In addition to this spinning spike ball of death, I've implemented a proper save system in addition to the password system, and a trapdoor with switches that open and close them, allowing and restricting access to some parts of a level. And with that, I can finally start building the levels to the game! Jubilations!

My energy is starting to burn out at the rate I'm working at on this game, but I'm still determined to get this thing done by the deadline. This month will be spent on the level building and making sure the difficulty curves at a reasonable rate, in addition to providing proper backgrounds and such.

I don't think my schedule is going to lift at all, and admittedly, most of the time I spend on this game is wasted with lack of motivation. However, I've made two major changes within the last week.

First of all, I spent a lot of time on party AI. They're both general and character-based. For example, Saira will support whenever any party member drops low enough, Bane will tactfully retreat, Anka will berserk, and Rai will back off and fight at a distance. There are a lot of other things that play into how they behave, but overall I'm content with it, and once I work in their character abilities, things should be going smoothly.

Second, I've decided to remove the co-op functionality. The reason for this is because since the game wasn't built around multiplayer, implementing it turned out to be a lot more challenging than I'd expected, and didn't bring enough to the table to be considered worthwhile. I think cutting it out will save me a lot of time so I can focus on something else.

As a final note, I won't be bringing back all the class moves. Instead, I'll be adding the ultimate moves, as originally intended, and reworking current class moves to have better utility and fun factor, rather than just increasing your damage.

Unfortunately though, my main reason for not getting stuff done has been another project of mine….

I've made some superficial presentation changes (fonts etc.) and have made to date exactly one difficulty edit.

I've done lots of bugfixing and such and also some behind-the-scenes work. The engine is horribly horribly put together, seeing as I usually can only have 600 or 700 or so bullets before it begins to choke (compared to 1,200 for LS2) so I probably need to go and redo the object hierarchy too >_>

Added lots of polish (particles, fades, etc). Started playing around with sound… working on my own version of sfxr. May or may not finish it in time.

All of the levels are represented now. Still need to work on the transition between levels. Many obstacles and bonuses are yet to be created/imagined.

Again, the imgur album.

For those who can't be bothered, here's a screenshot I think came out pretty well:

My progress has been rather poor again this week. I only really created a dialogue system. I'm really pleased with it because it works nicely, but I would have liked to have done more.

I think my progress will continue to be poor until around the middle of June.

I've got lot's of nothing to show this time round. Reasons are obvious.

I do have this though:

And this is the beginning of a thing that may or may not become a complete game.

I spent the last two days working on this level editor:

Now I can work on designing levels while in Germany! It's not like I'll be spending all of my time over there working on this game, but I might try and get some stuff done - a month is a long time. Other than making the rest of the levels and music, there's very little else that needs to be implemented before the game's ready to ship. Hard to believe the game is almost feature complete less than a week in.

Unrelated note: I think the date on this needs updating.