Weekly mod news 24/11/2024 "Week 2 of the super monkey's rework"

Bloons mod: "Super monkey reworks: robo monkey path & other small touches"
1. Robo monkey, Tech terror & Anti Bloon upgrades have been reworked from an upgrade with a few firing formations to a dual wielding weapon swapping machine, firing darts or boomerangs, what you choose is your choice! Darts being easier to aim and fire faster, while boomerangs are better for pierce and area clearing but fire a little bit slower and are harder to hit than darts. Also you get this choice with each hand, your not just limited to only darts or only rangs, you can mix them to have your left hand fire darts and the other hand fire rangs! Or even the inverse! Tech terror onward gain a third option, missiles that deal 2 layers of damage in a wide area with a pierce of 30 but has a 4x slower firing speed than darts & rangs.
2. New huds: Robo monkey/030 super monkey
3. Spikeball/300dart, juggernaut/400dart, & ultra juggernaut/500dart all got a damage buff alongside a projectile buff that when the spikeball hits the ground after enough bounces it stays there for a bit before disappearing poping a total of: 10 bloons for spikeball/300dart, and 20 for juggernaut/400dart & ultra juggernaut/500dart
4. boomerang monkey upgrades: Glaives/200boomerang, Glaive ricochet/300boomerang, M.O.A.R Glaives/400boomerang, Glaive Lord/500boomerang, all got a new hud frame as holding the glaive in the idle frame blocked most of the screen.

Platformer mod: "Platformer mod news? after 5 weeks?"
1. started on stone man's level.

Other:
1. Started work on video: CobrasBloonsMod: Introduction & dart monkey!

Plans for next week? I either will spend my time working on the bloons mod introduction video or the dark knight path for the super monkey. It will be one or the other as I'm going to be busy this week.

Weekly mod news 17/11/2024 "The start of the super monkey's rework"

Bloons mod: "Super monkey reworks"
1. Super monkey now has mid-air firing frames!
2. new skins made: Sun avatar, dark knight, dark champion, legend of the night.
3. new upgrade for the super monkey: Awesome boots! This togglable item allows the superb ability to fly freely, but at the cost of quickly draining the super monkey ability bar while active.
4. Super monkey upgrades reworked: default, 100, 200, 010, 020, 001 & 002
5. laser vision & plasma vision upgrades gain a new charge attack that while holding down altfire fires a constant almost-hitscan laser/plasma beam but slowing the user in the process and draining super ability ammo as long as the button is held.
6. Discovered an unintentional set of code that gave the super monkey 2 ammo regen warpers instead of one, that is fixed now as I decided to delete one of them but made the remaining one twice as powerful. As I liked the results it was giving.
7. Did a private online test (by myself) and two bugs were found, **first, round messages don't appear online for some reason, and the second one is monkey corpses remain when the player dies.** both of them are fixed now.
8. Fixed a bug that Somehow was created while reworking the super monkey making the game more and more laggy every second you played as the super monkey for some reason?

Plans for next week? I plan on continuing the super monkey this week and making a video as well, either I work on the robo monkey path or the dark knight path, the sun temple will be saved for last due to it's gimmicks. I plan to make a video this week as well, "Cobra's guide to the bloons mod! Introduction & the dart monkey class".


I know a free flight ability will sound busted, but I'm trying really hard to balance it as I still need to figure out a good cost for this optional upgrade.

Discord is doing something weird, so mod news might be delayed until Discord fixes itself.

Weekly mod news 10/11/2024 "More bloon machine fixes, fortified moab class voxels & bug fixing!"

Bloons mod: "Fully reworked bloon machine & more!"
1. All bloons are registered in the bloon machine now.
2. Decided to finally finish all directions for super monkey flight frames.
3. New CVAR: BM_EndOfRoundBonus, if this is set to true at the end of each round you get $100 monkey money! Only for one player per round though.
4. Bloon machine now displays the round contents using messages! Sadly it's only text and no images yet.
5. Fortified moab class bloons now have voxels!
6. Class select icons broke due to the use of "menu_joingamewithclass" in previous zandronum versions there were no issues, I asked for some help and I ended using a version of "closemenu;join" and the problem was fixed.

