Hey, Gamers!

Lunar Ladies Studio is a team of four students from the University of Michigan. Over the past 4 weeks, we have been developing Star Witch for EECS 494: Video Game Development. We are excited to be releasing our Alpha build to the public! 

In Star Witch, travel the galaxy, visit exotic planets, and lend your magic powers to help the creatures that inhabit them. Your spellbook is powerful, but be careful - the differing environments are known to affect your spells. You must adapt in order to protect the citizens of the galaxy!

Last week, we received a lot of great feedback from our fellow EECS 494 students. Playtesters found that the “desert level” was too challenging and frustrating, only required the use of the starfire spell, and its platform placement caused unexpected falls. In general, both levels could be completed without rescuing the inhabitants, and there wasn’t much need to combine spells to navigate them. There were also requests to add a new spell to spice things up and make mana management more challenging. 

As far as mechanics are concerned, the most hotly requested feature was a skip button for our amazing cutscenes. Additionally, players were confused when they died because there was no damage or death animation. Lastly, playtesters couldn’t put their fingers on what was up, but something was “off” about the jumping. 

In response to all of this wonderful feedback, as well as their reported bugs, we made the following changes for the Alpha build of Star Witch...

New Content:

• New planet! 🪐Say hello to the Glorms of Cavernia! (More level content coming next week.)
• New spell! ✨Transform into your cuddly kitten familiar. 😸(So cute!!) Be warned that this spell costs you mana over time.
• Health and mana potions are now available throughout the game.
• Level designs have undergone a major overhaul. Arboria and Sandonia are now more than two times as long as before and require the use of all your spells to reach the end!
• Beware of enemies! 😈The planets are now more treacherous than ever before with the addition of two types of enemies to encounter. Hint: One will require the use of multiple spells.
• Space travel cutscenes contain additional story content.

Bug Fixes: 

• Never-ending explosions have been resolved and should no longer be an issue.
• Walking animation no longer has responsiveness issues.
• Jumps used to be a fixed height and are now dynamic based on player input.
• NPC physical collisions with the player have been removed.
• NPC speech no longer overflows past the speech bubble. 
• Sprite layering is consistent across levels.
• Parallax issues have been fixed, so you shouldn’t see more than two suns in Sandonia now and Arborian trees don’t stop.

Other Modifications & Improvements:

• Player animations have been added for climbing, taking damage, and dying.
• Jumping is more forgiving and “platform-y” thanks to this video.
• A skip button has been added to cutscenes for people who, for some reason, don’t appreciate world-building.
• To improve theming, vines and wood platforms are now metal/mechanical/electrical/evil in appearance. Plus, we don’t let you burn wood platforms with starfire, so this might make more logical sense?
• Camera motion is smoother. 

We hope you enjoy our game! Any feedback or bug reports would be greatly appreciated from the community, but please keep things kind and constructive, and remember that all of us are still new to game dev. We will do our best to address issues for our Beta release next week. 

Let us know in the comments below “witch” spell is your favorite!

Ad astra,
Lunar Ladies Studio

🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕🌖🌗🌘🌑

Game Asset Credits:

-- Sprites --
https://opengameart.org/content/high-res-fire-ball
Author: Game Developer Studio
License: Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)

Reworked by AntumDeluge on OpenGameArt.org (https://opengameart.org/content/cats-rework) 
Original art by bluecarrot16 (https://opengameart.org/node/69399)
License: Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)

-- Music --
https://www.playonloop.com/2018-music-loops/galaxy-nauts/
Music: “Galaxy Nauts”, from PlayOnLoop.com
Licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 4.0

https://www.playonloop.com/2019-music-loops/foggy-forest/
Music: “Foggy Forest”, from PlayOnLoop.com
Licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 4.0

https://www.playonloop.com/2015-music-loops/desert-temple/
Music: “Desert Temple”, from PlayOnLoop.com
Licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 4.0

https://www.playonloop.com/2015-music-loops/spirit-forge/
Music: “Spirit Forge”, from PlayOnLoop.com
Licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 4.0

-- Font --
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Grenze+Gotisch?category=Sans+Serif,Display,Mon...
Grenze Gotisch on Google Fonts