Ice Demon
Untitled
-Slightly increased the size of the uppercut attack's hitbox.
-Once again, made tweaks to fix a variety of issues involving floor/wall collisions with numerous enemies, as well as the player character.
-Fixed a Survival Mode bug that only recently appeared. When two Chibearas were present, the "shockwave" sprite would sometimes appear on a Chibeara not currently using that attack.
-Fixed bug where a frozen, defeated Skeleton would temporarily be transparent when an Esper appeared.
Small update
This is an otherwise small update, just some things I've been meaning to work out for a while. A lot of new players found the name "Level" kind of confusing for the game's difficulty system, as that word is usually associated with an entirely different kind of feature, so I decided to rename it. I also worked on some bugs. Let me know if anything persists and I'll look at it quickly.
I hope everyone's having a good holiday! Thanks for playing and have a safe rest of the year.
SONG:
A music track by SypherAP, which was made for a feature that ended up going unused, now plays when reaching level 13 in Demon World.
FIXES:
-When his back is to the wall, Ninja will go forward like he is supposed to when doing a jump kick.
-Fixed bug where using a super would temporarily pause enemy spawns while a Gladiator is present in Heaven Mode.
OTHER:
-Rebranded the "difficulty level" system to "heat."
Bugfix
-Possibly fixed bug where Jet glitches out if he is knocked out of his dive bomb attack and touches a wall.
-Decreased the height of Jet's attack hitbox, making it safer to hit him with drop kicks.
-Fixed bug where an alert arrow would appear on the left side when Golem's chair is past the right side of the screen.
-Several minor sprite tweaks and fixes.
Achievements and Chibeara bugfix
FIXES:
-Re-implemented a thing that went missing which enables Steam features. When the game opens, it should set Steam to unlock any missing achievements.
-Hopefully fixed a bug where doing the pummel attack on Chibeara would cause you to somehow move upward. This would prevent you from reaching Chibeara with the pummel attack, softlocking the run. In the event I failed to fix this one, the pummel attack object now spawns on top of Chibeara, ensuring he takes damage. Also, if you happen to go outside the room's boundaries in the pummel state, you will respawn back into the room without taking damage, and exit the pummel state.
August bugfix update
The main reason for the delay on this one is that I've been busy. But also, long story short, in order to continue updating the game, I had to switch Gamemaker Studio versions from 1.4 to 2. It's been a hassle because the one or two functions that had minor changes ended up affecting a -lot- of stuff relating to physics, so I'm hoping no new bugs have slipped under the radar. But I'm glad it's done, this update needed to come out for a while so I could address a whopping three different game crash issues.
Now that the big Gamemaker jump is done, any future bugfix and rebalance updates should come out much faster. I don't think that switching Gamemaker versions is going to create issues for anybody, but let me know if anything really weird happens and I'll look into it. Thanks as always for playing, stay safe and I'll see you again whenever.
FIXES:
-Fixed a bug that usually resulted in a crash, where enemy reinforcements during a boss encounter would show up even though the game was paused.
-Fixed a game crash relating to bosses being left alive for way too long.
-Fixed a game crash where hitting a chibeara's gray energy ball would crash the game if the chibeara's HP was 0.
-Fixed sounds rarely being played at the wrong volume for a split second (hopefully. Apologies if this bug still happens, it's been strangely hard to fix in the past.)
-Fixed a player character bug where landing on the ground while walking would make you stop walking for one frame.
-Fixed the enemy icons on the corners of the screen displaying the wrong quantity of outside-of-screen enemy if there was more than 10 of a non-ninja enemy on one side.
-Fixed jets descending all the way to the ground when they spawn in the center of Technospace.
-Fixed bug where jets would sometimes have the wrong sprite when doing their flight attack.
-Fixed weird things happening involving samurai jumping out of a pit.
-Fixed bug where "dodge" caption would sometimes not appear when getting the dodge on a golem's quake attack.
-Fixed certain things not properly displaying their sprite while an esper was spawning in.
-Fixed esper's eye being placed a pixel off center at certain times.
-Fixed hyper esper's fireball body not flashing red with his eye.
ENEMY TWEAKS:
-If a jet performs a dive bomb and touches the left or right wall, instead of stopping his attack, he will continue downward.
-After finishing a dive bomb or recovering from a flinch, the jet's sprite will be his neutral pose instead of the "about to dive bomb" sprite. This way, it will be easier to notice him preparing to dive bomb after he ascends.
-After causing a jet to flinch (freezing counts,) you can use spin kick to inflict flinching and prevent his ascent. (Fun fact, this is actually a bug, but because I actually like being able to do this I'm leaving it in as an experiment.)
-Golem's chair hitbox is two pixels shorter horizontally.
-Berserkers and golems will now display their sprite below those of most other enemies, preventing smaller enemies from hiding behind them.
