It’s been a bit of a weird month. I haven’t worked deeply on much, but made a lot of slight progress on different things, and have also made some substantial revisions to the game design.
Well, first things first, I made this piece of background art:
I like how this one turned out, but I also need to make an alternate version of it for a special effect I have planned and that one is proving to be a bit difficult. A lot of these background images are almost technical problems, where I need to figure out a way to depict the idea I have in my head without getting bogged down for hours and hours, and also to depict an area that makes some sense relative to the actual navigable portion of terrain the game takes place in. This background already has taken far more time than any of the others, and the potential for an even more detailed and time-consuming version has me a bit concerned, so I’m trying to figure out a clever way to approach it..
With these concerns in mind, I decided to drop the background work for a bit and work on some animations. I began creating animations for one of the other early-game enemies, the Crawler:
This is one of very few enemies in the game what does damage on contact rather than having to do a particular attack, and is more or less completely unaggressive and minds its own business – an obstacle as much as an enemy, really. The animations aren’t quite complete yet, with the turn animation in particular being a bit of a troublesome obstacle, but it’s coming along. Once this and the mask enemy are complete, there’s only one more enemy type planned for the first couple areas of the game, so I’ll have pretty much everything I need in place to finish building out the early areas. I also spent some time building out some of the animations I’ll need for the other variations on the mask enemy, such as the stone throwing and spear throwing types, but nothing finished as of yet.
There were some other minor side-lines – a system for making it possible to modify a value from multiple locations without overwriting each other’s modifications, building a special ‘alternate reality’ effect for the second area, roughing out some of the level designs… near the end of the month, though, I realized, or perhaps merely acknowledged, a number of substantial design flaws that were threatening to undermine the game. These had to do with the upgrades I had planned, when you were likely to find them in the game, and how useful and interesting they would be. The biggest problem that emerged was that I had come up with the idea of this attack using the sling and, when I thought about how it would feel in action, I realized it was completely unsatisfactory. Essentially I was planning this whole ability which didn’t really have any role in what the player was doing – it would be the only ranged attack available, sure, but in a game where ranged attacks weren’t really necessary to succeed, and it would totally clutter up the control system.
I spent a few days thinking about this, and eventually came up with a whole new system, with a set of 4 elemental attacks and alternate forms of each attack, along with a system of special attack ‘charges’ that get restored whenever the player gets hit. I think this is a pretty good idea! But it also presents a lot of issues with, again, when the player finds upgrades and what role those upgrades play in the overall flow of the game. I’m still not 100% there with this design, but the missing pieces will probably be small things that I can fit into place as I go rather than massive gaping holes that I need to invent whole new game systems to fill.
Since then, I’ve just been reworking the way attacks are programmed to make room for this system. The new attack system is far more flexible than before, though there are probably still some ways I could improve it that I may have to consider.
This month will probably have more work on creating enemy animations, a little bit more design work figuring out what the flow of upgrades and specific properties of special attacks will be (along with whether I want to have, say, special objects that the player can interact with using said special attacks), and perhaps laying the groundwork for creating the special attacks themselves – though they are mostly a low priority for a moment, since most of them are planned to be found later in the game than the first chapter, which is where I am currently focusing my development effort. If I don’t feel like that stuff then creating assets and level details for the first couple areas, finishing the mentioned background image, or building improving tilesets are also strong possibilities for productive work to do next.