Protect the portal

This update was all about making the game feel complete instead of simply adding more content. I spent most of my time refining mechanics, balancing gameplay, and improving the overall player experience.

The feature I’m most proud of is the new parry system for boss fights. Players now have to react within a small timing window by holding Shift to reflect incoming attacks back at the boss. Getting the timing right took a surprising amount of testing because I wanted it to reward good reactions without letting players spam it, so I added a cooldown and carefully balanced the mechanic until it felt fair.

I also introduced three different game modes, each changing how the game is played instead of just increasing difficulty. To help new players understand everything, I built an in-game tutorial that walks through the mechanics before gameplay begins, while still allowing players to revisit it later if needed.

Beyond that, I polished the experience with independent music and sound effect controls, hid a few easter eggs around the game, balanced enemy behavior, and improved the overall feel of combat with better audio and gameplay feedback.

Most of the artwork comes from the Pocket Mortys sprite sheets, so my focus throughout this update was on programming the gameplay systems and making them work together smoothly. Looking back at the first version, I’m happiest with how much more polished the game feels now, and I hope players enjoy mastering the boss fights and discovering all the little secrets hidden throughout the game.

In the process of developing gameplay, the first thing that had to be done was getting the visual assets. Mostly, the Morty sprites were taken from the website called The Spriters Resource using the sheet of Pocket Mortys sprites, which contained various unique characters that would be suitable as falling enemies. The large sprite sheet was manually sliced into separate transparent PNGs, but only the most identifiable Morty variants, including Wizard Morty, Pizza Morty, Ghost Morty, Dracula Morty, and Evil Morty, were selected in order to allow the player to distinguish enemies easily. The visual assets are referenced as placeholders for a hobby project. Rick, the pickle projectile, and some UI elements are from the open-source project itself.Now that the assets were prepared, the development process revolved around creating a minimal and viable playable prototype. The first prototype featured a game screen where there was a Rick that was fixed to the screen and could move using a keyboard. Also included were the enemy Morty who would fall from above, the upward-firing pickles, bounding box collision detection, and the game over when all the lives were lost. This prototype was purposely kept very basic since the goal was to determine whether it was fun to dodge and shoot the falling Mortys before adding any more features. At this stage, a bug relating to collision detection which was as a result of an incomplete overlap was noticed, but was not realized until later.