The last time, we left Dudebro armless and shooting bullets from his beard.
By revision 52, he could count on a fully functional arm and multidirectional aiming. Besides the eight main directions standard for these types of 2D game, we decided to use interpolation to double the number of angles you can shoot at. This would later prove especially effective for rapid-fire weapons, not just from the obvious gameplay standpoint, but also because it allows for more visually appealing bullet patterns.
Speaking of better-looking, the addition of shooting frames with a flash muzzle, highlights and a subtle recoil, sure helps give the act of shooting a bit more weight.
Revision 75 marked the introduction of a parallax effect for the background layers (in this test map limited to two, plus a skybox layer with mountains), and the beginning of a very important addition: throw-able objects!
At this point, throw-able objects (crates, barrels, etc.) were just represented by black squares with imprecise colliders. Dudebro wasn’t able to pick them up and throw them at that point, but he could push them around and the physics worked rather well.
By revision 94, these objects were finally visualized correctly, and could effectively contribute in making the test map less sparse. But, with Dudebro being the only character in the game at this point, the environment sure didn’t look lively enough. It was about time to change this, but we’ll get to that in a later update.