I spent most of the last week creating and implementing new art and more upgrades to the game. Jambon has a run cycle and dropshadow now, I created an explosion animation for the Rocket Dorb, and I spent the better part of a day trying to make a nice tileable texture. I really didn't like the result at first, but once I added the small details like flowers and misc. mossy bits I started to come around on it. Still very much a novice artist, and I'm aware the grass colors aren't the most beautiful, but I committed early to a specific color palette and I'm hoping that registers once all art is implemented.
Character upgrades are going well, and I improved the draft window UI to better scale with resolution. All the pixel art is placeholder, I will be creating icons for each upgrade once they are all fully implemented. I've added quite a few new upgrades just today in fact, including increased experience gain, crit chance, and max health upgrades.
As for the Dorbs themselves, I had a lot of fun creating a spreadsheet to help ballpark balance. For weapons like the Rifle and Rocket Dorb that can hit more than 5 enemies at a time I capped at 5 for practical comparison. I'm not an Excel wizard so apologies if it is a bit scuffed. My initial design for these Dorb upgrades was to make them linear, where each upgrade required the previous rank, with rank 4 usually being the most impactful/exciting. When I went to implement these changes though I decided to make only the base Dorb required so that players have more interesting and dynamic decisions to make each level up. I don't wanna sand off every edge to make the upgrades "equal" as I think there should be some amount of excitement when certain upgrades show up in the draft window. I tested these numbers against the first wave of Egg enemies and things felt roughly equivalent. The base/pistol Dorb is meant to be a little weaker, as you will always start the run with it. I've committed to just having Jambon be playable at this point, so I don't have to balance each Dorb as if it were a starting Dorb.
From here I'm largely gonna be focused on designing lots of new enemies to flesh out 10-15 minute runs. Gonna try to aim low for overall difficulty, but I also intend to implement a currency you can collect for "ferociously hip" permanent upgrades from the Smoke House to give players struggling an extra boost. After that, if there's still time I will try to setup an intro cutscene and increase overall polish where I can. Thanks for reading, hope to see you back next week!