How.... this is so well made, a bull is so unique and can cause some cool abilities to be made like the angry dash thing. Great job endmark, you've impressed me.
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Dude, coming from you that is some high praise. I've enjoyed (and even been a bit jealous of) all the games of yours I've played, so this comment meant a lot to me.
The how, well, I hope I show some of that soon in a devlog. I recorded plenty of stuff, but the short answer is that I didn't do it at a sustainable rate. There's no way I could do what I did this round in future rounds. I wanted to come out swinging and I was really happy just with my dev art square, but as soon as I made him into a square bull it just spiraled out of control from there. I promised my wife future rounds will be a much better work/life/gamedev split ... I did late nights pretty much every night and a full day commitment each weekend. I tried to get creative with solutions as much as I could: like the enemy bullet particle and the character running particle are the same code essentially, just slight tweaks, same for the enemies dying and blocks breaking, and for art I reused my old robot rocket boost from Xander's last jam for the dash and went into my old pixel dailies submissions to see what I could rework for a background. Luckily I'd just finished a Slynyrd tutorial and made my own autotileset (way too complex for this character style) so I simplified the edges and limited the type of tiles.
Even with all that though, this took a lot of of me (and I cut blocks and enemies you could pull with the lasso). I just had so much fun making the little world after I put together the tutorial I wanted more rooms and challenges to test what players could do. Future entries will be scoped way back so I can get enough rest and family time.
I'm playing and rating starting tomorrow and I've been excited to try yours out ever since you first started sharing on Twitter.
Thanks again!