KNOWN BUG! Also postmortem...

I've had the game freeze almost consistently any time I get to the boss scene with the flamethrower and start attacking it with it...!

And yet...

The boss scene has four crates in it, each containing one of the four available weapon pickups. Picking up the flamethrower here, then attacking the boss with it is completely fine.

I have absolutely no idea what's going on there... 😵

Anyway, Underlier: Underslung, my Scream Jam 2023 entry; an arcade-style Game Boy shooter and the latest chapter in the Underlier series.

Why an arcade-style shooter, tho? There are a few reasons. Arguably the biggest one is a certain degree of burnout following ROT, my previous jam entry, which had a lot of "firsts" going into it. It took a lot out of me, prompting me to take it relatively easy for this project. That being said, I was still able to test - successfully, as far as I can tell - a few ideas I'd been mulling over (turns out exploding projectiles in GB Studio are valid... 👍).

Another reason is there was no way I was going to pass up on Scream Jam - not with those numbers 👀 (over 3,500 with just over an hour to go at time of writing...) - so I wanted a project I could do a lot with within the timeframe (as much as I'd have loved to present a prototypical survival horror game for this jam as well, Scareverse (the jam ROT was submitted to) ran for six weeks, Scream Jam for one; adjust scope accordingly...!).

Finally, there's the drive to expand the definition of what the Underlier series is even supposed to be. The first game was essentially a top-down walking simulator (one commenter was kind enough to compare it to P.T.); the second, an attempt to prototype a Zelda-like within the series' universe, which fell flat as I ran out of time with way too much missing under the hood, although it's worth nothing that, had everything gone according to plan, the combat in Even Deeper would have been somewhat reminiscent of what's now here in Underslung. What the third game lacks in polish, I'd say it makes up for in atmosphere, plus the fact that it's a first-person shooter is something of a statement of intent; my original vision for some game called "Underlier" was an immersive sim blending on-foot survival horror with 6-degrees-of-freedom vehicular exploration and combat - it's fair to say I'm not quite there yet, but it's good to have goals... 👍

A couple of notes regarding Underslung's game feel:

I'm still very much feeling out recreating certain game mechanics in GB Studio. I have a method which enables holding down a button for constant fire, although under the current setup, if the player wants to switch from one shot type to the other, rather than holding the other fire button down and having that action override the holding of the first button, they will have to briefly let go of the fire button altogether before pressing the other one. I had a similar issue with that NSFW twin-stick shooter I made a few months back, only that was concerning direction of fire rather than shot type.

The code to determine which direction the boss is going to shoot in is currently - admittedly - very boneheaded. The goal will be to take the player's XY position, compare it to the boss's XY position and work out the angle in which the next shot will fire, but I haven't figured out the method yet, so at the moment it's all "If PlayerX is less than this and PlayerY is greater than that... Else etc.", and as a consequence, there are sweet spots in that arena where the boss won't be able to hit the player at all.