Post-Jam Updates to Ghost of the Arcade

While the submission period of the GB Compo may be over for quite some time now, I have continued to work on my entry "Ghost of the Arcade". Over multiple updates I have changed and fixed A LOT of things. Now I have finally created a version that I am actually happy with. So, regardless whether you want to revisit Ghost of the Arcade or want to play it for the first time - make sure you download the most recent version of the ROM. At the time of writing, this is GHOSTOFTHEARCADE_update-after-submission7.gb.

Also, I have put together a nice little trailer for the game:

Here is an overview of all the things I did (and still remember):

New Content

• 5 more racing tracks for Monster Truck Tour: Each of them comes with its own characteristics that change the driving physics. E. g., one track is frozen making you slide after steering. I furthermore added music variations for some of those tracks, which are more fitting to the respective setting. On top of that I added a track selection screen, on which one of the tracks is picked at random. Also, there now is a bar in the HUD displaying your progress on the current racing track.
• 2 new enemy monsters for M.O.N.S.T.E.R.: Now you can encounter two different enemy types. They both have their own sprites and action patterns, including shooting projectiles at the player.
• Obstacles in Hell Escape: As soon as you are overground, there are now angels flying horizontally, trying to stop you on your way into heaven.
• Increasing Difficulty in Nessi: Once you managed to beat all other sea monsters, their speed increases. At some point you won't be able to win races against them without buying upgrades.

Fixes

• Nessi Ocean Racer: This is probably the most important one. The submission version had a strange bug, which made all sprite graphics glitch while the player moved after jumping. Despite trying my best, I could not figure out where the bug came from before submission, as the bug did not appear when testing the Nessi game in isolation. So, quite litterally in the last minutes before the deadline, I created and implemented a scaled down version of the Nessi sprite as a makeshift solution. This way, the player could press right without glitches, which made the game at least playable. For those who are interested - the bug was caused by a script attached to a Platformer Plus state in the game Hell Escape, which I forgot to deactivate when exiting Hell Escape. Took me quite some time to figure that out. Anyways, now the game can be played as originally intended.
  Furthermore I overhauled the placement of the obstacles on the Nessi tracks. Now they flow much better.
• Kernel Panic Bug: The other big problem I fixed is a kernel panic caused by a scene stack overflow. I thought that the "restore previous scene from stack" event would also delete the scene from the stack after loading. Well, I was wrong. This caused problems when the player was playing the same game over and over again until the stack was full. Once again, fixing the bug was not really in issue. Much rather it was finding the source of the bug, which took forever. I never encountered the bug, because I had become too good at the mini games. This way I only had to start each of them once or twice to get to the score I needed for testing.
• Arcade Tickets from Arcade Mode: Now the arcade tickets earned in Arcade Mode carry over to story mode. This makes it easier to complete your Tokipon collection if you wish to do so. 
• Tauriphena Bug: Tauriphena should appear after you have played a certain number of games. Before the update it was the other way round and she disappeared after the player made more progress. This locked the player out from an alternative ending, which is now available and more fleshed out.
• Scene Change Graphics Glitches: In many cases, scene changes were not looking nice and smooth beforehand. There were quite a few graphics glitching around. While this did not affect the actual playability of the game, it did not look quite as polished as I would have liked. This should now be fixed for most if not all cases.
• Minor Sprite Adjustments: Changed the overworld sprites of Tauriphena and Jerry. 
• A LOT of Balancing. In all kinds of areas like highscore requirements, movement speed, jumping physics, time limits, points per pickup,  etc.
• Many, MAAAAANY other smaller things :)

Performance Updates

• I went through pretty much all scenes and deleted all unnecessary / redundant / leftover code or tried to solve things with fewer event blocks. With less things to calculate per second, many of the included games run considerably more smoothly than before.

Future Plans

There are still quite a few things I would like to add before a proper release:

• More story: Currently there are not many characters present at the arcade after finishing the intro. I want to change that. With different characters visiting the arcade at different times, giving you different dialog based on your progress. However I'll have to wait for hauntology to change variable names in his plugins. Currently his amazing Platformer Plus and Adventure Plus cannot be used in the same project because of conflicting variable names. However, I'll need both to realize my plans. Also, I want to add a third alternative ending.
• Tokipon Trading: I want to do more with the Tokipon figures you collect from the gacha machines. I'd definitely like to add trading with other characters. This was already hinted at in a dialog with Violeta but not integrated yet.
• Endless Mode: It's already in the main menu but cannot be unlocked yet, as it has not been created yet. It'll be somewhat like Wario Ware, throwing you into different parts of different mini games at a rather fast pace.
• More Music: I'm currently using a couple of music pieces in more than one place. Ideally every piece of music would be reserved for one use case only.
• Potentially more arcade games to play: I'm not really sure whether I should keep my game ideas for future game jams or if I should use them to expand on this game. I might end up doing both - create standalone games for game jams and later integrate arcade versions of them into this game. We'll see.