Insurgence of Forgotten Fairies

  2nd Project Innocence: Insurgence of Forgotten Fairies is the sequel to 1st Project Innocence: Shadows Over Yumekyo. Since developing 1st Project Innocence, I've started taking a drawing course, which has improved the art quality immensely. Previously, I had just been doing art based on what I had taught myself, and it didn't really come out well.

  So far, I haven't really been focusing on developing any one thing. I've basically been revamping everything that 1stPI had, and making it better. I've been using a bunch of tweens to make the game have that completed game feel. I've made a much nicer HUD, which also shows some of the extra mechanics I've put into the game. This screenshot also shows some of the drops I've programmed in, which were not in 1stPI. The drops score you extra points the higher up on the screen they are collected, which was surprisingly difficult to code. It's always the little things. You expect to be done it in half an hour, tops, and then you end up spending two or three hours polishing it to make it work.

  The thing I'm probably the most proud of so far is the custom dialogue system. I decided to make my own dialogue system, because I wanted to have multiple people being shown at once, which the Dialog Extension just can't do. I ended up making it as a sort of offshoot of Flargy-Filler/fillergames' dialogue system: using a seperator to differentiate between commands and actual dialog. The below screenshot uses:

  Kiyoko\Happy\Whoa, this game looks way better\than the last one already!

  Which looks like this:

  Kiyoko is the character portrait that gets put up. Happy is the animation that gets chosen. Everything afterwards is just the dialogue. The \ in the middle of the dialogue triggers a line break, but for simplicity, and my sanity, I only support one line break, and then I have to advance text to see the rest of a sentence. Eventually I'll implement an event system, such as:

  EVENT\PlayBossMusic\0.1

  EVENT being the trigger to let the game know that this isn't dialogue, and no portrait should be changed. PlayBossMusic is the custom event that gets triggered in-scene. 0.1 is how long until the next dialogue comes up. Overall, I think this setup is pretty flexible, and even in some ways superior to the Dialog Extension (no offense, Justin and Cory).

  The next thing I'll work on (besides art) will probably be getting shooting working. I've got a very different idea for the shooting in this game compared to 1stPI, but it might turn out to be a pain to code...

Very nice improvement! Be careful with the  colors, though. I’m not an expert, so I might be very wrong...  The  combination of blue going to pink/purple contrasting the green doesn’t feel  so good to me. I think when  contrasting 2 opposing colors, one of them should be used just a fragment of the amount that the other has. Something like that, don’t know exactly.
Otherwise, the character herself  looks quite good.

Looking good. Extensions are great, but sometimes you have no choice but to build your own things. I actually use the same separator technique a lot.

I agree with domagojbulat about the colours. Colour theory is actually really interesting if you fancy reading up about it, but a quick solution would be to look at some colour scheme generators. There are loads of decent ones on the web. But don't worry too much about your graphics yet, they can be easily replaced later.

The gradient backgrounds were actually meant to contrast with the HUD and everything else. Right now their there purely as placeholders, because I haven't done any backgrounds yet. I have something very cool in mind for the backgrounds...

I think it looks pretty good so far. The dialog system you have works similarly to how my AI system parses instructions.

When you're working on the permanent backgrounds, I think you should keep an eye on the font. I'd prefer it to be easier to read, so that I don't have to take my eyes off the game action as long. Maybe add a black shadow around the characters to give them more contrast?

Is it hard to read right now? I've been experimenting with different colors, and I haven't really settled on anything yet.

Is it hard to read right now? I've been experimenting with different colors, and I haven't really settled on anything yet.

Yeah, small as the texts in this forum, I can't read them,
even if I know they are larger than the texts in this forum.

Shot Type A: "Homing Necklace"

Unfocussed

Focussed

 I've got shots working! So far I've just got Kiyoko's A type shot, but in the final game there will be six unique shot types to choose from. Each shot increases in power depending on how much "Potential" you have. You can increase your Potential by grabbing the purple "P" drops. Those "Ex" drops add to your Extend. Once you get enough Ex, you get another life, or if you have max lives, you'll get a "Potential Shift". Along with these shots came the options: the orbs around Kiyoko. They were a bit of a nightmare to code, but with a little help (thanks LIBERADO!) I've got them working.