-Berserker's attack had its range reduced from the backside. In other words, you are more likely to avoid the attack when standing close to his body. However, when berserker jumps, he now checks if you are too close for him to hit you, and will jump backwards to attempt to reach you. Note that the new hitbox retains its width at the very top of the hitbox, at the edge of the axe's swing.
-After a skeleton dies, hitting him with Glacier Punch causes him to explode into ice, which does not damage the player.
-If a skeleton dies while frozen, it will enter the frozen version of his death state.
CHALLENGE MODE TWEAKS:
-Renamed the Bestiary challenge to Mob Rush. (This mode got the name "Bestiary" back in a super old version where you'd have multiple stages fighting only one enemy type. I figured a rebranding was in order.)
-The Mob Rush challenge no longer spawns skeletons, samurai, cyborgs, or dragoons until level 4.
-Mob Rush now requires 50 kills for the achievement instead of 60.
SMALL THINGS:
-Tweaked the appearance of a few character sprites, and fixed some sprites having out of place pixels in their empty space. Also did some other oddball changes to make things look nicer.
-The little intro screen with the logo is gone. ("Shower Time" kinda stopped being my branding a long time ago, so I decided to just get rid of this altogether so your main menu will open up faster.)
Small status update
Also, the store page now has a translation available in Spanish. This is thanks to a company named WeSpeakGameish. They reached out to me recently and offered to translate the store page, so here we are. Many thanks!
While I'm here, quick reminder that I have a Twitter strictly for updates on what I'm working on. You should check it out if you ever want a heads up on what I end up doing after Ice Demon:
https://twitter.com/BobHoodGames1
Thank you for playing Ice Demon, be safe and I look forward to getting back to all of you with a game update.
Balance and minor bugfix update
To summarize, certain enemies (namely berserkers and skeletons) were way too annoying for the wrong reasons, and have been toned down. Hopefully these tweaks are enough.
Also, because getting the same boss to fight three or four times in a row can get boring, you now always get a different boss from the prior one during your run of a stage.
All this and a bunch of other small things. If you unlocked the Heaven challenge, please give it another try, as it also was a part of today's changes.
Thank you again for your interest in Ice Demon, without you I would be nothing. Please enjoy and have a good, safe remainder of the year.
BALANCE CHANGES:
-Jets take 10 frames longer (1 frame means 1 60th of a second) to react after entering flinch status.
-Reduced the range of berserker's attack. (Hitbox is 10 pixels shorter in width. The change is so major that the sprite of the motion blur was also shortened.)
-Reduced skeleton's HP from 10 to 9.
-Reduced hyper skeleton's HP from 20 to 18.
-After throwing bones, skeletons (both variants) take 10 frames longer to attack again.
-Skeleton's bones have a red outline to make them easier to see, and their hitboxes before exploding were reworked (though the hitbox change might be very hard to notice.)
-Hazardous explosions have a reworked hitbox to make more sense, and the hitbox is smaller overall.
-The explosions of frozen explosives also have a reworked hitbox, however their hitbox is a bit bigger than standard explosions.
-The hitbox of golem's thrown chair was shortened in width by 4 pixels.
-After splitting, Chibeara's green energy ball attack has a shorter hitbox about two pixels all around.
TECHNOSPACE FIX:
-Technospace now spawns enemies from lower points. This change basically increases the time most enemies have to wait before they can attack. The new wait time is now a lot closer to that of other stages, as it was supposed to be. This change is also supposed to stop the dragoon enemy from starting his attack from off the screen if he appears during a boss encounter.
BOSS MECHANIC CHANGES:
-Fixed bug where hyper gladiators and hyper golems would appear as their standard variants on Carina Ruins during high difficulty levels on Expert.
-When encountering bosses, you will no longer get the same boss to fight twice in a row.
HEAVEN MODE REWORK:
-Removed skeletons from the Heaven challenge. Doing this temporarily as a test, might keep this change.
-Heaven's difficulty increases faster.
-Tweaked the appearance of Heaven's arena.
OTHERS:
-The P and B crystals all spawn high in the air, much like the ones in Carina Ruins. This means you now have to perform a double jump to obtain the crystal, allowing you to perform single jumps in the center area without accidentally grabbing it.
-Tweaked a few various sprites and other minor things to look better/make more sense.
Leaderboard Fixed
Just giving everyone a heads up that as of earlier today, it is now visible. Your scores had been saving this whole time, you had just not been able to see any of them because I was supposed to set community names to each.
Also, I had something set up backwards, and basically, players who were playing the game for about the first hour of release may have scores on the leaderboard that are lower than that of their save file. If this happened to you, this can be fixed simply by entering that stage and then leaving; your high score should immediately upload and be proper this time.
Many apologies for the inconvenience, please give me a heads up if there are further issues and I will work them out as soon as possible. Big thank you to everyone for playing!