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I've added in the last batch of enemies for the bullet hell game. First is the mortar (all names tentative as I haven't gotten art yet). It creates large circles on the map, and you have to avoid those circles or else they'll blow up on you. It's interesting in that they aren't bullets in the normal way, they're just circles that check for the player in its radius.


Then there's the orb collector. It has a permanent wall in front of it and you can't damage it with your own bullets. Instead it fires multiple bullets at you, one of which is differently colored. To damage the enemy, you have to touch that colored orb. Originally this was going to be a ping pong paddle, and you had to keep hitting a ball towards it to damage it. I didn't know how to make it obvious that you were supposed to do that if it looked like a regular bullet though, which is why I now have a differently colored orb, it stands out.


Finally today I added the last enemy. This one shoots bullets that grow larger over time, but they also pause when they reach a certain size. When paused, they stop moving and then disappear after a bit of time. The idea is that they're so long that they end up blocking your movement and trapping you towards one side of the map. Originally they were going to be full on solid walls and your bullets can't go past it, but I didn't have fun when I tried it. That enemy that creates walls in front of itself was plenty.


Moving on from enemies, I added health packs to the game. When you beat a wave, a health pack drops from the top of the screen that gives you 1 HP back. I resisted on giving these because after all, the ultimate achievement in this game would be to beat the whole thing without taking any damage or missing any bullets right? But after constantly losing on the highest difficulty (which I verified to be beatable), I added it in.


Another thing I discovered is sort of a bug, but the kind of bug I'm leaving in. The player constantly tries to follow the mouse. But if you pause the game, move your mouse across the screen, then unpause, the player will move very quickly towards your new mouse position. This isn't intended, but it's probably a fun thing that a super good player can take advantage of. What makes me less worried about it is that it isn't an instantaneous teleport, you can get hit by bullets while pause dashing.


Finally I've had 2 weird dreams. The first one was about how having to rush to get both detergent and glue before moving out of an apartment. I don't know why I needed those 2 things, but I had to get them fast to rush to an airport. The second one was my family going to a restaurant, and afterwards I had somehow lost my computer (even though I never took it out of my backpack). After returning to the restaurant, the computer was still missing. I don't remember if I found the computer eventually, although I do remember being very mad in the dream.

Lemme remember what happened in the past week.


Firstly for the bullet hell game, most of the work has just been changing the enemies. Originally very few enemies did something unique; now most of them do. The only ones that have mostly survived unchanged are the knight (who shoots downwards) and the bow (who shoots really fast bullets). Now I have enemies that move left and right, up and down, can revive after being defeated, move after you shoot them, or can create temporary walls. I did try and give up on a few other ideas (like having bullets that follow you). Right now there are 7 enemies and I think I want 10.


But also I added a hard mode ot the game, which makes all enemies more aggressive. With all of these changes, the game has gotten much harder. After a ton of attempts I still haven't beaten hard mode yet, even after nerfing some enemies and buffing the player (now you have 6 health and 6 bullets).


Recently I've had to help mom out with using computers, because she's not a Mac person. But I also have to help with things like Microsoft Excel, and I don't have much experience there (I use Google Sheets). Today was annoying in that Excel kept crashing when trying to do basic functions, and sometimes files would get lost in OneDrive, which is something I never experienced with google.


I also played Coffin of Andy and Leyley. It's a narrative game about 2 siblings in a dystopian setting. Even though it has a good narrative, I can't say that I think that most people should play it. As I say a lot, I can appreciate a well-written story in a game but if the gameplay is boring then I don't want to play it (somehow I played it anyway, even knowing the gameplay would be bad). And while the dialogue and story are good and quite funny, it does have dark themes (like cannibalism) and a lot of swearing (there's easily over 100 F-bombs).


Final misc thoughts are that I added 2 more songs to my playlist: Quiet Room and The Snow White Princess. Overall I think shifting things to weekly is the move forwards. Skip past all the boring days for actually interesting thoughts. Which is to say, next post will be on Jan 17.

I'm going to try something, maybe just for 1-2 weeks, maybe permanent. I'm going to write blog posts every week instead of every day. The main thing being, a ton of posts recently have been very short and how interesting is that really. The hope with having rarer posts is that I end up writing longer posts that are more interesting to read. Any urls for Jan 4-9 will redirect to this post instead. Anyway see you in a week (Jan 10).

Thomas Tang (DZ)

tt2195@nyu.edu

+1 (646) 236-5503

Redmond, WA

©2025 by Thomas Tang

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