Welcome to Slugger State of the Game for April 2025! First of all, I have been working more on the combos mechanic, where I’ve added a cool “riser” sound that slowly plays as you get a higher combo. For clarification, a combo is when you kill a large amount of enemies in a short amount of time. It increases the longer you can keep this up and resets if you go too long without killing an enemy. This combo system aims to make the combat system feel very integrated and polished, as well as giving the user a ton of visual and audio feedback. I’ve also been working on particle systems along with this to help with the feeling of the game. As for content, I’ve implemented the Hivox system, basically the thing that will spawn the enemies on the screen. Something I’ve done with the Hivox which I didn’t do for the enemies was that the Hivox sprite I created is going to be the final sprite for Realm 1, essentially level 1 (I’ll talk about my plans for this later). As of the development snapshot 30w12d25ma for v2.0.0.0 (the GameMaker port), the enemies in the game are just placeholder enemies. As you can see, they look like absolute rectangular garbage. I’m planning to create the sprite for these enemies for Realm 1 along with when I create all of the other realms up to Realm 10 in Phase 3 of development of the GameMaker port. But before Phase 3, I still have a bucket load of things to do as I’m still in Phase 1. In Phase 1, I’m focusing on getting the base game just right, essentially the core gameplay loop, and beginning to implement some of the more important features like upgrades, elements, and crates. Phase 2 involves all of the outer gameplay loop infrastructure, so all upgrades, elements, advancements, weapons, spirits, shields, boosts, and more. Oh wait. I might have revealed a little too much there. Oh well… Anyway… Where am I in Phase 1 currently? Well, I probably shouldn’t reveal too much, but I’ll say I’m beginning to implement the core-gameplay-loop infrastructure for the elements system, although not too much to show for now. And by the way, if the terms I’m using are confusing, don’t worry, I’m just being cryptic… Some other things I’ve done is I’ve redone the Warped Souls sprite as it looked pretty trash before, and I’ve also added one major thing: powerups. Now, powerups are going to work very differently in version 2.0.0 compared to version 1.4.7. Instead of having a huge variety of powerups spawning super frequently and the player’s ability to collect the right powerups being just as important as getting upgrades essentially making the game more random and feeling like you’re “not in control”, there will only be two basic powerups in the new version that have a larger impact but don’t last as long and spawn less often. This is so I have more room to add more upgrades and cool abilities and who knows what else, and make the game feel more structured and allow for more strategy. That sound good? I’d love it if you could give me some feedback!

Happy game dev,

ProxyFirewall.