Insurgence of Forgotten Fairies

You could sync your bullet updating with Stencyl's updating, but that would also result in faster updates of 100 per second.

  How would I do that? I might have done that already: I divide the bullet's speed by Engine.STEP_SIZE, but I doubt that that's what you're referring to.

  Also, this thread hit 9999 views. Thanks!

I'm assuming you already have an update function that's called each frame, maybe using an event listener?  If so, you could call that function in the Updating event instead.

  It's been a bit longer than I'd like it to have been.

  But, I've finally figured out my major lag issue (with a lot of help from rob1221, merrak, Luyren, Justin, and probably some more people: I've been working on this one problem for a while now, so I've forgotten everyone who's helped me. Thanks guys!). That means that I can finally start working on the game again!

^Finally...

  This will probably be the first stage boss's first attack. I also having switched the bullet event listener to updating, so now bullets don't slow down during lag. I'm thinking of causing them to update faster than 100 times a second, though, because of some issues with very fast spirals not coming out properly, but I'm not sure how that would affect the bullets.

  I'm back to working on this after the game jam. I added a little particle flair when grazing bullets, which in action looks very nice.

  I've also implemented deathbombing (getting hit by a bullet, but quickly bombing, thus losing a bomb instead of a life), which turned out to be surprisingly difficult to code.

  This is also the first forum post with the new fairy animations. They now turn towards whichever direction they're moving.
  I'm also working on remaking the first stage, as I wasn't very happy with the original design: making the attacks fully in time with the music quickly became tedious and not rewarding enough.

  Oh my, it's been quite a while, hasn't it? A lot has been done since April.

  Probably the biggest accomplishment since last post was the programming language I use for bullet patterns now. I programmed an entirely custom language specifically for this game's bullet patterns, and it was definitely worth it. I can program a new pattern in less than half the time it would take for me to do it in the Stencyl block interface. It makes use of the External Data extension to pull .sjbs files (just fancy .txt files that have some pretty formatting when they're opened in Notepad++) into a list. Then I have a very large behaviour that runs through the list and parses everything, giving the correct response. It was a lot simpler to program than I expected; the biggest hurdles I ran into were probably implementing math and attributes, and loops. Of course, it's still rough around the edges, e.g.: sometimes loops won't work properly unless you put a "wait for zero seconds" command inside of the loop, but it works like a charm otherwise.

  Another big thing I set up was the second playable character, seen in the above screenshot. She comes with two new shot types, but her bombs still have yet to be programmed. The main playable character also has her second shot type now, as well as her second bomb, which is probably the most fun I've had programming with the Image API: https://twitter.com/akemi_yume/status/1259986181158133760

  There are also a few things here and there that I've added or fixed: There's a timer on attacks now, so you won't get stuck losing an inordinate amount of lives on a single attack, I figured out a much better way to seamlessly loop music, there's a boss name flair in the corner, there are the white familiars orbiting the boss that signify how many attacks are left, and so on and so forth.