i spent last night working through more of STGBuilder's tutorial, which got me shots, an enemy ship, and ✨explosions✨. no collision handling (and shots don't seem to disappear on contact even though they should??) but still pretty satisfying, a lot of repeat cookie cutter work with the sprite patterns was the biggest timesink1
the script editor is wild though; i was bracing for some kind of a code window or language, but instead you get a bunch of task/event lists and control blocks that you drag in from the side, and those blocks feed into each other with parameters and stuff?? it's soooo much more abstract than i expected and i love it and i'm fascinated by it. it reminds me a little bit of editing shader parameters in ReShade, in the way where you only get some select numbers to tweak on a fucked up little code snippet.
i don't know what today has in store. i'm very sleepy. good mornnnghnghhh.
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the attack/defense collision boxes are definitely not keyed right but it's not really a big deal at this point. when i cut out the explosion animation, the tutorial had a note about "hitbox discernment not necessary" which made me realize "oh yeah the hitbox discernment was definitely necessary on those last ones, huh. they wanted me to discern things"
when i first cleared Mecha Ritz: Steel Rondo and saw "made with STG Builder" in the credits, i had sort of assumed that the UI at the bottom was just, like, standard for anyone using STGBuilder. but thinking about the test window up above, i realized... no, Mecha Ritz is actually just drawing its UI inspirations from plenty of other games, and STG Builder made it possible to look really good. that's cool as hell and gives me a lot more appreciation for that little window
... but damn, "when you make games you really gotta make the whole thing," huh
(not my screenshot, thank you to the user on the Steam community who posted this so i could steal it off of my phone at work)