Sorry to be absent for so long. I'm still working on Hot Shots, but it has been going slow, and the stuff I'm doing will take a while to turn into something I can do as an update.

I've had a couple of snafus in a row. Took a little vacation after the last big update. Got super sick during that vacation, had trouble getting back to work afterwards. I accidentally moved my resource folder in Godot and it partially rewrote all the file locations before crashing, so I had to manually reload them or point the game engine to right files again. This mostly worked except for stages, so I reloaded most of them manually, but I've been thinking of replacing the long tunnel level and the jungle level with better long tunnels and jungles already, so I decided to just not fix those levels. August is always rough on me, the long nights make it hard to sleep and by late summer I get very frayed. Add that to everything else, so I just spent most of the month in a bad mood, and even considered just canning the whole Hot Shots project for a while. (Before I realized what was wrong with the resource folder, I thought I might have to can the project)

But now I'm back, I've got the resource problem figured out, and I'm moving on to the next thing. The Survival Mode is pretty much complete, and I'm going to move on to the other major modes I want the game to have. I thought I'd be able to do a Duel Mode where you fight 1v1 against AI controlled playable characters, but I'm not happy enough with my AI to justify that as a separate mode at the moment. Trapping one zombie in the swarm behind a barrel is one thing, but if the only major enemy on the whole stage is doing that, it breaks the game. With the Duel Mode AI, it's not something I can just work on, I need to have a eureka moment about why my AI doesn't do what I think it should do. I'll try to work it into the other modes and hopefully by observing the AI, I'll be able to make some breakthroughs. The other major modes I've been wanting to do are Rogue Mode, which will have random dungeons like the original game, and Career Mode, which will have special missions to complete, like Collect Coins, Grab the MacGuffin, etc. For Rogue Mode I need to make randomizable dungeon maps, and for Career Mode and I need to do a lot of new programming for special missions.

So unfortunately, there's just a lot of behind-the-scenes work that needs to get done before anything new is ready. I am still working on Hot Shots, and have been all this time (minus vacation and freak out time). I have a few new characters that are close to done, but I don't want to do too much with new characters until I have these other big things worked out.

I've posted some new stage graphics here: Hot Shots Characters Sketches I'll try to update there more often.