Hey, everybody! How's 2020 treating y'all? It's been going pretty good for me and it's even better now that I can reveal the 9th crasher: Darlene!

Darlene is the former leader of a girl biker gang called 77 Golden Demons, Hana's mom, and strong enough to punch a hole in the moon if that's something that she felt like doing. She's been in the works for a while after a few setbacks with her mechanical design and animations, but now she's finally ready to be unleashed upon the world. She's the most complicated character to date and comes with some very unique mechanics.

Darlenes Trait: Hard Knocks -  The only thing that can keep Darlene's power in check is her own sense of restraint. To represent this, her trait "Hard Knocks" causes her attacks to be weaker unless you hold the attack button to charge it up. Her uncharged attacks create grey "null waves" that can't crash enemy waves and will just disappear on contact. Charging to 50% will launch the standard orange waves. But getting to 100% charge will launch blue super waves, meaning any attack has the potential to as powerful as other characters' special attacks. In practice it looks like this:

This trait came about from the fact that when I was planning Darlene, the two ideas I was working with was that I wanted a mom character in the game and that I wanted her to be the most physically powerful character in the WaveCrash!! universe. I tested out a few other ideas that either weren't fun or weren't fair, but I feel like this was the best realization of that idea. In a game where any hit counts the same, it can be difficult to convey varying degrees of strength, but I think the constant access to super waves at a cost pulls it off.

Darlene's Special Attack: Meteor Impact - Since her trait gives her all the super waves she could want, her special attack is more of a support option. Darlene strikes the earth with her golden ring bearing fists with enough force to destroy oncoming waves and daze her opponent. Dazed opponents move and slower and have reduced animation speed, currently set to 70% of normal speed. This can create the opening she needs to unleash a fully charged attack and finish her opponent off.

So there you go! Darlene introduces a new type of a wave and a status effect (represented by those dizzy stars in the GIF above)! She might be tricky to get the hang of, but hopefully folks enjoy unleashing her devastating power on opponents!

Other Updates: With this build, I've updated to Unity 2019 so that I can use it's improved 2D sprite features. I haven't noticed any issues besides it scrambling up the text alignment but I think I've cleaned up all of the instances of that. If any text looks like it's out of place, let me know!