🦊Heyo, coming at you today with a post you wont like, but is very important to post. As you probably guessed from the title, Cosmogelica is postponed indefinitely. Unlike Shield Cat though, this is not a matter of finances or not having the resources to complete the project. Instead, it's a matter of the project having unforeseen complications that have arisen and can no longer be ignored.

What Went Wrong

The original concept for Cosmogelica was that you could use the gel as a barrier to protect against incoming enemy units. This, on the surface, seemed like a great idea! However, many problems have come up with it.

First and foremost, many players simply do not use the gel, and opt to just weave through bullets as they would in a traditional shmup. For those that *do*  use the gel, they find it's not that effective, as the playfield is constantly scrolling, so it ends up with the gel not being viable to use anyways. Also, in the current version of the game we're working on, the playfield is constantly scrolling, further decreasing the viability of using the gel. There were also inconsistencies in like, the playfield scrolls so you can't really use the gel, until the boss phase when it doesn't scroll anymore?

Testing the Gel Barrier Idea

We've been going back and forth on this for a while, trying to figure out ways to incentivize players using the gel, but all of the methods we came up with felt forced and arbitrary. Eventually, we decided to make a new little prototype that revisited the initial idea of the game, being like Space Invaders and, at the suggestion of a friend, possibly combining it with the mechanics of Missile Command. Our idea was simple:  have some houses you have to protect, and some turrets you also have to protect, and use the gel to prevent enemy attacks from taking down your units. Essentially, it would be like a tower defense game.

Everything looked good with this little prototype, up until we added the gel. At that point it became clear that the player placing gel was too OP, so the two gameplay choices out of that were: 

1. make it so you have some kind of "barrier juice" where you eventually can't use the barrier or it otherwise is not that good to use,

2. Add enough enemies to be able to overwhelm your barrier so it's not as OP, or

3. Add some kind of "setup" phase where you set up the barrier and then spend the round trying to defend against enemies and hoping your barrier lasts.

None of these possibilities sounded interesting or exciting. Overall, the prototype showed us that the whole mechanic of the player creating gel barriers is pretty much an unviable game mechanic and, since that's pretty much what we were going for, it means that the whole game is unviable... except, maybe not.

What Happens Now?

Now that we've abandoned the idea of the player dropping gel on the playfield, we've been thinking of new mechanics. Our ideas so far are as follows:

1. Gel becomes something the enemies use, and serve as a barrier/obstacle that you have to overcome. Enemy shots are no longer blocked by gel, allowing bosses (for example)  to guard themselves with gel and then fire from behind it, making you have to clear the gel with your blaster. Enemies can use the gel as part of their attack patterns.

2. Give the player more traditional shmup actions. Allow the player to swap between Wave and Spread beams during gameplay instead of having to pick up weapon types. Give the player screen clearing bombs that not only destroy enemy shots and low-level enemies, but also clear the screen of enemy gel. Focus changes from "use gel to block enemy bullets" to "plow forward and shoot every guy while trying not to get hit by bullets."

We've realized that the whole "use gel strategically to block enemy bullets" thing doesn't really work, but we may still have a pretty good shmup idea on our hands here. It's possible to turn Cosmogelica into a traditional shmup, with the gel acting like walls in many side-scrolling shmups like R-Type. Bosses can protect themselves with gel, but you can use the bomb to get rid of it and then proceed to blast the boss away. There's many new and exciting gameplay elements that can come out of this. We can also reduce the overall amount of bullets on screen, which we started adding more and more of to try to balance out the gel barrier (again, this just sucks.)

So If You Can Just Make It A Shmup, Why Not Just Do That?

We don't want to just jump into this, that's why. We want to take the time to really think out the idea, since the "using gel as a strategic barrier" game is dead. We *can*  make a shmup out of this, but we have to think of all new game ideas and mechanics, and how they can all fit together, and in the meantime, we want to work on our other game Blobun more. That game has a solid game concept, and it's coming along really well. We want to make sure that our new ideas for Cosmogelica are as solid as that before we say "ok we're working on Cosmogelica again."

