Slugging through the sewers

Well - I started laying out the sewer portion of the map, and it's currently looking really, really nice. In order to get everything running on lower-end systems such as my netbook I attempted to optimize the sine-wave water routine, and stumbled upon a nasty bug that made things run slowly regardless whether or not the water was on screen or not.

My old slime enemies look very nice in the sewer, which might warrant their partial overhaul, as their current AI and attack pattern are quite terrible and somewhat unpredictable. Also - since I can populate the sewer by the slimes, I might as well recycle the huge slime boss, though, it needs to be redrawn to make it less cartoony-looking.

Now I need some alligators, sludge-cascades and rusty machinery - this is gonna be awesome.
I continued working on the game's map layout, as after some thinking I realized that Iya ends up getting her core moves way too late into the game, so I reshuffled the powerup order. Also, it was decided to reduce the number of magic attributes to three - each with 3 levels of upgrade (the third one is a single secret item that powers up all three magics).

Over the last two days I was playing Return of Egypt - an older indie metroidvania. Not a great game, but it made me think - with its map about a fraction of LOI's and only about three distinct environments it still provides several hours of moderately fun gameplay, Return of Egypt is just long enough for an indie project... is it possible I went overboard with LOI's ginormous world?

I've been somewhat burned out as of late.

Even my commute has become slightly less productive lately, as I've just been so damn tired. However, this didn't stop me from adding more room data and beginning to code puzzle elements in.
In addition to large set-piece puzzles every now and then I decided to pepper the game with less complex, but somewhat interesting tasks throughout. First such task I planned to implement was the balancing platforms - two platforms suspended on chains, and a crank to turn left or right to move one platform up while the other moves down and vice versa... Implementing this took me surprisingly little time, so I decided to kick it up a notch - remove the crank, replacing it with a giant rusty wheel connected to the platform chain. Grabbing and hanging off of knobs along the the circumference of the wheel turns it in that direction, lowering and raising platforms. Not only does this make the whole system more realistic, but it provides for a possibility of very cool set-piece graphics (of ancient rusty machinery)
On the graphical front I have continued rehashing one of my existing tilesets adding more elements to it. A new parallax background for another area of Sanctuary Woods has been preliminary pixeled, but needs to be detailed out. It currently looks like this.
^^^

I have been slowly adding more flashy effects for things getting hit. Now when a hit connects with certain enemies, not only there is a fountain of animated sparks, but also a cloud of dust - this adds a lot to the robustness of the game's look... or something: ) Began drawing other hit-connection effects drawing inspiration from Street Fighter 3.

As I mentioned in my previous post - I began working on the game's starting area - a modern city, but honestly haven't made it far enough into drawing it to even show it here. Maybe the next time I update.

Fixed a few annoying glitches in the ledge-grab routine, which apparently I originally hacked in. Also - floating enemies no longer become invincible when uppercutted.
There is still an annoying glitch in moving along with horizontally-moving platforms - I need to fix that pronto, as this will be key to some puzzles.

Anyway - so many things to work on... so little time - and even less energy to do it.