I'm actually writing this on Day 3. , but yesterday I managed to finish the bulk of the gameplay. I coded all of the special abilities for the characters which was really satisfying. That was the one part of the game where I didn't know if I had the skill to pull it off, especially the naruto jump, the rolling enemies, and the boss fight. The boss fight in particular had me really worried.

Turns out all you need is a state machine and you can program an enemy with relatively few bugs. This is the least amount of trouble that enemies have ever given me.

I drew a lot of the art since I could bare to look at some of the terrible placeholder art anymore. I used a cute pixel art character in a bear costume for reference with the proportions, and I think it turned out really well. I have never been great at drawing pixel art and I think I managed to stay far enough away from the original drawing to create something unique while still being a cute little pixelated character. I think this is some of my best pixel art I've ever done, though that isn't saying much.

The background was really simple, a few straight lines across the screen and a blur tool to make it fuzzy. I never saw the jumble tool in Aseprite before and I love it. It makes perfect grass shapes in the background. I also redid the main ground tile as I wasn't happy with it. I knew this game would have a ton of tiles and I didn't want to manually place every one so I had to learn how to use autotile. Of course, that turned out to be way more confusing that I had thought it would be. Fortunately, I found this awesome program called Tile Setter that takes a sprite and modifies it based on just a base piece and a top piece to create a full autotile sheet. It then lets you export it straight to gamemaker. This was a life saver. It was only like $12, so I think that was worth it.