Greetings! It's been a while since I worked on this game, and even longer since I made an update, so before I get stuck into it again let me tell you what's changed. The most important change can be seen above... a title screen! Pretty slick if I do say so myself.

Wave after Wave

Up until the last devlog update there was only one type of wave, a very simple continuous stream of collectibles with one enemy who wasn't much of a threat. I've since put some effort into devising new wave patterns, categorised by difficulty, and randomly selected from to form the stages of the game.

You can also see in the above GIFs that I've changed the art for the collectibles. I'm still not sure if the gems for the first stage will be in the final game. I've taken lots of suggestions on what to use, but still nothing feels quite right!

Transitions

I didn't really like the previous transitions between stages that I'd implemented, so I changed to a sort of wipe that uses the Pico-8's drawing patterns.

Endgame

Previously, if you fell off the bottom of the screen the game just went into reverse... ooops! Now I've made it so the game resets. An important new feature!

A bit abrupt! I will need to add a game over screen in between I think.

COLOURS

A while back, a second palette was added to the Pico-8. I was inspired by the great things that people were doing with it to see if it would be a good fit for Rory...

Some of the new colours work well in certain places, but not universally. If I was starting the game now I might decide on a palette that was a mix of the two, and might do so for other games in the future, but ultimately I've decided to stick with the original palette for this game.

Squishin' and Squashin'

The current challenge I'm facing in terms of the Pico-8's limitations is the compressed size. Although the token and character counts are well under the limits, the compressed size is just sneaking over, at 100.34%. This is after some effort on my part to reduce the size by shortening variable names and reducing the number of classes in the code, but it is still over the line, and I'm not sure what else can be done. I still need to add a lot more wave patterns, so I will definitely need to find some solution to this.