We realize that some people will be disappointed in the pivot away from the phase-based gameplay and gel usage that the original prototype and SAGE 2023 demo promised. However, this has just proven to be unviable. We believe, however, that "game that's not exactly what was originally shown, but is still a game that exists" is a lot better than "game was canceled and never came out" because yea, we've almost canceled this game 3 times now just because it wasn't shaping up.

We basically just want to take some time away and come back to it with fresh eyes. There's still the potential to make a really neat and interesting shmup, but we want to have a well thought out idea first.

What About Shield Cat?

We would love to get back to that game! If we won the lottery, and had the resources to hire other people to help us out, we'd be working on Shield Cat right away. However, the scope of that is too much to work on with our current resources, so we need to stick to smaller scale projects until such time that we can work something out. Trust me, we *really* want to make Shield Cat a full game, but it's just not viable with our current resources. Cosmogelica IS viable with our current resources, however, we don't want to put a game out there that's only half baked.

The Final "Player Gel" Build

We've released a build you can check out that shows what we've been doing the past few months. Unfortunately, this build is only available for Windows, so if you're in Linux you'll have to run it in Proton or something.

If you want to understand the issues, please feel free to try out the game and see how much you use (or rather, dont use) the gel. You can also see the many graphical improvements we made. The game looks really nice! But the mechanics just are not sound, unfortunately.

HOW TO ACCESS

Go to the itch main page and download "042124 Cosmogelica Windows (Final Gel Build)"

If you have access to the Steam build (via Patreon) you can switch to the "final_gel" branch if you really want to. Again, this is only for Windows, so you'll have to enable Proton Compatibility to play it.

There are bugs with this version of the game, but none of them should interfere with gameplay. Also, the game doesn't have a method of saying so, but a second player can now join at any time by pressing a button on the second gamepad. There are many more changes since the November build, but we'll detail those down below. You'll see, we've been working very, very hard to try to overhaul the game and test out a lot of different things to make it work! We haven't just been sitting around haha

We're Sorry

We know this isn't what you wanted to read, and that people are excited for Cosmogelica. However, hopefully this is not the end of the road for the game! If we're able to figure out the gameplay issues and make something that plays solid, then we will resume development of the game as soon as possible and bring it to you. We hope for your understand and patience as we work to figure this out. Game development is tricky, and sometimes, things just don't pan out like you thought they would. However, at least this is better than what we originally were gonna post, which was that we were canceling it. *Something* is there though,  and if we can find it, we will bring it to you.

Thank you for reading all this, and again, many apologies.

Patch  Notes

As always, here are the patch notes:

===== IMPORTANT =====

• This build is the result of a *major* refactoring, a lot of which is detailed below. Pretty much all of the game's code was overhauled, so there's gonna be new and exciting bugs.
• The level structure has changed completely, meaning that stages that were previously available may not be available in this build.
• We did a *lot* of cleanup of old code and removing stuff that's been around since the original prototype. There may be bugs caused by this!
• A number of menu items have been changed around or removed for better organization.

===== NEW =====

• A second player can now join at any time, removing the need for separate 1/2 player menus. The first input device the game reads will be assumed to be Player 1, and the second player can press Fire on a different device to join.
• You know what they say about assumptions, so you can reassign players/control inputs under the Settings menu at any time.
• 20 Phase mode has been replaced with the Stage Challenge mode. You can now try to beat a set amount of 1, 2, or 10 stages.

