Monthly Update #37 ☀️

Happy July, Sleepyheads! I am typing this update as I sit out in the shade enjoying some beautiful and warm weather (it’s 90 degrees out here but I love the summer heat as long as I can stay out of the sun 🫠). I hope my fellow northern hemisphere dwellers are getting to enjoy some beautiful summer weather as well. And if you are out in the sun, don’t forget your sunscreen! ☀️

Next Friday is August 1st, which means this is the final Friday of July, so it’s a slightly early monthly update for you all. As I did last month, I’m gonna dive into a topic that I think will be interesting to talk about, and then after that I’ll get into some of the stuff I worked on this month.

Just about everything I’m showing off in here is pretty spoilery, so I’m just gonna go ahead and tell you to skip to nearly the end now if you want to avoid any and all spoilers. But generally I think these spoilers aren’t too bad so consider reading anyways.

Minor Spoilers Ahead ❗🙈❗

Something that people have been expressing interest in is the enemies/bad guys/monsters in Slumberland. Sometimes I show them off in these updates, but I’ve also missed sharing a bunch of them, and I also thought it would be nice to look at how I approach creating the enemies for an entire domain. So this month our topic is:

Creating the Enemies of 🎃Haunted Hollow🎃

To start, I’ll just quickly show off and describe all of the domain-specific enemies found in Haunted Hollow:

Shy Eye
This is a shy little eyeball that will only approach when you’re not looking. If it gets too close it’ll hit you with its glare attack, so make sure to look towards it to stop it from hopping at you. You can also stand on top of and pluck these things up if you want to toss them at someone else.

Once you look away, it will become MUCH less shy

Stink Eye
These little eyeballs look like Shy Eye, but they behave very differently. Their noxious aura will damage you if you touch them, but luckily they don’t move around. Though they will jump whenever Nemo jumps, making avoiding them a little trickier than you might anticipate. Their 3 health makes killing them a little difficult so its sometimes best to just avoid them.

You can time your jumps to go over or under if you just want to avoid these lil guys

Electric Scarabiner
Somehow some Scarabiners have been brought back to life with the power of electricity. They are much more fragile than other Scarabiners however and will be destroyed if attacked. Don’t touch them or you’ll get zapped, but that electricity actually provides a nice light source if you’re willing to avoid them instead of destroying them.

Killing these lil guys could result in you not being able to see a thing

Kettle Gremlin
This is a little creature hiding out in a kettle/cauldron/pot which will throw toilet paper at you if you get too close. Attacking it is useless as long as it remains in its kettle, so you’ll have to pluck it out if you want to destroy it.

If you get too close you’ll have to deal with toliet paper flying at you

Haunted Armor
This suit of armor will attack with a thrust of its sword if you get too close, so proceed with caution when you need to cross its path. Best to avoid it because if you attack the armor, it will collapse, leaving only a haunted helmet which will chase Nemo around until it’s destroyed.

Getting past this sword thrust isn’t too bad if you have the Bubble Wand or Cape

Design

Light Source Enemy
When designing out which enemies we wanted to have specific for this domain, one of the first ideas was to play into the theme of having limited or no light. We already have jack-o-lanterns (a carriable light source) and ghost platforms (platforms which disappear when you step on them but are visible in the dark), so it made sense to have an enemy that provides light as long as you can avoid it.

The first attempt at this was very much inspired by the Bubble enemies in Zelda (the spirits that bounce around rooms at 45 degree angles). A skull with blue flames made sense in a Halloween-themed domain and an erratic-yet-predictable bouncy pattern like that would certainly make them hard to avoid. So what I cooked up was essentially that but if you attacked it, it would extinguish its flame and the skull would fall to the ground bouncing about for a bit before reigniting (you would need to pogo-stick it while it was extinguished to actually defeat it). I thought this was a pretty cool enemy, but the problem was that its erratic pattern meant it was hard to design around: if you placed it in one area intending to light it up for the player, it would quickly find its way out of there and into someplace else.

Here are some concept sketches João made for this enemy

After realizing that behavior was gonna be a problem, I solved that by having the “light source enemy” instead have the geemer-like quality of just walking along surfaces. This makes them very easy to contain (you can draw a little “island” of tiles for it to walk on, or corral it with hazard tiles). Since we already had the Scarabiners that exhibited this behavior, and we were thinking about how a plasma globe could be an interesting idea to work with, those ideas fused into the electric Scarabiner which is a kind of Frankenstein’s monster Scarabiner.

Approaches When You’re Not Looking Enemy
Another idea I wanted to incorporate into this domain was something like the Boos in Mario. The idea of something that only approaches when you’re not looking has an innate bit of spookiness to it. I don’t totally love the way the boos behave, so I wanted to tweak it a bit, which is how we wound up with an enemy that just hops towards you when you’re not looking. This idea of gaze worked nicely with a giant eyeball (also a nice Halloween motif) and the pun/Mario 2 callback of “Shy Eye” was right there.

Here are João’s concept sketches for the Shy Eye

I wanted to re-use some of these Eyeball sprites and try another version of them, but with a different behavior, which is how we got the Stink Eye. This behavior wasn’t something that I specifically wanted for Haunted Hollow, but the Skipsqueak from Super Mario 3D World is one of my favorite enemy behaviors (jump when the player jumps) and I really wanted to incorporate that somewhere. Since have some disappearing platforms in this domain, I figured we could probably make some fun by combining these two elements.

Pluckable Enemy
As for the Kettle Gremlin, that’s kind of a funny one. It was actually designed as a general idea first. I was speaking with Rygar about enemies in Symphony of the Night and he mentioned a “Goblin in a Pot”, which I’m not even sure which enemy was being referred to, but I loved the idea and pretty quickly came up with this as a cool idea for an enemy you have to pluck to be able to destroy.

