Mega-Cluster Enhanced Spooting
In order to learn the Obsidian interface (and especially the Kanban plugin), I organized all of my features into a massive Kanban based on anticipated difficulty, and then selected an easy task to start with: after improving how the MegaCluster boss deployed its ejecta upon being shot in the previous update, I wanted to extend it to the periodic, player-targeted spoot.
It took a bit of refactoring and splitting up my methods (which were fairly brittle and only designed to service player-generated ejecta until now), but I’ve succeeded: the spoots now fire directly out of the edge of the MegaCluster, generate a cloud of dust, and all ejecta have a temporary afterimage trail. Additionally, I had the spoot also eject a random assortment of smaller junk that isn’t void-persistent: it makes it harder to sit in one spot and keep shooting but doesn’t add to the clutter and difficulty. And it looks good!
… The only thing is, a bug has surfaced where the wave doesn’t end when all visible enemies are cleared, now. I’m concerned it has to do with my non-void-persistent shenanigans, as that’s the weird thing I’ve done. Ah, well. Time to start a bugs kanban.
It turned out that I wasn’t instance_destroy()ing entities that weren’t void-persistent, so the ejecta was continuing to fly off beyond the player’s view and the range of the guns (that did respect self-destruct-on-void, thankfully). With this resolved, my playthrough was well-behaved, and my end-boss was much more impressive. Such as it is.