===== IMPROVED =====

• A lot of menus have been improved visually and replaced with function specific menus, leading to an overall more polished experience.
• Scene loading is now more efficient.
• The game can also now load custom scenes, though I really wouldn't recommend messing with that functionality at this stage of development.
• If you like living life on the edge and want to mess with it anyways, check the readme file in the "bg_scenes" directory of the install folder.
• Expressions have been added to some enemies upon getting hit.
• Improved graphics for the player blaster.
• Fuel drops now pulse, and will also magnetize toward the player.
• The game will now switch to the primary audio device automatically (Windows only) (This feature was added by Gamemaker.)

===== CHANGED =====

• We redid the entirety of the game's menus. There may be some bugs (especially with input remapping.)
• Ground units will now clear gel around them when they spawn (but not afterwards, so you can just cover them with gel and put them out of action.)
• The gel and near background now scroll at the same speed.
• Enemy unit AI has been majorly adjusted to fit into the new stage structure. There's been too many changes to detail here.
• Enemy units now no longer make firing sounds for each bullet fired, regardless if you have enemy shot sounds turned on or off.
• This doesn't apply to the big lasers the Boss Mask fires, because come on, they're big lasers.
• Warning text for boss phases has been updated and the large sprite has been removed (as it just gets in the way with the new stage layouts.)
• The "Wavy Text" option has been replaced with the "UI Animations" option, which generally disables various animation factors. If you had toggled wavy text off before, because of the different property name, you'll have to toggle it off again.
• Enemies now fly offscreen in a silly manner.
• Player bullets now despawn the moment they're off screen, instead of lasting for a little bit more to hit entities which are offscreen.
• Flammable gel offscreen will no longer catch fire.
• The game no longer reads merged inputs from all attached keyboards/gamepads when in single player mode, as part of the above change to multiplayer. We're not sure how this will affect everything, but we're open to all feedback.
• The Balloon minigame has been removed.
• Since the stage progression has changed, Fuel Bonuses at the end of enemy formations no longer makes sense. Now, the game will gradually drop fuel depending on how well you're doing or how much you need it. You'll still get a fuel bonus at the end.
• Because of all the changes, the high scores from the previous version of the game will not carry over. However, they'll still be present and available for older versions of the game to read.
• Previously, shots would pass through enemies (especially the boss) if they never landed on a frame where the enemy was vulnerable (due to iframes) and would simply pass through. Now, all shots that hit the enemy will deal damage, but if the enemy currently has iframes, the shot potency will be reduced to 20%.
• The CRT filter now has slight scanlines on it.
• The space stage with the empty background, the one with the clouds, and the one with the meteors have all been removed. The space stage with meteors and foreground elements is staying, however.
• Because we've rewritten the graphics pipeline some to support new color blending and other effects, the glow effect has become an integral part of the drawing routine. As such, we had to remove the accessibility option to turn it off (otherwise some stages are really dark.)

===== BUG FIXES =====

• Some bugs were fixed simply due to the refactor causing them to not apply any longer. we'll take those Ws, even if we didn't directly fix them.
• Refactored some gel updating code. Not necessarily fixing bugs, but doing this may *cause* bugs, so please keep an eye out for the gel not updating properly.
• Game should no longer show weird sprites when going to/leaving from the pause screen.
• Fixed some visual bugs with the boss health meter.
• Fixed depth issues with powerups appearing below player bullets.
• Fixed a bug where sometimes a missile would attempt to autotarget a gift box, causing the game to crash.
• Fixed a previously fixed bug where the background wouldn't scroll properly and would flash black or double draw, where the fix caused it to double draw a lot more often. It wasn't noticeable before because there weren't layers with blend modes before.
• Fixed a bug with the turret enemy's targeting system.
• Fixed a screen drawing displacement issue where the screen would always be just a little bit misaligned. You probably never noticed it.
• Fixed an issue with weird smears appearing in the effects layer. This is also probably something you never noticed.
• Fixed a bug where shooting the Wave blaster on the far edge of the screen could cause the bullets to despawn.

===== KNOWN BUGS =====

• Due to changing from imguigml to imgui_gm, debug overlays are currently only available in the Windows build of the game. Apologies!