Alright, I've been thinking... I wanna do a fly-off-screen when you complete a stage in Hensen Hopper (classic shmup stuff) and I COULD just hardcode it into the character controller script but I came up with a more nuanced solution.

Close-up of the re-shaded Hensen!

Here's a short video showing off the improved gameplay loop and "stage complete" screen. The updated artwork for Hensen and his gun and the honey bullets can also be seen.

Okay, so the stages and score saving are both more or less working. Your score and high score will be saved throughout the lifetime of the application. Currently nothing saves when the game is closed, though, I'll be working on that next weekend.

I've been working on the backdrop today! Among other things I've done, I made a bush! I know, SOOOO impressive lol.

This is just about the only situation in which I'll ever do this. I almost never put multiple calls to methods on the same line but here I've logged a warning to remind furure me to do something I didn't have time to do today in a glaringly obvious way.

Very unfinished but the backdrop image, as it is in this video, is already leagues better than what I had last weekend! I'm going to work on it incrementally over the coming weeks as I work on implementing the stages idea I talked about before!

I've worked out a process for drawing bushes that I'm using for the backdrop! First I draw the branches, then "paint" where the bush texture will be, copy it's alpha to a new layer in white, then draw it's shadows in a layer over the bush layer.

Been working on the artwork for the "stage complete" screen all morning! Right now I'm improving the shadows/shading for Hensen because he is a part of that screen. I do need to work out the contrast between the text and the backdrop image, I know.

This is a short video showing off the new procedurally generated enemy waves in Hensen! In theory, the game will become more and more unpredictable as I continue to build and implement new enemies!!!