Psycho Sphere Alpha 2 Release

New Alpha Build!

As part of the Finish Your Game Jam 2023, I am releasing a new alpha build of the game!

A lot has changed, and a lot of it being structural and backend to help support rapid development later, including

• New shaders and materials to help with the 3D UI
• Shaders that help with seeing through walls to help visibility during combat.
• Dialogue system that supports flags and cutscene programming (Yarnspinner)
• Enhanced battle backend to make programming attacks easier
• Saving and loading system (not in demo)
• Clever tools for implementing scene transitions and teleporting to the correct place in a scene
• Various juicing of the gameplay and fx

but there's a bunch of material stuff you can see and I'll list them out below:

New Player Model:

Gone is the temporary Shroome model, now we got an actual main mascot kid. The game's story will not feature a self insert protagonist, but will have every character grow, 

Above is a bunch of iterations of the player's height. He's supposed to be about 8-12 years old, so I tweaked around with the proportions a lot.  Getting the heads of characters just the right width and height is a challenge for me. The kind of kid that just wants to hit everything with his stick. He's animated with temp animations, but those will be filled out with time.
New Ally (art only):

 This is an ally that you get early game. She isn't implemented, but I'm close to doing so,all the art and tools are made to add her, she just needs a basic attack and overworld player following logic programmed.
New Stages and Art:


There are 4 stages, 3 of them are grey boxed, the first level is mocked up with the tools and shaders I've been developing to get a good workflow down. It took quite a while to get polybrush cooperating with texture painting on my materials. If you take a close look, you'll see that the textures dont repeat! I used a procedurely generated hex shader to break them up. Quite a lot of effort to fix something that could probably be excused as "stylized".

New Enemies:
 
Here are some enemies I did the art for about half a year ago. I've switched to a much rougher art workflow that what these sprites are now. These enemies are probably only one pass from being finalized, but everything made after them are no less than 2 passes away.
There's a sub and area boss  that I hope to implement by the end of the week. A common theme for the development is going slow so that I can go fast. It took a week to get just one player and one enemy attack working about a year ago, but now if I sat down and had all the attacks in the game conceptualized, I could get them all done in a matter of days.
Jumping:
I liked the jumping that was in Xenoblade, although it wasn't important to the actual gameplay, it was a cool thing to watch Shunk go up and down and make grunting sounds. I added a cool little jump to my game for that reason, and to make the levels a bit more interesting. Right now you can just about jump wherever you want, but I intend on having some cool verticality to the environment.

Leveling and Skills:
You can gain Skill XP and Party XP in this demo. Skill XP for the skill you use it with, and Party XP will increase when you defeat any enemies. All party members levels through the Party XP system. There wont be more party members than will fit into combat, so we dont have to worry about battle participation.