Prestige, Shops, and Quadrated Sprites, Oh My!

[p]Holidays, vacation, and a foray back into color randomization have left me a bit distracted since the last Nuzcraft Newsletter. Even so, I'm happy to talk through the latest features coming to Unfair Dungeon![/p][p]Wishlist Unfair Dungeon Today![/p][p][/p][p]Clicking on Quadrated Sprites[/p][h2]Prestige[/h2][p]One of the ways I want to expand the footprint of this silly random game is to encourage players to chain together runs. After completing a game, returning with the Coin of Rehtaeh, you can flip it for a chance to "prestige". The game starts over and you lose all your upgrades, but you keep your items and earn some currency to spend on items for more permanent upgrades. I'm intending to include some achievements + unlockable skins for prestiging.[/p][p][/p][p]Accepting the Coin's Judgement[/p][h2]Shopping & Items[/h2][p]Prestiging will let you earn currency to spend at the merchant. This was an intense feature to develop because I needed to rewrite much of the that pathing functionality to allow for a branching path to the merchant. It is important to me that the the game doesn't force the player to engage with the shop, they will need to go out of their way to interact with it.[/p][p]Items are intended to directly affect the player to make the next run faster/easier. The most straightforward example is a 'lucky' ring that makes it 5% easier to move the chosen direction. Purchasing the ring is a permanent buff, and raises the floor on which the XP-purchased upgrades draw from. The run, and every prestiged run after, will go faster and feel easier. There is a lot of design space open for interesting item effects.[/p][p][/p][p]Demonstrating a Shop & Item Effects[/p][h2]Quadrated Sprites & Juice[/h2][p]I'd been musing for a while about 2-color sprites divided vertically down the middle. The Oh No, More Goblins tileset is designed to be 1-bit, but MRMO's art has a couple examples of bigger sprites with the left and right halfs colored differently. To try this out, I built out a simple shader to let me split the sprite into quarters for detailed colorization.[/p][p][/p][p]Quadrating Shader Controls[/p][p]Since my game is leaning on big sprite sizes (36x36 mostly), the quadrations look really nice. So far I've spent some time setting it up with the environment tiles and I think they give the game a very nice vibe, adding detail without changing the spritesheet or palette. I also spent some time making things clickable with a little squashing and some particles. That little bit of juice goes a long way![/p][p][/p][p]Clicking on Quadrated Sprites[/p][p]Thank you so much for reading! I'm hopeful this burst of creative energy will sustain me and you'll get an update in March. My next 2 major efforts will be a UI overhaul and a project re-planning session to help me prioritize what I should be working on.[/p][p]- nuzcraft[/p]