Plans for next week? I plan on starting on the super monkey this week, he will take a long time due to the importance of this monkey. If he's weak no one would like that and if he's too strong everyone will play him causing a giant money issue for all players.

Weekly mod news 3/11/2024 "More afterburn application & more!"

Bloons mod: "The last of the mortar monkey code, and the reworked bloon machine system!"
1. Mortar monkey Burny stuff DOT added to Camo, Regrow, & Camo Regrow bloons. That means it works on all bloons now.
2. Ninja monkey flash bombs used on red bloons wouldn't give money to players, don't know how I missed that but it's fixed now.
3. Mortar monkey dunk huds implemented
4. Fixed an oversight where all ninja monkey paths got the benefits of 100 and where it got nuts is if you would get 100crosspath & have shinobi buff creating an insane firing speed buff on any path. Making the super monkey completely outclassed.
5. Mortar monkey now is able to move while firing but it's very slow movement, it's slow to keep the main downside of playing the mortar monkey but making it a little bit more forgiving.
6. The Bloon machine has been reworked! Now for the bloons to spawn you'll need to make ACs scripts holding the wave composition only spawning the next wave once all bloons are dead. This allows for more customized round formations! Of course you'll need to place a new object that are bloon spawners, currently they come in all-bloons, No-moabs, and finally Only-Moabs. All default rounds implemented!
7. Pink Speed is getting a price buff as it was insanely valuable for it's price, $500 > $900.
8. Due to the round machine change rounds are processed faster! I assume it's 2-4x faster than the old system.
9. The first bloons mod map BLONM1 I put more boundries in it to prevent bloons from going out of bounds + added bloon spawnpoints to the map.

Plans for next week? So I plan to work on another video while I come up with how I'm going to tackle the final reworks for the super monkey. I believe he should take about 4-6 weeks to complete and once he's done I can get onto the final stage of the mod, more maps, balancing & enhanced visual effects.

"Why is the machine here if you said the rounds machine was reworked?" That machine is to start the default rounds. Once the machine is hit rounds will spawn when the previous one is cleared until everyone dies or all the rounds are beaten.

"Cobra what's this? A countdown?!" Yes, it is. So when a round finishes a new message shows up and for the first round there is a 5 second timer before the rounds start, every round after that has a 2 second timer I'm still figuring out how long the timer should be in between rounds.

So these Fortified red bloons are the new bloon spawnpoints, these will be invisible on release.

Weekly mod news 27/10/2024 "Mortar monkey week, ignited edition!"

Bloons mod: "More Mortar monkey reworks, the destructive power of flames!"
1. Mortar monkey Burny stuff DOT works! On red - ceramic & all Moab class bloons, still needs compatibility with camo, regrow & camo regrow bloon variants.
2. Green regen charm nerfed: 35tics for 2 hp > 30tics fo4 1 hp.
3. Mortar monkey afterburn had a bug where you could stack more and more afterburn effects every time a Bloon would get hit by afterburn inducing damage types. So if you had blooncineration you'd shred high health bloons with relative ease as long as you could keep connecting the lingering hitbox.
4. Old exit text changed and new ones added for a total of 16!
5. Mortar monkey bug discovered where if BM_NoAutoCashPickup is set to FALSE afterburn would give no money so I've made bloons drop corpses if they die with the afterburn debuff on them. It will be like this until I find out how to fix this problem which will take quite a while due to Zandronum jank.

Plans for next week? Some skins for the super monkey, hopefully applying afterburn to the rest of the bloons, and getting mortar dunk huds implemented. I also plan to rework the bloon machine once those other three objectives are done, mainly to make the bloon spawns more customizable and lower the chance of trolling. I'm going to need to sleep well tonight as the mortar monkey afterburn has been a real pain wanting to work for 2 seconds then not working taking 26 minutes to fix that then more jank taking more time... You get it, not fun stuff. But yeah once the Mortar monkey is done and the bloon machine is updated I'll be able to work on the super monkey once and for all unless if another issue needs addressing.

I got to make more screenshots like these while I'm doing mod making.

