Eric

This guy is a Jerk, especially the first time you fight him.

Fun fact: Back in a different timeline, Vale was meant to be a recurring annoyance who gets stronger the deeper you get into the game.
When I built this new, better version of the game, I accidentally placed his second iteration in the place where you were meant to encounter him for the first time and figured I might as well try and see how well that works with other players.

As I was building out the rest, I ended up placing his fights in almost reverse order:
You start with 2 (medium), then comes 3(hard) and it ends on 1(easy). I want to do a fourth version of him that you have to fight after your last encounter, as he goes completely off the rails for having been relegated to being a mid-boss.

However, the feedback so far indicates that I should probably adjust this.
Still glad that people seem to hate him, because you should.

He is a Libertarian after all.

Yesterday I realised how I can add something like a throwing meachanic to Virtue's Heaven. You can't throw enemies directly, because I don't want to code that mess. However, I noticed that it should be fairly easy to grab an ememy's 'corpse' and throw that instead.

I got the basic stuff working yesterday, I spend a bunch of this morning, making an animation. Next thing I want to take care of is the projectile.

I don't want this to look and feel elegant. This should look and feel like you're throwing a car into someone else's face.

It's now possible to throw enemies while in the air, I also added a stream of small particles to the projectile.
I kind of want to try and see if I can make it so that the shot creates a dust trail when it travels along the ground.

There's still a bit more broader work left to do and I'm sure adding this, will cause a lot of problems in other areas (that movement code has a lot of ancient, dead ends in it), but it's Saturday past noon and I'm not supposed to be doing anything today.

Still need add some kind of carrying animation and there are cases where the mechanic is a bit wonky (some of the code I have to touch is almost seven years old now), but wow is it fun to just throw a big ball of energy into an enemy.

if later down towards the game's release I have enough time to add enemy specific hurt/dying animations, I may also change the generic Energy ball you're carrying right now.

Adding this reminded me what made this project so much fun early on and what kept me coming back to it. It's just nice to get an idea for a movement method, or attack, implement it, make sure that it feels like you want it to feel and then just see how much it changes the whole way you interact with the rest of the game. At some point I'll sit down and go into a bit more detail about what drove this game forward, my initial inspirations for it and so on. I might be tired of platformers in general, but they still offer such a good platform (ha!) for player expression.

By the way, the game has a Steam page and putting it on your wishlist is always as appreciated as it is prudent.

Yesterday I realised how I can add something like a throwing meachanic to Virtue's Heaven. You can't throw enemies directly, because I don't want to code that mess. However, I noticed that it should be fairly easy to grab an ememy's 'corpse' and throw that instead.

I got the basic stuff working yesterday, I spend a bunch of this morning, making an animation. Next thing I want to take care of is the projectile.

I don't want this to look and feel elegant. This should look and feel like you're throwing a car into someone else's face.

It's all over now.

I think I understand now, why character action games have style rating systems in place.

Virtue's Heaven already had a hidden ranking system, that was mostly there to reward players for having a more varied playstyle.
Basically the less you used the same attacks in a row, the higher your rank will go and the more resources you will get from enemies in return. There's also a timing element to it, where if you don't kill an enemy after a certain amount of time has passed, your rank will reset completely. So you really don't want to take your time in this game.

However I didn't surface this part, because I always felt like open ranking systems were kind of like yelling at the player to "do better".

Now, I haven't really gotten a lot of feedback from the playtest quite yet, but what I did catch was that people were apparently playing way too considerate, which completely counteracts the entire "Be Reckless!" idea that I had for this game.

So on my walk I realized that what open ranking systems also do, is show the player how close they are to the game's intended way of play and that I could use that hidden ranking system as one way to push players towards being more aggressive.

It's not going to be the only thing I'm going to try, and I want to make sure that I'm not accidentally yelling at the player, without giving them the tools to actually get closer to what I had in mind when I made this game.
What I want this to be really, is an indicator that show the players how much the game expects them to push and how close they are to reaching that level.

P.S.: While typing this I noticed several new things that I have to address to make players more comfy with throwing themselves head first into the unknown.