, and slope detection, followed by new Crawler AI and last week two new enemies but going forward makes that seem small!

This year is going to be big for NiTL as development of the biggest demo yet rolls in, along with it's first boss enemy!

Read on for all the details, starting with a basic comparison photo:

Comparison - New Demo is nearly 3 times as big

In this photo, everything in the colour black is empty space, the white lines are just borders of the grid the maps are on, and the different colours are different areas within the map.

Now here's where I get into the numbers and stats on the maps of the demos, hold on to your butts:

First Public Demo (Infogamer Tech Demo):

• Total Rooms: 20
• Room size: 24x14
• Map size: 5x4 grid

The first finished demo ever released for NiTL;

showcased at the Infogamer Reboot game expo.

Second Public Demo (v2.5):

• Total Rooms: 62
• Room Size: 27x15
• Map Size: 10x12 grid

That's the currently newest available demo.

Third Public Demo (v3, in-development):

• Total Rooms: 143
• Room Size: 27x15
•  Map Size: 12x15 grid

Demo currently in production.

Demo Map sizes in terms of tiles:

• First Demo: 6720 tiles
• Second Demo (current): 25110 tiles
• Demo in Development: 57915 tiles

The number of tiles is calculated by multiplying the room size with the amount of rooms in the map, the number of tiles is equal to the size of the map in 16x16 pixel tile spaces (room width x room height x amount of rooms in demo).

The current demo is 374% larger than the first demo while the one in development is 231% larger than the second demo and if you compare it to the first demo then it's 862% larger.

Enemies currently in the game:

1. Dive Bat
2. Jumper
3. Patrol Crab
4. Crawler
5. Ripper
6. Runak
7. Wallask
8. Tracking Mine
9. Spawners (and spawn)

All unique, that's 9 different types of enemies, then we have the player mechanics:

Player Mechanics:

1. Missiles
2. Morph Ball
3. Morph Bombs
4. Wall-jumping
5. Bomb Jumping  
6. High Jump
7. Morph Jump 
8. Space Jump
9. Ice Beam
10. Wave Beam
11. Plasma Beam
12. Charge Beam
13. Splitter Beam
14. Sprinting
15. Speed-boosting
16. Environmental Shield

Aside from that I'm going to add in one more enemy type, and a boss, as well as put in Ledge Grabbing/Climbing as another player mechanic.

Then on the system side, there's fully functional saving and loading via Save Stations, Mini-map, a full map screen, a pause screen, room-to-room transitions complete with fade out and fade in.

After I make the demo I'm finally gonna make a proper trailer

There's currently no set release date, but the end of May is the latest for the first version of the demo in terms of deadlines.

I'm going to be using some free assets I found on itch.io by Luis Zuno for the new demo until I can afford to commission original assets for NiTL, but in any case it's going to bring in a breath of fresh air in terms of demo areas and landscape, you're not going to be seeing the same assets over and over again for the entire demo. Eventually I'm going to be swapping out the art used in the demo.

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This is also going to be the last demo, meaning that after it's done there are not going to be any more new demos with new maps but only minor updates instead, like replacing art, putting in new audio, finishing menus, etc.

With 143 rooms and a area boss in this demo, that's one sixth of the size of the final game.

Bonus points for reaching the end of the article, screenshots:

Complete map overview of Demo v2.5

Difference between Demo 1 and Demo v2.5
Demo 3 is going to dwarf them both!