Hi everyone, thanks for playing the game! I'm hoping that you enjoyed it, or at the very least tolerated it. There are some actual development stuff that I'm going to share this time, so prepare for nice-ness or whatever!

But before getting into any of that, I have an announcement. The game is now on GameJolt! I didn't even think about adding it there, but someone made a copy account and uploaded the game. I don't know much about GameJolt, but I think it's better if I have it up there instead of someone else that is pretending to be me. Here's a link if you are interested for some reason: https://gamejolt.com/games/bazooka-blitz/889091.

Remaking the Game!

Now for what you actually came here for; the game is being remade from the ground up! It's now being made in GameMaker Studio 2, because Unity is in my opinion a bit clunky to work with. This means that all of the code will have to be rewritten by me. It might sound like a pain, but I think this is the best way to go forward. There will be more reliable physics, less engine bugs, smoother gameplay and smaller file sizes. But the biggest benefit of all is that aspects of the game can be reworked to be more fun!

Better Movement

A big focus for me is to improve the character movement. The problem with the old movement was that it was slow to move around. The fastest way to get from A to B was to spam the shoulder bash move, which is not the most exiting gameplay. You could theoretically go faster with the bazooka, but it didn't really work in practice. That is why I have added a dash to the game!

Now you can spam the shift key, but in a fancy way! It works similarly to the dash in AntonBlast, in which you have to time your dash presses to continue dashing. It's both faster than the old shoulder bash and can chain between moves better, which brings me to another improvement...

Better Bazooka

The kind of titular bazooka has been getting more fun and useful too! Before the bazooka was less used out of speed and more out of necessity when a jump was too high. My method of addressing this is by making you able to shoot your bazooka whenever you want to! You can shoot while running, crouching, body slamming or whatever. It is now also easier to keep your momentum. I also made the bazooka more satisfying to use by juicing it up with some hit stun, squash and shake.

GUI and Pause Menu

I'm also playing around with the GUI, mainly toying with having a monitor in the top right corner like in Pizza Tower. The art (like everything so far) is prototype stuff.

I also made a pause menu, which the Unity version was lacking. This means that you can pause the game, change setting, quit and so on. (The font used is ripped from Pizza Tower and is only temporary).

Art

You might have noticed that there is only placeholder art in the game, despite the fact that the Unity version has a bunch of finished art. This is because all of the art has to be remade for the game to fit the new resolution (I know, fun). The res change is to make the game fit onto monitors when in fullscreen and not be distorted. This also allows the game to be a bit more zoomed out. It's not that bad though, since the original art was a bit rushed. There is also the benefit of redesigning some stuff, like the player character!

This is obviously a prototype

Music and SFX

Now this is the one thing that doesn't need to be remade, but will still likely be. The SFX in the Unity version are honestly not that great (especially the jump). I'm hoping to make better ones for this new version. The music will not be changes that much, other then improving some stuff or just adding more.

Final words

It might take a while until the next demo with all of the schoolwork coming up until the summer break, but I am hoping that it will be finished one day. The plans are mostly to remake the game, add what didn't make the cut in the Unity version and generally improve the game. I might start making video logs every month or so to better show what's happening, along with making a discord server (which actually was asked about to my surprise). It might be a fun thing to try. Buh-bye!