This was an eventful month! Following my devblog post last month, I started sharing the project on a couple of game dev forums, and through a logical process which eludes me now 30 days later determined that a) I wanted to have the first chapter of the game complete by the end of 2017 and b) that in order to do this I should create a complete task-list and schedule for the project up to that point. This ended up taking me a few days, but I really feel like it was worth it. I now have, printed across 12 pages, a fairly comprehensive list of work that needs to be done in order to complete the first chapter of the game. There’s going to be four chapters total, so a lot of work will remain to complete the game even after all this, but the scope of the work will be determined and I’ll know how much time and effort it takes to create finished content for the game. All major gameplay bugs should get eliminated through this process, and all fundamental design code will be firmly in place.
I broke the schedule up into a total of five three-month blocks, one for the rest of this year and four others for next year. Currently, for this year’s block, I have 24/53 tasks completed or otherwise resolved. I also have a few tasks which I had to add to the list which aren’t accounted for there, as well as a few that are partially complete, but it’s still good progress and I’m proud of how quickly I’m getting the work done. Now, I expect some future tasks to be quite a bit trickier, and I also expect many unforeseen tasks to crop up, but that’s why I’m trying to get ahead of schedule now – as well as acknowledging that December is likely to be so busy with other stuff that I’ll probably only be able to work for half of it.
The biggest task accomplished over this month is the attack animations. All right-facing attack animations are complete – well, except for the occasional mistake or two still to be fixed, a few of which I’m noticing as I watch the attack montage play below. About half of the left-facing attacks are complete as well, and they should progress more quickly on average now that I have the right-facing attacks to use as template and I’ve got so much sprite creation practice. There were a few big sticking points: I realized after mostly completing them that the original standing attack animation was a) boring and b) functionally redundant with the running attack animation. I’ve since replaced the former with the latter, but fortunately not all was lost: I was able to use the standing attack frames to resolve another issue that had cropped up. When I changed the crouching position of the right arm some time ago, I invalidated the entire swing arc of the primary crouching attack animation prototype. However, the new arm position made perfect sense for the motion of the unused standing attack animation, so I just pulled the torso from those frames into the crouch animation. I still had to redo the leg positions from scratch, but it was a nice shortcut into creating a good expressive attack.
I’ve also been working on the music for the game. The first few areas largely have completed music tracks already, since I created music concurrent with them to figure out the tone I was going for, but as I made that music like five years ago there’s a lot of rough edges in those old tracks and they’re not necessarily well set up to work with the systems I want to have in place for the game. That is to say, I’m not planning on just creating a loop for each area, but having some degree of adaptive music based on where specifically the player is in an area and what the game state of that area is. Thus, I’ve been remastering the old tracks, making small composition tweaks, and rearranging the parts to make jumping between them work better. Fortunately, I found that by setting timers and jump points, I could very elegantly skip between segments of an adaptive track to switch playback to a new section. Less fortunately, I discovered that a track with tempo changes and heavy use of delay effects is probably the least optimal type of track to feed into such a system. Still, it’s functional for now, even if some of the track transitions sound a bit odd. I’ve at least proven out the basic concept and built the architecture: If I need to change things up a bit later to resolve these issues, it should be quite feasible.
I’ve also been working on tilesets and backgrounds here and there. I made this background very desaturated to create a clear delineation between background areas and gameplay areas, and also to reinforce the misty feel I was going for, but I worry a bit about how well it will work with the extremely vivid and saturated caves background I made before. I really love playing with color in unexpected ways, like I did with making the distance in the caves background a dark vivid red, but consistency is important as well. In the end, that’s something I can only figure out by getting the assets into the game and playing around with them and seeing what works. Really, though, changing palettes is incredibly easy compared to creating new assets, so it probably won’t be a big deal at any rate.
In addition to the backgrounds, I’ve created a number of the transitional tilesets necessary to blend different tilesets together. Now I can have grass tiles next to stone tiles next to dirt tiles without them looking like artificial grid-based garbage. There’s still some gaps in there, tiles that I’ll need to create that I haven’t noticed I’ll need to create, but I can build out most of the environments I want to now, at least at a degree of rough detail.
Over November I plan to finish out all of the character animations and start creating detail assets for the first section of the first chapter – Mostly just different kinds of grass and stone to start with but, again, in many of these cases I won’t know what I’ve forgotten until I get there and find I don’t have it. Still, finishing this game, as distant a goal as it remains, feels more concrete and feasible now than it has in a long time.