It’s just a rough prototype at the moment, but here’s that thing I was talking about last week:

I’ll be continuing to work on this “item chest” feature this week, figuring out what exactly items in Gunmetal Arcadia will be, how the existing subweapons will fit in that context, and so on. I’d like to start dropping these as rewards for killing bosses, in place of the heart containers seen in Zero. (Presumably then heart containers will be a random spawn from these chests.) As in Isaac, I’ll probably only want to allow each type of item to be spawned once per session, with the possible exception of heart containers, so I may need to keep track of previously dropped items to exclude from future rolls or draw up a list of all drops for the entire session in advance, whichever proves most effective.

As I start implementing items, I’m going to need to parameterize more existing game systems in order to support stat upgrades for things like damage, movement speed, jump height, and so on. Some of this already exists (as in the case of items to modify jump height in Zero), but I would prefer a more formalized system for interacting with these stats. Where this sort of thing has historically gotten a little awkward is that many of the attributes I would conceivably want to modify exist in core game code that doesn’t know or care about game conceits like upgradable stats. So while the code may be equipped to handle initializing physical parameters for a variable jump height, it may not necessarily be able to do so on the fly in response to dynamic changes to that jump height during gameplay.

I’ll probably tweak the character loadouts a bit in response to subweapon changes. Currently, all four characters start with the knife subweapon; in the future, most of them will probably start with no subweapon at all, and I’ll generalize subweapons into a “usable item” feature a la Isaac. But we’ll see. I’m still sort of feeling out what’s going to work best here.

I should note that, thanks to Labor Day and my usual habit of reserving Fridays for making videos (and more recently, builds on all platforms), this is only a three-day work week, so it’s extremely unlikely I’ll get around to all of this, but if I have time, I’d like to prototype one or more of a few enemy concepts I’ve been sitting on for a while, including:

• A humanoid/biped enemy who throws bombs.
• A simpler variant of the Pluck/Vitriol flying eyeball that doesn’t shoot projectiles.
• An armored golem of some sort that probably exposes a weak point periodically and maybe can always be damaged by bombs. Also probably a miniboss.
• A humanoid/biped with a shield that can be raised or lowered. Clearly derivative of the Ironknuckle/Darknut from Zelda 2, but may require some differences in design to compensate for the player not having a shield.