Hi, Tania here! The development of the game will resume in two days, I’m taking two days off to recover from this hard month.

Today I wanna talk a bit about the bloom system in the game and what I wanna do with it.

So. The “Bloom” at the very start is both an in-universe resource and a gameplay resource. The main purpose of the bloom lore-wise isn’t unknown for a lot of people, really nobody knows what it does except for maybe the instigator of it all, you’ll meet her when the time comes. It is only known that some people have the power to collect this energy and store it in their body. Gameplay-wise, in the current state, the bloom power can be used to boost the damage output of the player’s bullets.

The bloom gauge works in tandem with the notches and spell cards. But I find it really frustrating to use. In the current state, bloom can’t be manually unleached by the player, and you must collect a lot of bloom powerups to even trigger a bloom barrier.

What I had in mind for the full version is two things:

1. The removal of the bloom mechanic entirely, which is what i’m planning to do in the end.
2. Keeping the required bloom items to trigger a bloom barrier relatively low or scale it with the stage you’re in (Which would cause a much more bloom barrier early-game than at the end), and allow the player to trigger it when they want.

With the second solution, there is some problems:

• Balancing. This would require a lot of testing in every stages and difficulties to balance the required amount of bloom items, which is really tidious to do with how I code and work in general.
• Too much buttons to keep track of. The player can already shoot, focus, bomb, change their spell and use a spell card. This is already hard to keep track of everything for the player, some of my testers complained about this. Programming-wise, I can’t work with this much buttons, the replay system of base luaSTG already struggles a lot and must be rewrote with the addition of even one button, I can’t deal with 3 more inputs.

For the first solution, I think it’s the best thing to do, but I would have to rework the last spell cards of Hanase and Miko to find something else that wouldn’t interefer with the bloom gauge.

So, tl;dr: I plan to remove the bloom gauge and bloom barrier entirely, replacing it with…nothing. The game has already its main mechanic working: player spell cards, I think they’re enough for a first game.

Speaking of the “first” game, Myara HoAO is also called “Myara 1”, that means there will be a second game? Oh hell yes there will, even a third and a fourth. I have the entire story of Myara planned for the first arc, I will do it in four games. Myara 2 is already in my mind, I know what type of game this will be: not a shump. The main character won’t be Hanase or Miko, or even characters in Myara HoAO, she will be someone new and I hope you will like her.

The world of Myara is big and mysterious, a lot of things aren’t known yet. I look forward to December to share this project I put a lot of work and efforts in, with you all!