After restructuring The Plunge Of Sludge into a rougelite, I decided to revamp everything. From the tiles of the levels to adding simple lighting, it looked nothing like how it was before. This was when I added an item type called "Trinkets", which can range from stat boosts to doing more interesting things like making your bullets bigger or making all bullets drip acid. 

During this time the game had no name and only went by "bullethellrouge". Around this time was also when I started letting my friends playtest the game and that further motivated me to continue working on the game.

There are times where I miss this period of development due to how broken everything was. Due to the low amount of items in the game, ranging from 20-30 items at a time depending on the playtest session, it would be extremely easy to get very power items. Items could even be stacked with each other in this point of development, so at the end of most runs bullets would take up half the screen!

It was a very fun period of time in my life, especially in school where I had something to distract me from boredom. During downtime, especially in the mornings, I would spend the class period sketching concepts for the game. From items and enemies that would eventually come to the game, to systems that would define how the game would be played, a lot of early ideas came from my time at school.

Eventually after fleshing things out as much as I could, I proceeded to work on the other two levels featured in the game, which I will go over in future posts! I hope you got something out of this one!

-socks