 I also played around with the HUD font. I dunno if it's better, but I think it stands out a bit more.

Looks like you're making good progress, and it looks great. The HUD does stand out a bit more, but the blue clashes with the pink/red. If you made the background darker it would be easier to read.

For the main screen magenta/cyan/yellow is a triadic colour scheme, but those 'Ex' might become hard to spot if there's lots of activity on screen. Again, try a darker background. It's all about contrast.

  It's been a bit. I haven't been updating here because I felt like I haven't been getting anything done. However:

^{Once again, the gradient in the background is a placeholder.}

  I do in fact have some tangible progress!

  In actuality, I've gotten a lot done. Just most of it isn't in-game yet. I've gone through two artstyles before settling on this one. In addition to those two portraits I have four more: one different expression for each of the characters there, and two more for another character.

  I also have three (almost four) music tracks completed as well. Which leads into my currently biggest problem yet. I've run into an odd audio problem with Chrome. All the audio on Chrome is muffled, and plagued with random pops.

  Also, how does this HUD font look? I'm also thinking of just doing a straight white font.

  Hey everybody,

  So, I'm going to be stepping away from this project. I'm probably going to be stepping away from game development as a whole for a while in fact. I've been very busy with everyday life, and game dev isn't as appealing to me as it used to be.

  However,

  That does not mean that this game is not going to be made. Since the beginning of Project Innocence, I've been working with Akemi, who you might know from on Discord. She's actually the one who first came up with the idea for Project Innocence, and who does the bulk of design and programming for the game. So we talked a bit and she said that she'd be able to carry on the project without me, as I'm not that invested in it anymore.

  Akemi will probably post pretty soon after this, introducing herself to the forums, and this thread in particular.

  As my final... announcement, I guess you could say, I'd like to say that we've decided to change this game's name from 2nd Project Innocence: Insurgance of Forgottan Fairies to 1st Project Seijun: IoFF.

  A big thank you to this community for all you've done, and happy game-making!

  Hey all!

  I'm Akemi, who (as I see Rosalina has already mentioned) some of you may already know from Discord. I'll be taking full control of development from here on out, (man, that sounds a lot worse than it's meant to be) so I'll be the one posting progress reports on here now. In case you're wondering, no, there are no other hidden devs here. It's just me now.

  I don't have access to any screenshots of the development of the game at the moment, but I'll try to get a game-related post on here relatively soon.

  Here's a relatively large update!

  First off, I've switched development to desktop, and that makes an enormous difference. Not only can I create a bazillion more bullets, I also don't need to worry about the sound issue that we ran into earlier, because it doesn't exist on desktop. (Windows, at least...)

  A large mechanic of the game has been implemented: named danmaku!

_{There's also a neat star particle effect on screen.}

  Generally, a boss will alternate between a normal attack, and something more special and memorable, which is then given a name that's thrown up on-screen. This also makes it easier to discuss the game, because instead of having to say "the second attack of the first boss" you can say "Minute Solar Flares".

  I think I should probably make the health bar a bit more fancy. Even just another shade on the bottom would do a lot, I think.

  I also implemented grazing (getting close to a bullet, but not getting hit by it), and a reward for grazing: each graze is worth 100 points, and has a chance to drop an Extend pickup, which will go towards extra lives and Potential Shifts, which, ironically, haven't been implemented yet.

  You can die now, so I guess that's good?

  I'm pretty sure that the Stage 1 boss is mostly done. I still have some spriting and balancing to do, and I'll probably implement some sort of timer, but I won't really be able to do either of those until I finish spriting and coding all of the players. Meanwhile, I finally made and implemented a background:

^{The background is subject to change: I'm not completely sure I'm done it.}

  I also added some eye candy for grazing: a small particle will pop out of you and head towards the bullet you grazed, and then fade out.

Looking good. One thought is than rather than have free-floating text on the left, it should have borders around it. It would be good to give the main game area a border too.