Update 0.1.6: Boom

I considered pushing an update last week, but decided to polish the map first since it was already fairly well past my schedule.

A choice I don't regret, that would have been a mess.  It was laggy, descriptionless, had basically decorations, and had some annoying balance issues.  All of which have been dealt with this week.  Except lag, I've improved it but don't know of any way to have 200 entities running around lag-free.

One thing I want to discuss here is the level design process, because this wasn't my original picture for the level, but I think it morphed into something far better.

Originally I was picturing a neon city, the underworld, with winding streets weaving around ending in one building or park, but the assets I had weren't very easy to use.

So I realized I could merge that idea of a city with my plan for the next map I'm ditching due to time constraints, and make a ruined, burning city where the ritual's complete.  That made a lot fall together.

From there, I was considering randomly generating storms of death to reference the fact you're in the underworld, defeating the Takodachi that entered, and storms of magic buffing them to reference the ritual being done.  But I quickly realized the storms of death weren't interesting at all.  Defend well enough to survive if they live or die?  But the healing storms WERE interesting, making you reinforce deeper in and more strictly in case they heal where you do the fighting.

The feature where the Takos speed up as they get closer to the end was put in place because after making the long ritual-circle design I realized it took AGES for anything to happen deeper in, and I considered options like the storms speeding up the takos, but decided a speed-up aura actually worked pretty well.

All in all, the map looks nothing like my original plan, and is a lot better for it.

Update 0.1.6: Boom

New features:

Calli's level is finished, now you can explore the ruined remains of the Underworld and fight the Takodachi threat there.

Changes:

Music: Moved Ouroboros to Calli's level, added Ame's theme to the first level.
Screen fade-in, now starting's a bit smoother.

Sped up Gura's trident to more reliably hit faster targets.

Boosted Kiara's explosion upgrade radius.

Fixes:

Optimization.  Hopefully you won't notice any differences but higher FPS at high numbers of enemies.  Still laggy at the end of the new map, but better than before.  
If you see a healthbar not update after something doing damage or healing, let me know.
Fixed Ame so now upgrading the slow amount effects enemies already in range.

There was more I'm sure, but I can not remember right now...

I have plans for one last update for another map and then I'll be content to call the project finished.  I'll then have 5 maps for 5 girls.  :D

I can't say for sure what the timescale will be for that update because my semester starts on Monday, but I would guess 1-3 weeks.  I already know the visual style I'm looking for, the map itself shouldn't take as long to finish, but we'll see.

After that I'll share the project on the HEFS Discord, update to fix bugs, and call it done until the semester's over so I can focus on my baby, Clock Busters.  Once the semester's over I'll consider a Councilrys expansion.