Thank you for playing the demo!

There were massive problems with communicating the playstyle on top of conflicting design, but fortunately it ended without major technical issues (except for some controller problems). That's very good news because the day before the first release it would crash on Intel in all sorts of ways. With that my first, 1.5 month long milestone was successful.

Here's my development plan, in no particular order, for the project so far.

Better controls and tweaks

• Sharper controls, especially midair
• Hover designed around concurrent aiming
• Different movement modes for more intentional actions and controls
• Bullet penetration
• More control over spirit form
• and more

Subweapons and bonuses

There was already a bonus wearpon in the later demo, but I'm going to expand on it properly. Now you will be able to mix up your movement and attacks with another weapon.

Chainsaw is already looking interesting, but it controls even weirder than minigun does.

Visuals

• Fixing shell rendering
• Full enemy replacement
• Sound replacement
• Better environments
• Lighting changes for better visibility without ruining aesthetics
• Environmental destruction
• More dakka

Stages

Starting off with a fully vertical level was... quite a steep learning curve

Level design for this game is a massive headache, because it needs to properly flow with player's movement, and placement of some enemies needs to be tight, and on top of that it should be playable without using all the tricks. Additionally I need to remember about shells constantly changing the battlefield.

That said, there will be some levels stretching horizontally to ease in the initial gameplay, and if anyone finds it boring you should be able to blast through those with spirit form.

Of course all that goes with new enemies and objects to interact with.

Storyline

The way I'm handling the mecha theme might be far off from the usual take, so I'm not sure if it will be up to everyone's expectation, but I'm sure willing to take the risk.

Writing it this way allows me to tap into different concepts from a new angle, and a perspective of a long time span should be interesting.

I've been reading up different sources and writing my outline up to the point my brain can't keep up with the sheer volume and number of decisions to be made.

Originally I wanted to make animated mission briefings, but now it might not be enough to properly convey the plot. I might go for in-game scenes instead, on top of stages designed around it.

Further development

Having a unified score screen doesn't seem to work well, so I'm going to go for explicit challenges and game modes.

On top of that more characters might appear (as shown in the main menu) which will change the playstyle and tell a separate story.

End note

This is a general roadmap outline, so it's not final and there's still a lot I have to process from all the feedback and other help I got. If there's something  you really wish to see in the game, please let me know.

Views and downloads don't look good recently, so I hope this doesn't foreshadow another Cosmogonic Overflow.

Have a nice day!