Most of my time on the project had so far been focused on simply getting things to work and making things look decent, but the player really had no motivation or reason to shoot any of the enemies other than to just, you know, shoot all the enemies. I'm a big Shmup fan, and as such rarely enjoy or pay attention to the story in a Shmup(!), especially one that interrupts the shooting, but this forced me to acknowledge that of course all Shmups have a story or framing narrative of some sort. So it was time to try and figure out mine. The concept that we were playing with a drawn on film animation had been established, so when the music was put in, I thought it'd be fun to play about with a slow down effect and a camera pull out to reveal the edges of the film when the game was paused. [previewyoutube=_DVI7wEHiQE;full][/previewyoutube] This test reminded me of something that had always kind of been at the back of my mind, which was to have the 'animator' as the main antagonist, a hand drawing in all the annoying enemies and becoming the boss at the end of each level. I wanted to introduce this idea as soon as possible through the title screen and the context of the menus leading up to the first level, so for a couple of months I focused on the menu design and implementation. If I wanted this 'animator' to be the baddie, it made sense that we should see the player character relaxing at first before being interrupted or bothered by them. [previewyoutube=73LyY7eEGmA;full][/previewyoutube] [previewyoutube=3U7ozqcQxcw;full][/previewyoutube] I was happy that I was finally getting to grips with my camera system at least! The next task was to get the paint brush directly antagonising the character somehow - I'm definitely going to need to revisit this at some point, but I think it gets the idea across well enough for now. [previewyoutube=oUE3DTqAtBs;full][/previewyoutube] Now that we had the brush vandalising our character's world, it gave the player some motivation to restore it back to it's original peace and tranquility, which helped me finally figure out one of the main mechanics in the game as well - the popping buttons. When you ground pound the buttons, you see the background transform to it's original colour. The percentage of the background you manage to clean up is tied in to a score multiplier at the end of each level, so there's hopefully an interesting balance to strike between maximising your score and managing your finite energy and health resources (which also come from the buttons). [previewyoutube=kZm3F_WlgSs;full][/previewyoutube] Thanks for reading! Next time I'll have a look at the first boss fight with the brush!