Hey there!

I usually just update my TIG devlog but I guess I’ll give this a shot too.

I haven’t worked on this project for a few months. Last time I did anything my immediate goal was to test additional game mechanics, because I though the game felt too shallow. In particular, adding action elements, like enemies. I tried some scaling mechanic (the curved space would distort you besides changing your orientation) and discarded it. I also tried a very interesting but overall confusing mechanic of spitting seeds that link the player orientation to the object hit by the seed. This seed spitting thing was really confusing and hard to design levels around it so I discarded as well.

I haven’t yet made any enemies but I’m actually looking forward to doing that! there are some novel things to try with enemies when you can approach them from different orientations. Like, maybe jumping on the head of a flying thing damages you but if you are upside down with respect to each other, landing on its belly hurts him. Or a goomba-like dude where you can kill by jumping on its head but his face (if you’re rotated 90°) can be used as a platform. Things like that.

Anyway, I should try some enemy coding soon, but right now I implemented a suggestion made by an user named Zorg back in my TIG devlog. It’s basically a way to grab objects. I made it so you can also swing with it, you can push and pull objects, you can catch a ride on things falling up or sideways. I gotta say, I think this one will stay in the game! it feels really fun to grab things and swing around and it does seem to make the gameplay richer.

In order to make the game easier to absorb, this will not be available from the start. At some point the player will find an upgrade (a denture for the worm, probably :P)

I attached some gifs showing the new mechanic. Any comments are appreciated! :) (specially so I know if anyone’s reading this lol)

(The attached gifs are not showing, so I’m just going to link to my imgur uploads)