New Year's Status

Hey friends! Tyro here...


Just wanted to say happy New Year's! I'm making a bit of a solo post here, but I do want to update what's going on in my and Kaiden's world at the moment so that there is at least not complete silence while we continue with the work on the game. There's also something else I want to talk about, but I'll leave that for the end for those who aren't interested.

The first thing is I've been doing some tweaking behind the scenes. Primarily, making it so that enemies are more visible as well as the player so that they are easier to "read". Secondly, I have managed to get those fancy animations from our friend! As they are now, they're fully implemented in the current version, but I'm working on, again, making them a bit more visible. This hopefully will also include a tighter camera, as well as some slight asset re-scaling so that the clarity can come through on some sprites.

Secondly, Kaiden and I are working on our basic framework for how we want to go in terms of level design. Right now we're taking a lot of reference from amazing games like Celeste, SANABI, Sonic, and a few others. But we think we have managed to boil down a few concepts into the core ideas for our level designs, as well as level progression. This is to hopefully smoothen out the initial 5 levels we have(if not, we may remove one or two) and to finally get true use out of the assets we have been telling everyone about, but haven't been utilizing yet in the levels themselves. 

Lastly, I'm going to be updating the tutorial a bit. What I'm mostly thinking is using progressive mechanic design similar to that of Celeste/SANABI specifically, where the game shows you a new mechanic before throwing new challenges at you. However, I also want to avoid "filler" levels that only do this, as eventually it may be a bit annoying. There are other ways of going about this, though, such as integrated tutorials in the levels themselves. What my dream would be, however, is more dynamic pop-up text that is optional, which I can see being a relatively easy thing to pull off. 

Now, for the end point. Heres the thing: In my opinion, I don't dislike the current state of the game, but I won't be afraid to admit that it is not ideal(In my eyes). My main issue with this project has been managing the time to get it done, and well...I won't say I was not part of that problem, and as a result I didn't hit that mark of launching at the "end of 2024." I realize maybe some parts of the game were more involved than I expected, but I also underestimated scope creep. It's a bit odd, at least to me, because I've been trying really hard to avoid that, but I guess when you're in a discord call with one of your friends that you're making a game with you can't help but come up with an endless stream of ideas on what could make the game "better." I guess another BIG mistake was taking a long term project that I had been working on-and-off of for what has now been 2 years as making it my first proper, real game project, which I always here is never a good idea. But, I'm this far down the sewer, may as well keep swimming, right? Regardless, I just wanted to share my personal feelings on the state of the game so that I can be as transparent as possible. As it stands, in my dream universe where everything is perfect, me and Kaiden can produce some good, quality levels within a couple weeks, but it's pretty clear that can't just happen. Not when we both have work, and real life responsibilities to attend to.

TL;DR: Game development is wierd. And hard. And it takes a while. Regardless, just know we are still hard at work on what we are trying to achieve. Our total goal for the game is 20 levels, and we have 5. Some of those 5 may not make it into the final version, and we're getting around to putting together a real formula on how to create said levels. In the meantime, we'll be seeing you!