What’s new: new and improved hit effects! We’ve got a few more basic hit effects, directional hit effects, and smoke effects on ground contact. I’m particularly glad to have the smoke be correctly in front/behind the characters to create a bit of depth, as I’m using separate front and back smoke animation sprites 😀 It’s such a simple trick, yet it adds enormously compared to a single smoke sprite placed in front of the character, and the memory consuption basically amounts to the same thing.
Here’s all of that in action, along with some of the earlier upgrades, like gamepad support (though you can’t really tell just from these):
There’s even some technical stuff for players who want to play like that (even though it’s pretty relaxed and slow compared to any fighting game), like dash/move cancels. Here’s what it can look like when things get hectic with counters and the like:
For those who care, all of these were taken in hard mode, with a 40STR Honey against a 22DEF Little Sun, meaning Honey has been training quite extensively during the VN segment (more likely, you’d only reach 25-30STR at that point by doing regular training), but hasn’t been to see Little Sun’s exhibition match previously, which would cause her defence to drop lower 😀 Still, with those stats, even hard mode is proving to be manageable!
I still need to rework the speed line effects, but we’re getting to the point where I’m getting ready to move on to the next character. I’ll work on the unmask event first, just to make sure it works and I can reuse it for all matches later (it’s what happens when you lose and you have a chance to run away before getting unmasked), and once that’s done, I’ll start on the second opponent, finally!