Devlog #8: Giving Everyone Guns and Bullets (Part 2)

Note: See Part 1 for context if you haven’t already.
I think I’ll be done with guns for a while. After completing the first area, you most likely won’t see them again until one of the last levels of the second area (maybe not even until the next boss fight).
Also, after rebalancing the harder difficulties to actually serve a good challenge, playtesting my own game took 2x longer than I usually would, as I’d keep dying to certain enemies or traps. But this game isn’t about breezing through easy levels, so…

Guns for Plants and Bees

These enemies are simple. Plants stay in one position, firing at random intervals. Their firerate is random and slower (average of 3.75/2.75/2/1.25 seconds), but their health is much higher compared to a Trunkwalker (65/75/90/100 health). Bees move around in the air, firing stinger bullets downwards. They fire often (average of 2.5/2/1.5/1 second[s]), but their health is decreased to make up for it (12/15/16/20 health).

Since these bees will be above the player, I made an auto-firing gun that fires upwards. I decided that manual guns will instead show up in the next area after the boss. (That means the manual guns won’t be in the demo. Sorry…)

These enemies show up in levels 1-10 and 1-11.

Minor Details and Changes

I spent a lot of time on major changes this week, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t spend time on minor problems. Here’s the small changes I made:

• Added Hard, Extra Hard, and Ultra Hard difficulty variants to level 1-9
• Trunkwalker firing interval is more random instead of being fixed (to me, it just looks weird when they all attack at the same time)
• Rebalanced easier levels so they actually can somewhat serve a good challenge
• Resized hitbox of Mushrooms (so player can now properly die to a Mushroom when not bouncing on top of them)
• Moved melon in level 1-5 (for Ultra Hard and Extreme variants) to a harder-to-reach location (as it was too easy to reach the melon previously)

You might think rebalancing levels would be a major change, but I honestly didn’t change much with each level. I mainly just moved traps/enemies around.

Upcoming Additions

Most of the time next week will be spent creating the first area’s boss fight. I won’t tell you what I plan to make for the boss fight, though. That would spoil everything. If you do want to view the spoilers, though I’ll provide a link to a Google Doc on the next devlog detailing everything about the upcoming boss fight.
I suspect this boss will take more than 6 hours to make, so I’ll split it all into two devlogs (and also two weeks). Not much to say otherwise, though. Enjoy my (pretty horrible) gameplay below!