Hello Folks,

I ended up deciding not to release something last week for a number of reasons. Originally I was just going to delay it but, oh buddy, that heatwave was extreme. I’m not going to dwell on that though! The week itself was productive enough as I implemented one of the last big things (key rebinding), fleshed out some features, and spent a lot of time on balancing the game. 

This week was really all about accessibility. The first thing I want to talk about is the new “Style” settings menu. This is essentially the game’s “Difficulty” settings, but I really do not think that “Difficulty” accurately conveys what we mean conceptually when we use it for games. Ultimately we are asking the player what “style” of experience they want. Words like “Easy”, “Medium”, and “Hard” have a weight and association to them that doesn’t always lineup with player or developer intentions. 

So instead, this game has Style Presets that try to communicate the settings more directly. (Though I am still unsure that "Pleasant" and "Sheer" achieve this, but hopefully they are at least evocative.) The other important thing is that these presets are not tiered. They are generally organized from what most folks would probably find “easier” to “harder”, but that isn’t all that intentional. Nor is it fully true as Standard is the first one and that would be equivalent to “Normal” or “Medium”. 

What do these presets actually change though? Well, as you can see in the screenshot, a lot of stuff actually. The players, themselves, can then alter these settings further. For this game these settings are simple things. Player health, enemy health, the frequency which enemies drop health pickups, that sort of stuff. This is due to the kind of game it is. The feature is one I plan on using for all my games. It was even in Void Wisp. 

I want players to get the sort of challenge they want from the game. It's very likely that will differ from what I originally planned. My goal as a game designer is not to attempt to make something that will be right for all players, or to guess how an easy or hard mode would work for most people. 

The risk of a system like this is that it can be overwhelming. This should be solved by presets. Even then too many presets can be just as overwhelming. That’s why I start it on “Standard” and then give them options like “Practice” and “Beginner”.

One thing I would like to do in the future is allow players to save and export their own style presets. This is not something I will be doing for this game, but eventually!

The next big thing is the key rebinding feature! This is one of those things that seems like it would be super difficult to implement but is a lot easier than you’d think except when it’s not. Haha. The only real problem I faced when implementing this was being a doofus and forgetting to change the way the options menu detects you want to change an option. Once I realized my mistake though, it was pretty smooth sailing. Though I have to admit, it’s not the most elegant at all. You see, each verb is it’s own variable rather than a single array for verbs, so a lot of stuff has to be hard coded or repeated rather than in nice little for loops. But whatever! It works and the players will never see that stuff. 

I don’t really have too much else to say right now. Next week should have the final phase in it for the most part. After that, it’s polish, additional audio, and other minor features. Then this game is done.

Thanks for reading!