Devlog #1 - Tools & Tutorials

First I'd like to start by thanking HeartBeast who made a majority of assets and code in this game as well as a tutorial explaining how to put it all together. 

You can find his tutorial series here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9FzW-m48fn2SlrW0KoLT4n5egNdX-W9a

Here are some other tutorials and software I've used so far as well:

Music - https://boscaceoil.net/

Pixelart - https://www.aseprite.org/

Sound Effects - https://sfbgames.itch.io/chiptone

Music Tutorial - Brackeys

Menu, Pause Tutorial - GDQuest

Once I completed HeartBeast's tutorial I decided I wanted to continue on, adding some of my own ideas to the game. I didn't truly learn how it all worked until going through the code a second time and really trying to understand it in order to get something new to work with it. 

Soon my messing with things with no direction or plan started to actually work. I threw together a start menu, a pause menu, and a death screen (See tutorial here: GDQuest). I edited the player's Roll to make them invincible, I filled out the world, I added hearts that heal the player, made them drop randomly from bats and grass, and I added upgrades for player health and damage. This all took probably a little over a week and lots of play testing from my wonderful wife!

Next I plan to make new art for damage upgrades and health upgrades. I'm also working on the boss fight. Currently I've just made the bat enemy giant and added a large health bar for it. I plan to change this to a static non moving boss with telegraphed attacks. I also want the boss to go invincible after taking a certain amount of damage and spawn bat enemies for the player to fight. I'd like to add a sort of scoreboard which shows time played, kills, damage taken, etc.

I feel like I'm really only adding to someone else's game instead of creating my own. I'll set a soft February 7th release date and a hard February 28th release date. I want to put a limit on how much I work on this game so I can eventually start my own game from scratch.