The basics of multiplayer work!
I started off controlling all 4 players with one gamepad, which was a bit overpowered, as you can see below. I’ve separated the controls now, and I’ve ordered another Xbox 360 gamepad so that I’ll have 4 input devices. Was actually quite easy to add multiplayer: I mostly just replaced every reference to the player with a vector (array) of players. Now I’m going to modify the game difficulty appropriately – I’ll take some ideas from Jamestown’s multiplayer mechanics.

Here’s what happens when you use all four bombs at once. This won’t be in the game though.

Here’s what the foe animations actually look like when they’re compiled using Dragonbones for Starling to use. The blur filters are currently cut off because they don’t add to the bounding rectangle sizes, but that’s an easy fix (just put an invisible box around them).

As I mentioned in my Cat Cafe posts, Dragonbones can do some pretty cool stuff with tweened animtions. It can change the speed and framerate of animations, play them backwards, and it can blend together different animations (demonstrated in the player sprite). Quite handy.

Drew the first 4 players! They’ll function much like in the previous game, except Anna and Natalie will have their secondary weapons swapped. Once I program these guys, I’ll start working on multiplayer gameplay.

I’m curious to hear what other playable characters you want to see. NoLegs and Slime Bunny will be playable for sure. The main cat from Cat Cafe probably too.

There will be no permanent upgrades this time, but I’m considering some sort of player customization system, where you can equip some stat modifiers (+10% movement speed, +20% power up duration, etc), or change each player’s sub weapon to a totally different one.

We shall see.