Hey everyone!

The Astromeda full game is progressing nicely, and this month a lot of work went into making many of the gameplay elements. Rooms, exploration, NPCs, wild bacteria battles, new items, etc! I've been getting a lot of requests asking me to talk more about the process of actually making the game, so why not! As I said, a lot of work went into the new line of wild Bacteria battles you'll encounter in Sandlyn. In Astromeda, creating an enemy battle is a very fun part of development, but it can more much more complex to make compared to a typical turn-based RPG. A bacteria enemy needs to have what we like to call a "Big sprite", like Forgi right here:
Then, it needs an idle animation, a hurt animation, and an animated expression for actions like this one:
And then, when the camera view changes to the dodge phase, the enemy bacteria needs a "Small sprite" along with multiple animations for each attack the enemy performs. For this example, I'm going to use the opportunity and reveal another new wild bacteria you'll meet in the game! *All art and sneak peeks are a work in progress and are subject to change.* Meet Opun (green) and Milla! (Purple) Their names are based on Opuntia and Mammillaria which are cactus species. Their unique names were the idea of Astromeda's artist, Ocelot33! In this specific enemy encounter you battle Opun, with Milla cheering on the side! Their species name is called Botanny which is also the name that appears when you fight Opun in-game.
A lot of thought goes into making a good attack pattern for an enemy in Astromeda because it needs to work well with the room size and the player size while being fun and interesting! Botanny has multiple attack patterns like every enemy bacteria. Here's a first-time sneak peek of one of them! After the Bacteria Queen's sudden change, her harsh changes in policies made fewer and fewer bacteria visit Sandlyn which resulted in a lot of trash being left around. This attack is based on the story.
Opun helps Milla clean the garden! ... But with a destructive force that you must avoid.
If you survive the pattern without dying, the garden is clean and Opun and Milla celebrate!
This attack pattern is really cute, and very fun to play! *Keep in mind that this isn't a boss. If you played the demo already, note that for now, in the full game, the DASH will have its travel distance decreased a bit mainly because it allowed you to move through the entire screen in a single dash which was unbalanced and didn't allow for the creation of unique enemy patterns. The dash distance values will stay the same for now in the demo itself and will be updated at a later date but you can expect it to change in the full game. I've played and tested the demo thousands of times by now, and from testing the dash value changes, you don't feel too much of a difference and get used to it very, very quickly. The shorter travel distance also feels smoother and allows you to cancel your dash quicker than before, when if you dashed in the wrong direction then you'd very likely get hit. I usually don't show too much full game footage in dev updates, especially not characters due to spoilers but I wanted to show a bit more for this one, so I hope you liked it! To finish off this month's devlog, here's some SAND!!!
As always, Astromeda is being worked on every day with all of our love and passion poured into it! We're really looking forward to seeing you experience the full game once it's ready. (There's still a lot of work left though ;D) Please make sure to join the game's Discord server if you haven't yet! Also, to be notified of the next dev update, make sure to follow and wishlist the game! Thank you for supporting Astromeda, and I will see you on the next development update!