Hello folks,

So recently I lost my day job after enduring months of harassment from HR regarding my auto-immune disease/disability. I was looking for new work that whole time but other than some interviews I didn’t find anything. After the firing I realized how much trauma from awful managers and that I just needed a break. Fortunately I have enough savings and a wonderful partner to afford me the privilege to take that break. 

I just want to make games and now I have the time, so I should take that time to make something, right? My problem as a hobbyist developer is often I would get burnt out from my day job and lose focus on my game projects leading to me to just never finish them. It’s always been very hard for me to resist the urge of the new project. Oftentimes my ideas have been over ambitious too, but that came from a place of “I’ll probably never finish this so it’s fine if I make something massive since it’s mostly just for the fun of making it.” 

I think this is actually a healthy philosophy as, despite what capitalism demands, we are not content mills. While I believe that Art is a conversation always. It can be a conversation between the artist and themself. The important thing is to be creative as individuals and that creativity endures the horrors of the modern world. Still, I so desperately want to finish and release something because, ultimately, I want my games to be played. 

That brings me to this project, The One Who Struggles. 

As a concept this game is fairly simple. You play as a genderless little fellow (the titular one who struggles) and must fight against a single entity that changes over time. It is essentially a run’and’gun platformer along the lines of something like Contra but only the boss fights. It was partially inspired by the old freeware game Banana Nababa, which pitted players against a series of boss fights. Multiple bosses felt a bit too much for me, so instead I decided to opt for a single boss that has multiple phases. Three phases to be exact. Ideally each with increasing challenge, but I only made one of them so far. 

Much of the art came from a previous project that never got off the ground. Both it and this project use 4x4 pixel titles which prove to be quite challenging to make art for, but I really like the look of. It really drives the point home why the NES and other consoles of that era used 16x16 tiles. Not only can you fit a lot more detail but it’s actually easier to draw. Ah well, I made my choice. Fortunately the tininess does mean that any indecision I have on art can be quickly changed. Sometimes something may just look like a blob of pixels, but at least I don’t have to spend a whole day working on it.

The art style isn’t fully realized yet. If you’re familiar with my previous game, Void Wisp, you’ll know it had a cool color cycling effect and, for a number of reasons (see below), I want to have a similar effect for this game. The issue is that I’m using tilesets and in GMS2.3, the only way to apply an effect like that to them would be to use a shader. I have next to no experience with shaders, so it hasn’t been a high priority for me. I do know that a simple effect like that shouldn’t be too hard and should be a good experience for familiarizing myself with shaders.

Let’s talk about what the player character can do in this game. 

First off, there’s some nuance to the character movement that may not be instantly obvious. The verbs that character has are pretty much what you’d expect. You can walk, run (R2), and jump.  Moving horizontally adds height to your jump. So the faster you’re moving the higher you’ll jump. This lets me design some interesting moment-to-moment risk-v-reward choices since horizontal movement has momentum. You can’t just turn around instantly. You have to commit. I feel this gives the character some weight and physicality as well. I didn’t want the character to feel like a superhero who can move with perfect precision. 

Secondly, you have three weapons at your disposal:

Thorn - a rapid fire short-range horizontal attack. Holding “up” while attacking will give you a shotgun-like attack instead. This can do a lot of damage really quickly, but it’s limited range means you’ll have to put yourself in tough positions to take advantage of it.

Arc - the classic video arcing attack. Similar to the axe of Castlevania fame. There are a few key differences though. One, this bounces off solid surfaces. Two, you can change the angle of the arc by holding up or down. This can give you a lot of freedom to deal with things above you while dodging other things.

Hum - a weapon that homes in on enemies. It has high damage but a low fire rate. It’s “neutral” attack is a charge. You can hold the attack button to store charges and then release to fire many shots off at once. Holding up will fire a single shot at a low rate. This weapon is very safe as the projectile can go through walls, but it has a lot of variance and you’ll likely not hit exactly what you’re aiming for.

These weapons are intended to have their own niches and uses. Ideally players will recognize when each is worth switching to, but also allows players to challenge themselves by trying to only use one item.

I don’t have too much to say about the boss you face at the moment. I wanted to go with something that would feel like a final boss in both challenge and scale. This first phase isn’t quite there yet. There’s still a lot of areas that are safe and easy to cheese (as you can see from the video posted above.) I will likely reduce the safe spots and put in some additional attacks/obstacles to keep the player moving. 

The lack of audio also negatively impacts this goal. Audio is something I plan on focusing on for week 2. I will likely make it in Famitracker and then do some additional effects in FL Studio since I don’t want to have purely 8-bit audio. The music will likely be fairly simple and easy to fade into the background, but I haven’t even started to do sketches of it.

Something else to note about that boss as it is now that may not be super obvious is that you can deal damage to it by hitting the turret things on either side of the arena. They only take 1 damage regardless of the weapon used, but I wanted (at least in the first phase) for players to always be able to deal damage to the boss. They’ll continue in the next phases in vastly different appearances, but likely have that same quirk. You can expect that the boss (and arena) will change pretty drastically between phases. I just have to be sure to temper my ambition.

Lastly, I wanted to mention that while there’s not a ton of story planned for this game, there is a narrative connection between it and Void Wisp. It may seem strange, and I’m certainly not going to explain how right now, but the two are part of a series I’ve been planning for years. When it comes to the sort of narrative I want to tell…. I kind of want to be intentionally obscure with it. Not because I think it has some grand idea or even because I want room to change if I decide to. 

No. 

Actually it’s because I want to be in conversation with (hopefully) a future community of fans and fan theories. I already know the cosmology of the narrative more or less, and it’s largely not going to matter to any of the games in the series, but I want to hint at it here and there to give people room to speculate and create their own works around it. Even if they end up being wrong. I hope to cultivate a community that is interested in the possibilities of the way the greater lore functions without seeing it as a puzzle that needs to be solved. We’ll see if that happens though.

OK. This is long enough. That’s it for this week. You can play the current build of the game now for free. This game will be free until it’s done, at which I’ll start charging for it. If you download it now you’ll always have a valid key through itch.io as far as I’m aware. I may allow for some other alternative payments such as pay-with-fanart. I would also like to bring it to Steam, but that’s an extremely low priority. The goal is just to make a finished product ultimately. I don’t have solid plans for it beyond that.