Suki Game Art Update (5/30)

Update time! We're back to A Suki Game again, with another update pushing the game closer to a final release. For patrons, you can try it right now with this link! And as the title suggests, the big focus with in build was updating the art, adding in all the finished character art from Mabo and UI art from Pump. Here's a little sneak peak of what that looks like:

Very clean, no notes. With this the game is looking nearly complete, especially seeing it in action.
Additionally, I've made a handful of other changes and additions. The game will now save both the highest tier of character you've reached and your highest score, remembering these for the next time you play. This isn't used for much currently, but in the next update it's planned to turn the hold mechanic into an unlockable mechanic, as well as adding more features to unlock too. Volume settings have also been added as an option to the pause menu and not just the main menu, and in the main menu there's a new option for resetting your save data. There's a handful of other small changes here and their, but the last one I want to highlight is a small change to merging, meant to help make the multi-merge mechanic easier to take advantage of.

For the uninitiated, multi-merge is a mechanic in this Suika-like where you can combine three matching characters at the same time to have them skip an entire tier of size. It's been in this game for a long time, but it's always been inconsistent, especially with larger characters. You would think you have the perfect setup to pull one off, only for one of the three in the combo to just be left out. Whenever I tested the game this would always annoy me, so in this update I made two changes to hopefully make this mechanic as consistent as it can be in a game like this. The first change being that instead of two characters pulling eachother with equal force to merge (resulting in the new character appearing in the midpoint between them), now the lower character is pulled with much more force than the higher character. This means that merging generally pulled characters upwards where they'd float, and the character in a more potentially stable position is prioritized over the one that may have just dropped down, or may have just been created from a merge. And the second change is that when a character can potentially merge with two other characters at the same time, she won't be pulled towards either of them and they're forced to be pulled towards her. That way, there'll be less occasions where one character immediately pulls the middle one away from the other.

Did a quick showcase of these changes in action. It does just do what you'd expect to happen, but you'd be surprised how tricky that can be in a game with physics as unpredictable as this, lol. Either way though I'm happy with the merge mechanic where it is now, and I'm thinking this should be the last time I have to mess around with the gameplay mechanics. We're on the home stretch now!

Most of what's left to do on this game is stuff that I'll have to collaborate with Mabo on, so in the meantime I'll be getting back to focusing on the Maya Platformer instead. The next goal first and foremost is going to be to finally get that level editor fully functional. For all the work I've put into it it's still missing so many features, but I think I'm really close to the point where it can be used as a streamlined way to make levels, both for me and anyone else who plays it. Once that happens, I feel like progress on the game is going to speed up dramatically. I'm really excited for that and I hope you are too, but in the meantime, that's all for this devlog. Until next time!