From the beginning of PhasePixel, I've been the artist, level designer/game planner, and (part) musician for Resistance is Fruitile, but going forward and for the foreseeable future, I will be taking on duties as the lead/sole dev of the game.
For the past few months, I've been learning a mix of both programming as well as expanding my knowledge of Unity features, and have been making some QoL / gameplay changes to RiF as I've become more able to do so on my own.
Today, I've decided that there's enough new content/changes that I feel ready to release a major update. I am, however, planning to release more updates in the future as I add more changes/improvements.
A (probably incomplete) summary of the changes:
Graphics, Music, and Sound:
- I've majorly improved the enemy death explosions by making them look more like fruit chunks/giblets instead of dots/squares. Crystal turrets will shatter into shards, and grape enemies will literally lose their grapes. Bosses especially have gotten a big overhaul here and will erupt in a shower of fruit guts!
- I've also changed all the enemy guns to look more sci-fi as opposed to traditional human weaponry, as I believe this is more in-line with the theme of the game.
- Originally, RiF's levels were not actually made via Unity's built-in tilemap system, and instead I made them as single images in a tile-based pixel art software (shout out to Pyxeledit!). This was done simply due to my ignorance / we weren't sure how to implement the levels properly. I've recently spent some time learning more about Unity, and found out just how great the tilemap system can be. So, after tinkering with it for a while in a test project, I decided to convert all of the existing RiF levels to this system.
So far, I've converted all of The Courtyard, The Library, and The Fruit Realm rooms (haven't converted the Royal Court yet as that floor is much more complicated), and in doing so also changed / improved most of the existing Courtyard rooms. Please note that you can now phase dash through (most of) the hedge bushes, and across 1-tile wide water. It's not perfect, but I will continue to tweak this / experiment with adding more dashable obstacles. - When your character is in super mode, they now have a flame aura effect, a la Dragon Ball.
- Music-wise, I've improved / tweaked the instrumentation of the Library and Royal Court songs.
- Finally, I've changed several enemy death and shot sounds for more variation, and added a Rage "ready" sound.
Power Cards and Balance:
- I've increased the total number of Power Cards to 32 (from 28).
- The backside of the cards have a new look that's less like poker playing cards and more like mystical power cards.
- The "Power" bar is now called "Rage" and has a yellow color, which is more in-line with the theme of the game and also gives it a different naming scheme from the "Power" cards.
- I've modified the colors of all the Power Cards to fit a consistent theme / color coding:
red = health, pink = damage output, orange = super, yellow = rage, green = healing, blue = minerals/exp, purple = bullet effects, gray = Juicr9000, black = movement/dash - I finally realized far too long after release that the Bride's super was waaaaaaaay too OP with Bottomless Pit and Tough Nuts (I might have entered the wrong number here or there...) so I've tweaked the damage down and lowered the rate of fire to account for a few Power Card changes that I'll detail ahead.
I've reworked / separated several powers into multiple powers and added a few new ones:
- Mineral Hoarder: minerals move towards you; the match-two makes enemies drop more minerals.
- Vitamin C4: allows you to manually detonate the Juicr9000 by pressing the mine button again; the match-two makes the explosion MUCH bigger.
- Rapid Fire: match-two now gives you the extra barrel perk that Tough Nuts used to give. Moving this off of Tough Nuts to Rapid Fire will provide more pathways to increase your damage output.
- Tough Nuts: the match-two bonus gives you the two mines perk for now, but this might be a temporary placeholder until I change this to something more interesting / not related to the Juicr9000 once I'm capable of doing so.
- Minefulness: changed to only grant increased sawblade rate of fire. The match-two makes the sawblade bigger and do more damage.
- Selective Breeding: no longer makes your normal bullets bigger, but instead now makes only your super attack bigger, and also stronger. The match-two gives you increased super attack speed.
I felt that having big normal bullets all the time created way too much noise / chaos on screen and it would become hard to see what you were doing, so it's now completely gone from the game. At the same time, I also felt that not having a power that buffs your super made the super feel way too weak in the later parts of the game if you weren't lucky enough to get Bottomless Pit's match-two, so this was a perfect change. Speaking of Bottomless Pit... - Bottomless Pit: perhaps the biggest perk change, I've toned down the match-two bonus so that it only grants you base power card abilities to your super, and no longer their corresponding match-two bonuses.
The updated Selective Breeding can power buff the super to compensate for the nerf, which I think feels better since you can get it more easily. It was just a bit tooooo crazy when you had the piercing split bullet along with bouncing, dash burst, and range extension.
Also, as a final addition, when you obtain the match-two bonuses for Tough Nuts and Bottomless Pit, and combine it with Selective Breeding, you will unleash the long fabled RED super bullet!
That's most, if not everything I've changed/added so far. I have vague plans to continue improving the game as I see fit, and the extent of this will depend on how much I'm able to learn, and how much of the existing code I'm able to understand to then change.
And ps, the game runs perfectly on the Steam Deck!
Merry Christmas!!
Kevin