Nemo defeating a Kettle Gremlin

And then finally the Haunted Armor was a late-comer. I was working on spicing up the Palace (which re-uses enemies from other domains) and was just looking for something like this. So behavior wise, it came from a need in the Palace, but I was also feeling like the Haunted Hollow need a little something else and the haunted nature of this enemy meant it fit in thematically.

So when we combine these enemies with the common enemies shared across domains, we’ve got plenty of options for creating some fun encounters in this domain that interact with the domain’s gimmicks in interesting ways.

What we worked on this month 🛠️

Production work continues as I do my best to get the game more less wrapped up soon so we can begin playtesting the whole experience. While my primary focus is working on the bosses, there are a few interesting smaller tasks it’s nice to pick up as a break. The work on bosses is actually quite challenging because it requires a combination of doing design/scripting/tweaking/and making things fun all at once that feels a bit different from working on other aspects of the game.

So some of the more fun tasks I worked on a bit this month were finishing up some PJ abilities. The PJs are all designed and in the game, but for some of them I hadn’t actually implemented their functionality yet. This month I spent a few hours on some of these when I needed to work on something fun.

Penguin PJs
These Winsor-themed pajamas prevent slipping on ice and can be super helpful if you’re exploring Valley of Silence to get all of the Blue Moons.

With the Penguin PJs on you can dance around enemies even on the ice!

Sweet Tooth PJs
These give you a candy magnet passive ability that causes candy to be attracted to you, making it much easier to collect.

Become a Candy Magnet with the Sweet Tooth PJs

Ghoulish PJs
These are the Alex-themed PJs which give you the “unawake” buff. This one is pretty transformative as you’ll no longer take damage from any enemies (they can’t even hit you!), but hazards will always wake you up in one hit (no matter how many Lucky Coins you have!). These PJs were slightly more complicated than most, but still relatively easy to implement.

The unawake ride a fine line between being asleep and awake and one touch of a hazard is enough to disturb it

And actually, because it was somewhat related to the Ghoulish PJs implementation I worked on, while I was in that code, I also went ahead and implemented functionality for Invulnerability and Infinite Health. These were hidden in the custom difficulty options previously, but didn’t actually do anything. Now they’re all wired up should you need them.

These two options have been in there since the June demo release, but they weren’t actually wired up to work correctly until now

World Map
One other thing I did just a little bit of work on this month is the World Map. This is a version of the map that you’ll see when zooming out the map all the way. This is just a nice way to show the names of the domains as well as giving us a place to display how many Blue Moons you have in each of the domains.

Here’s a sketch of how it will look (though the Blue Moon count UI doesn’t appear in this sketch), but avert your eyes if you’re avoiding domain spoilers because this shows almost all of them!

The World Map will show a small diorama of each domain you’ve been to roughly corresponding to the geography it covers on the map.

Bosses
I mentioned working on the Cordysect Queen last month, and I continued on that for a bit this month and got it feeling pretty fun. It’s mostly there and just needs some dialing in and just one or two custom sprites that need to get drawn.

It continues the spore theme that you encounter throughout Mushroom Marsh. Here’s a very brief snippet to help show the general concept of the battle:

The Cordysect Queen is invulnerable from any frontal attacks, so you’ll need to get above it to drop something onto it. If you’re very skilled with the pogo stick, you can probably bounce on some spores to get up there, but otherwise the little flower bud things (I should come up with a proper name for those) will eventually open up so you can bounce on them to get up there.

After that I turned to the boss of the Valley of Silence, which is a second encounter with the mysterious character you battled in Gumdrop Gardens. This time around they’re a bit stronger and more dangerous, but you should have many more toys at your disposal. The focus here is on using your monster claw to navigate this vertically orientated room as you battle the Shadow Clones that the boss seems to be able to create. Here’s a quick peek:

The second time around you’ll be fighting multiple shadow clones at once

With those done, I’ll continue to polish and tweak these, but will mostly turn my focus on implementing the last two bosses I need to get done: the boss of the Palace and another one that I probably won’t tell you anything about 🤐🤫

Back to Spoiler-Free ✅🐵✅

Okay, back to non-spoilers to wrap up this month’s post.

Kickstarter Friends 💚

Some of you might recall a while back I gave a shout out to a really cute and fun platformer called Dono’s Tale. Back then I had played the demo and really enjoyed it, but unfortunately it didn’t meet its funding goal. Luckily they’ve continued working on the game and are back with a relaunch of the Kickstarter that just went live today! While this is a level-based platformer rather than a Metroidvania, I think if you’re into Little Nemo, there’s a really good chance you’ll like this, so visit their Kickstarter page:

Dono’s Tale is the whimsical tale of a tiny dragon’s big adventure! Play as Dono, a little dragon who sets off on a grand adventure to learn everything he can about the world and build up his skills in the hopes of becoming one of the guardian heroes!

Along his journey, Dono will encounter allies who will grant him new abilities! Dono will jump, shoot, dash, slash and use many more abilities across 42 beautifully hand crafted levels!

That’s It For This Month 👋

Okay, that’s about it for July. Well, not entirely since almost all of next week still falls in July, but that’s it for this update anyways! Please comment down below or make a request in the Discord server if there are any topics you’d really love to hear me talk about! Do you like the more technical details or when I focus more on design? What about the details about the process? Are there certain areas of the game you want to see more of? Let me know!

Thanks so much for reading and I’ll see you all again in another month. Stay cool, Sleepyheads! 😎

-Dave