I guess it's about time I dust off the good 'ol Galactic Blasters BR project file and try to finish it up...

Today, I'd like to go over most of the things I've done with Galactic Blasters BR - Artist's Faith (the 4.5th Galactic Blasters game) since the vBHGJ version. Yes, it did take me over two years just to do what's mentioned here, please don't underestimate the power of procrastination! The screenshots here are from the latest built version unless otherwise mentioned. And so without further ado...

[Gameplay Changes]

For starters, I've made it so focusing will make your ship's central hitbox be visible. The graphic is slightly larger than the actual hitbox to make it easier to see (because the actual hitbox is only 2 x 2 pixels), and if you're playing in multiplayer the second player's hitbox will be a different color! Well, if they actually appeared in multiplayer, but I'm getting ahead of myself...

Player 1 would have a blue hitbox, player 2 would have a purple hitbox.

Another change I made to the gameplay is to make the HDS128 v2's focused speed slightly slower to allow for more precise movement. This comes from me repeatedly running into bullets while testing out some of the new ultra difficulty boss patterns even while focused, keeping in mind that the screen's practically packed with slower-moving bullets that the gameplay wasn't originally designed around. So I slightly slowed down the focused speed of the HDS128 v2 to make it easier to dodge these slower-moving bullets while leaving the other ships the same for accuracy reasons. While I haven't done the same change to Galactic Blasters D2's gameplay yet, when I get to working on that game again this will probably be one of the first things I do...

I ran into another issue while testing the boss patterns where some of my inputs just weren't registering while holding multiple keys together. This is actually caused by the keyboard itself as many keyboards have combinations of keys that just won't work together, so I ended up just implementing a new control scheme that moves around some of the keys to get around the problem. Strangely, my old laptop was perfectly fine with the regular control scheme, so how come my current gaming laptop's keyboard isn't? We may never know, but I feel the new alternate control scheme might be a bit more comfortable (at least for me)!

[Graphical Changes]

As you've probably noticed by now, I've completely changed the fonts used across the UI and HUD. While I really liked how the old fonts looked, I realized that it would NOT be a good idea to distribute them with the game since they're copyrighted. So in my search for new, free fonts to use that could be redistributed, I ended up choosing Normaleste and Video Glau from Sik's Font Pack (https://sik.itch.io/fonts). Luckily for me these fonts worked quite well with the UI I already made, although I still needed to slightly adjust some text... And adjust the in-game HUD quite a bit because I spaced out the text with spaces. Still, the results don't look that bad!

I've also tweaked some of the layers of Stage 2's background to make the water look more blue. Yeah, I don't think there's a lot I need to say...

Before (vBHGJ).

After (Current Build).

Finally, some other graphical changes include Johnathan Slade's placeholder artwork from Galactic Blasters ++ being replaced with new artwork on the character select screens, as well as the RGames logo on the "Created by RGames" screen being replaced with the RadikalGames logo. The latter's also been slightly reorganized to be a bit less cluttered, a.k.a. removing the mention of the Danmaku Fusion framework, which is essentially my framework for this type of game! The Danmaku part's pretty obvious if you know about bullet hell games, while Fusion comes from the name of the game engine used, Clickteam Fusion. Still, it's not really necessary to mention it on the "Created by" screen.

Don't mind the stray number, it's just debug stuff.

[Additions]

Have you ever wanted to take a break from the game, perhaps even a break for longer than a second? Well, introducing the revolutionary new pause feature! By pressing the escape key on the keyboard you too can pause time until you're ready to play the game again, at which point you need to simply press escape again! ...there's a good reason why I didn't have a pause function before, and it's that I didn't know how to implement a pause function that worked with both keyboards and controllers.

Back during Galactic Blasters D's development (likely relatively early on too if I remember), I found that Clickteam Fusion's built-in pause action could only be unpaused if you use the keyboard, which I didn't want, but at the same time I wasn't bothered to implement my own pausing system. The closest thing was the continue screen, and even then every bullet on-screen would be destroyed because they would've kept moving had they not been. Nowadays I'm more willing to just use the built-in pause action since the player's likely going to be close to the keyboard regardless of their input method.

Another thing I've implemented is a setting for changing your graphics mode between 840x480, 1680x960, and fullscreen, with an additional three options that tone down graphical effects for weaker computers. However, this does come at the cost of the English/Japanese language setting, which I removed because not only can't I properly verify the accuracy of the translations (I can't read Japanese, so I'd have to rely on translation services), but the new fonts don't support Japanese characters. Therefore, text would probably look wrong anyway.

I've also been trying to work on adding new ultra difficulty attack patterns, specifically for Galactic Blasters D's bosses as that game didn't let you play the story mode in ultra difficulty. Though my mindset here isn't to make even harder bosses, but rather to make Galactic Blasters D's bosses more in-line with Galactic Blasters D2's, whose bosses have denser, yet slower bullets. I mean, I sure do prefer a game that's difficult but fair rather than a game whose difficulty comes from being unfair! And luckily, I'm trying my best to make sure the bosses' ultra patterns are the former. It just takes a while to actually get to something I like...

Of course, I must mention that there's some new music tracks (some reused from other projects that never got off the ground) alongside the dialog being completely rewritten. The good and bad endings have also been implemented, which I shouldn't show directly to avoid spoilers but just know that they're no longer just a wall of text. But something that's going to be pretty exciting is that...

The third stage has been implemented! ...mostly. I still have some work to do for the final boss, but for the most part it's complete! It'll consist of the bosses from the latter half of Galactic Blasters D (from Stage 5 to Stage 7), and so far the first two sections are fully complete.

[Some Bugs to Fix]

Currently, there aren't that many bugs I'm aware about in the current development build! There's stuff as small as the high score entry screen not displaying anything when you complete Stage 3, and switching between resolutions might be a bit buggy right now since changing it in settings doesn't account for DPI at the moment (however, the window is the proper size when the game starts up). Those aren't really anything urgent that I have to fix up immediately, but something that I for sure want to fix as soon as possible would be the player hitboxes not showing up when focusing in multiplayer.

There was also a bug where fonts wouldn't be properly loaded in if the font files weren't in the exact path they would be on my own laptop. I do kinda blame Clickteam Fusion's documentation for this since I'm pretty sure it's not clear on how binary data works (which I tried to use to keep fonts embedded in the .exe rather than as separate files). However, I've managed to solve this bug before finishing up this post, so it's no longer an issue. But for the sake of just showing how the game looked when the fonts weren't loaded...

Yeaaaah... That's not right. I'm glad I fixed it!

[Conclusion]

In conclusion, Galactic Blasters BR - Artist's Faith has seen a whole bunch of development now that I'm motivated to develop it again, and hopefully I can get it released by either May 2025 or June 2025. I hope it'll be worth the wait when I do finally release it! Until next time, this has been RGamesOfficial, signing out from the Radikal dimension!

p.s. I also hope to start uploading more of my soundtrack backlog again, particularly Galactic Blasters Photo's MIDI soundtrack and Galactic Blasters Zero's soundtrack...