March 2024 Update

In the last month or so, I've had a few things going on with this project.

Boss Fight

I have never really made a boss fight, but I know I want this game to have them. I made an attempt to start making boss fights two times previously for this game, and both times I felt like I couldn't really get a strong foothold and quickly decided to focus on other things instead. This time, it feels like things are sticking and I'm making progress. I started with an initial idea for a stationary weak point with a variety of defences to test the player's skills and require a sampling of their toolkit. As I started blocking that into a level, trying to see how it feels to engage with a fight like that, the fight quickly evolved. I have landed for now on a pair of boss enemies that move on the sides of the screen and fire at the player in the middle, with a couple of electrical hazards to make things interesting.

Here is a video of the early WIP. Check out the sick music! My audio guy went ahead and composed a boss tune a while ago, and I think it slots in nicely here.

It may not look like much so far, but under the hood I have set up a state machine for a few different attack patterns and I know exactly where the tips of each turret are and where they're pointing. I need to create the actual projectiles for the attacks, get those states switching based on some kind of logic (likely a pattern that increases in speed/intensity as the fight goes on), and then from there do a lot of testing, validating and revising. This will be my main focus for dev work for a little bit, but hoping it doesn't drag on too long.

Art Stuff

I brought the game to Full Indie in Vancouver this past February, and got some great feedback. A couple of people well-versed in UI/UX were able to give me a lot of great feedback on the UI stuff I had been doing. One note I continue to get is on art, mainly that the background and foreground are not clearly separated. I made some attempts to remedy this, but decided to enlist some help from an artist friend who is beginning to help on the project. I have already implemented his sketch of the "cockpit screen" (see February update), but let him know that background art is a higher priority than polishing that piece. I spent a decent chunk of time this month just making sure I get him some strong reference and direction for how I want the game to look and feel, as he is basically beginning to contribute art to the project just now. 

Looking back on my past year of progress, a lot of it is actually art related. Though I've learned a lot, I'm not totally happy with the look of the game and I would rather spend time on designing and coding the game. 

Giving a Talk

At the monthly Full Indie event, two volunteer speakers will get up on stage and give talks. I had an idea for one floating around in my head for a while, and decided to bite the bullet and sign up. The general idea I had was talking about how I keep hobby game dev interesting and fun with a busy life. This was a bit of a roller coaster for me, as my confidence in my idea quickly took a nose dive as I sort of lost the plot and almost turned it into basically a career biography about myself, my failed indie games and my career in the game industry. I ended up narrowing my focus and landing on the ideas of working consistently and sustainably within a busy schedule, breaking down what has worked about my workflow in the past couple years and why I seem to be able to keep pushing on this project with seemingly endless motivation. Despite confidence in the topic, I really started to doubt myself about it. Do I really have any authority on this? I haven't even finished a game using this method. I've never done much public speaking... can I even hold it together and hold people's attention?

The talk seemed to go well though! I got laughs where I hoped to get laughs, got lots of great questions at the end, and had several people come up to me at the event (or message me afterwards) saying it was a great talk. There should be a video posted at some point, as they typically do post videos of the talks and I know it was recorded.

Looking Forward...

Some notes on what I have planned for the next little bit.

• Continue to work on the boss fight and get it feeling fun to play.
• Revising items as a concept. Currently they are expendable and need to be repurchased. I tried out increasing their count to 3 (instead of 1) and giving them to you right away (instead of forcing you to buy them), and I think that helped a lot. But you still have to buy them again when you run out. I want try out a more Estus Flask-like concept, where you get them back after you die. There's a twist I want to try though - not giving them back on checkpoint reload. You have what you had when you got to the checkpoint. I want to encourage returning to the start of the game as part of the game flow, using repeat runs to learn/try new routes, gain currency for upgrades, find new paths forward, etc. Right now, with one checkpoint in the game, people I've seen hit the checkpoint have no interest in going back to see what they missed.
• To revise items, I need to do some fairly minor reworks of how they're purchased and change up the layout of the store UI again (though in this case, I'd be simplifying it). 
• To support the concept of revised items, I want to have a proper checkpoint select screen that really makes it clear what to expect when loading a checkpoint. Not only showing your item count, but likely some kind of representation of where the checkpoint is on the map relative to the blast.
• Before making a map, I want to remedy some level design issues I am painfully aware of. The level design also factors in pretty heavily in how the game progresses in general, naturally, so there are some considerations around when the player can gain access to certain upgrades, and I'd like them to be naturally funneled to the first checkpoint after gaining an item that lets them progress in a new way. To be sure that the concept of "new routes will open up based on your abilities" is very clearly taught.
• Story/dialogue stuff would be great to get stood up at some point!
• All of this ends up being kind of important for the boss fight too, because it's meant to be a culmination of everything you've done and learned so far. So I think I can do it first still, I know what my intent is and there can be a benefit to working backwards, but it's starting to feel like I'll wait a few months before bringing my game out of the shadows for playtesting. That being said, if I can find a reason to get people to play it I'll probably do it.

I think I said something in February about quick updates each month. This one feels kinda long. Oh well.