Unfortunately, I've found that if they go much slower, it looks like the game is lagging because of the low-ish resolution.

Here's an actual video of World 4 in action:



With sounds and shaking effects in, the arc coil feels a lot meatier now, which is good.

I've also tweaked the actual attaching mechanic a little: instead of having to ram directly into the enemies, which was kind of finicky and annoying, they'll automatically be grabbed when they're within a small radius of your ship. To make it look a little nicer, I put a small electrical arc effect leading to each attachment, too. Now it feels really nice and swishy when you pick them up, and also leads to some cool sword-swinging action, which you can see in the video.

This game looks very I want it

Yeah, it looks really good.

I'll be sure to send you guys a copy when I get to the beta testing phase.

Wow, it's been a while. Exam season was long, as was pre-exam season...

Anyway, I'm back, and I have some gifs of the next boss in progress!
This the boss of world 4, which is entirely based on close-range weaponry. So, it only seems appropriate to have the boss be a giant sword-wielding ninja ship.

Here are two of its attack sequences:

That second sequence is absolutely beautiful, but I think it needs to be a little bit more random. At least from that .gif, it seems to favor lines drawn around the lower left-hand and upper right-hand corners.

I think he should move faster. It seems kind of predictable and easy to dodge, but it's supposed to be a fast dude, right?
Or at the least move faster as his health decreases.

Urch:
It spreads out a little more than that. If I were to show you a few different clips, they'd all end up in different places. That said, it does slightly favour corners because of how the algorithm is implemented, and that means that there's often a large space left empty. I'll see if I can think of a better way to spread them out.

Miggles:
I've been tweaking the speed upward as a go, but yeah, it might still be too slow. I'm at this kind of awkward stage where I'm not quite ready to beta test, so I have no idea if things are genuinely too easy or just easy because I've been working on the game for so long. So, that kind of thing will probably be changed a bit (or a lot?) once I do some testing.
Good idea with speeding up as the boss loses health, though. I might just implement that.

if/when you beta test you should give it to us first :o

I'm hoping to start beta testing this summer. It'll probably be a closed beta, but I'd like to get a fair number of people testing it (10-20?). So yeah, you guys are definitely on that list.

Sounds cool, I'm definitely interested

You'd better count me in.

The game looks like it's coming along beautifully, TLB.

I will test the ♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥ out of this game. None of its orifices will work the same after I'm done playtesting.

That's what I like to hear. The only way to release a non-shitty game is to test that ♥♥♥♥ right out of it.

Here's an update for today:
After working on this project for such a long time, it's inevitable that some of the earlier work isn't going to be quite up to par with the rest of the project. I've been going through all the music in the game recently and making things sound a little nicer.

Mostly, I've been playing with the compression levels of the songs to make things sound more crisp and powerful. As well, I've reworked the drum samples to sound more lo-fi while still keeping the integrity of the tracks. The drums in particular have been a problem since the very beginning. A few of the earlier songs were written using the Ultimate Mega Drive Soundfont, so there were some great 16-bit era drum samples to work with. I wasn't entirely comfortable using sounds ripped straight from another game, though, so I decided to switch over to using VOPM, which emulates a similar sound chip to the Mega Drive. That also meant coming up with new drum samples, but all the ones I have are high-fidelity. After a lot of playing around, I've gotten them to sound nice and crunchy using a mix of pretty heavy compression and a bitcrusher VST.

Here's a quick sampler of some of the older tracks that I've remastered, including Electroargentum, The Tough Get Going (Cyphon Theme) and Fast Travel. Let me know what you think!