Good evening, 2023 is wrapping up, and I wish you all a happy new year!

A lot of work has been done on the game this year I believe, and while I may not be the best at communicating it, there's some head scratching that went into all this, a project that isn't even close to completion, that started in August of 2022.

Regardless of everything, I worked on the game today a bit, and I'd like to show off some things!

First off, a new options menu. The old one was mainly just a placeholder, and today I got a bit tired of how it looked, so I decided to finally make them into normal tick boxes. (Well of course except the UI colour button, but I think it fits in quite well.)

Secondly, and more importantly, enemies got revamped!

This little turret fella is meant for the early game, and doesn't mean to impose any major threat
Aside from the visual improvement, that gets us from the strange shroom like turret to something that actually looks like one, their behaviour and  stats are also changed, to better gameplay, as previously these shroom turrets were straight up awful to fight against. The little playtesting I was able to conduct seems to prove the newer version is a better, fairer foe. Also, it lends itself to more variations due to it's mechanicalness (does that make sense?), if I were to add, let's say, a flying variant.

The second enemy to be revamped is the machine gunner!

this enemy first made it's appearance in the 4th game. Sometime down the line it was coloured green from it's original bluish white in Jumper IV, and yesterday, I coloured it back to a new shade, that is almost fully blue, while also giving it a new design. Just like the previous enemy, the machine gunner is also edited to better suit gameplay. Previously it had just shot a never ending stream of bullets, had a horrible line of sight, and stopped firing once you got too close. -- which didn't make really an exciting enemy. The new iteration has limited shots before it's gun overheats. As the gun overheats, it shoots bullets more quickly, and then you get a brief window to attack. The gun colour adjusts depending on the state of it, so you'll know when it's safe to attack, and it's relatively easy to learn the timings. - however it won't stop firing just because you got close. This makes this enemy actually somewhat dangerous -- hopefully not too much, but certainly more than the the previous implementation. We'll see those in due time, and further testing. Additionally, as you can see, it has a lot more particle effects, and wit the power of maths, the gun actually rotates too now instead of staying still!

there have been experimentations with lighting too, though at the moment I don't see it making it's way into the game anyhow.

TLDR; Revamps,

If you read all this, have a lovely new year!