Weekly mod news 20/10/2024 "Mortar monkey week"

Bloons mod: "Mortar monkey reworks, I hope you're good at dunking!"
1. Mortar monkey shells now have a voxel for where you aim at, when a shell is fired the same voxel appears for where the shell is going to land.
2. mortar monkey shells reworked to have a pierce cap and multiple burny stuff damagetypes!
3. Discovered & patched a bug where mortar monkey shells would explode on low ceilings, now they only explode when they come in contact with the floor.
4. Mortars now use voxels!
5. mortar launch attacks reworked! now you fly fast when launched and gradually slow down with distance, top path allows you to throw a shell where you're aiming while in flight, middle path increases the flight distance and bottom path makes you throw fiery shells. Cross paths allow use of other path's launch benefits!
6. Mortar monkey no longer dies if he drops shells on himself... I wanted to keep this to encourage people to not aim down but it would cause a lot of rage quits instead of being a learning experience.

Plans for next week? This week should be the last code additions to the mortar monkey being the full implementation of afterburn on bloons, explosion visuals will have to wait until the final visuals phase. That will start once the super monkey's new code is done. Mod works might be slowed down in the upcoming weeks due to IRL events.

Weekly mod news 13/10/2024 "Boomerang final additions & flipped gravity!"

Bloons mod: "Extra additions to the Boomerang"
1. Sonic boom implemented to a few other upgrades that didn't have it before.
2. turbo charge & perma charge ability rangs now are a bright green & magenta color respectively.
3. Dart monkey code optimized and easily moddable like the others (mortar & super monkeys have yet to get this but they'll get it soon)

Platformer mod: "Flipping gravity"
1. Flipped gravity gimmick made! It reacts a little slower but it does a good job for a proper first version! Although it only really works with megaman at the moment and he needs a few more sets of reverse gravity sprites implemented and a few small issues to fix. (Air jumps & Wall jumps don't work with this yet)

Other:
1. Video finished: Vclasses shenanigans 5

Plans for next week? I plan to work on the mortar monkey this week, he won't be done in a single week as there is quite a bit for me to rework.

Weekly mod news 6/10/2024 "Boomerang week"

Bloons mod: "Boomerang week"
1. New boomerang monkey huds made! (all upgrades, bionic boomer huds may need position adjustments)
2. boomerang monkey code optimized and fixing old code issues
3. glaive lord's orbitals have been reworked to take less space and have more functionality, they have a pierce cap of 1 pierce every game tick (35 pierce a second!), do more base damage & do more layers per hit. Also the direction of the orbitals reacts to which hand you use!
4. an old bug with the glaive lord returned allowing the player to use the glaive orbitals to keep slicing bloons even when they are dead. I patched it while working on the new glaive lord kit.
5. Boomerang monkey skins were not fully implemented until I found that the skins weren't showing up for upgrades so I fixed that in two minutes.
6. Boomerang monkey turbo & permacharge abilities now run on a timer like how super monkey fanclub does.
7. This was a suggestion from a friend *OmegaKnight64*: New boomerang monkey attack Sonic boom! Press altfire to throw a fast moving projectile forward, there is a little wind-up before the projectile is thrown so use for situations where normal rangs don't quite reach where you want them to reach. Each upgrade + crosspath enhances this ability from the amount of bloons it can hit, faster cooldown or even extend the range of the projectile! Which one you pick is your choice!

Other:
1. Currently working on a video: Vclasses shenanigans 5

Plans for next week? I'm either finishing the video for Vclass Shenans 5, working on the mortar monkey or making the dart monkey like everyone else by optimising his file size, or working on a few other projects. Most likely I'd pick the bloons mod stuff. Only 2 monkeys need finalization reworks now! I'm close to the end of the additions just a few more weeks to push through!

One frame of the total 98 frames made for the boomerang monkey!
To those who are here for the platformer mod there won't be much news on that until V2 of the bloons mod is publicly released that could be in 2 months or less if things go well, so hang on tight! I'll be back to that mod the moment the bloons mod V2 is released.

Weekly mod news 29/9/2024 "Hiatus week"

No news this week as I decided to relax this week, but what am I doing next week? Boomerang monkey huds & updates. To make him feel like he fits in the newly buffed monkeys. After the boomerang monkey is done I'll hammer the fixes & updates to mortar monkey and then I can finally begin on the biggest challenge of all the classes. Super monkey, the one who is very hard to balance, to make his upgrades useful but giving them the right price will be hard and the later upgrades will be difficult...