Hey there huh! You may have noticed it’s been awhile since an official update of the game, be it a new playable build or a devlog post and what not. Well, the latter is because I’m stupid and forget to write about things I’m working on.

THAT BEING SAID. I have indeed been working on things! Largely I’ve been making this “sandbox” demo of the game that is a continual work in progress and testing ground for the game.

In it’s current state, the sandbox demo consists of randomly generated enemies that spawn at larger and larger rates depending on how many waves you clear, ideally getting progressively harder, up until wave 15. NOTHING HAPPENS AFTER THAT. YET. I’ll throw in more and more as time goes on.

The main purpose of this is as I mentioned earlier, to generally test things in the game. Each enemy can have one of… eight? I think… different attack abilities. These attacks are all quite different in functionality. Some bounce, some are linear, some are spread shots, some are one-hit kills in a vertical or horizontal direction, some oscillate, some leave a stun or a damage over time effect upon impact.

Enemy movement patterns are also constantly being implemented. Right now, they simply stand still or patrol left and right across the screen. More of these will be added to the sandbox in time, as needed.

OKAY SO WHY AM I DOING THIS BEYOND TESTING THEIR ATTACKS? Well all of Quack’s current abilities are active in the demo. This means you can try any of the eight different abilities, at any time, in a variety of situations. This is where the hopeful balance based on feedback will come into play. What is advantageous? What is overpowered? Underpowered? How so? Are they fun to use? Are some situational? What for? These are all some of the questions I hope to answer with all of this.

Aside from these things, all of these enemies, their attacks, and their movement patterns serve a higher purpose. Ideally, these are all just basic placeholders for functionality that will be behind all the different types of encounters you’ll face in the MAIN GAME (this is still actively being worked on, and the focal point of all this sandbox business).

So I hope you can have fun and screw around in the sandbox, and keep checking back to see what is going on with it. When I get to showing off the main game’s progress, it will likely be quite different and more robust than what was in the Kickstarter demo.

The general gameplay is the same (cloud mode which is puzzle-esque, and action mode with is… well action-y), but the goal is that everything from the mechanics, the gameplay, the art, the sound, the interface… that it’s all very polished. It will be much more story focused, and the action segments of the gameplay will be much more fluid, perhaps difficult, but fun and rewarding.

Enjoy! And I’ll (hopefully) post more often about the small things here and there.