Hello once more folks,

This is the sixth week of development on The One Who Struggles and it wasn’t a particularly productive week for new content. I spent the majority of it just fixing some bugs mentioned in my last devlog and polishing the current content. That’s not to say that sort of stuff isn’t important, but it’s not flashy. The bugs and causes weren’t very interesting, but took about one and half days to fix!  

I did add a new enemy which behaves sort of like a mini-boss. I call it “Ebb”. It teleports to a random spot, then next horizontally to the player, fires a laser, and then teleports again. It rests for a moment while doing a little “dance” before repeating. The dance is just it moving along an hourglass shaped path and acts as a timer to show when the enemy is going to attack again. I thought that was pretty clever. 

I did start work on phase 3. It’s so far from being ready that I decided to cut it from this week’s build. With everything else out of the way, this final phase will be the goal of this week. You can see a preview on my twitter. There’s still other work to be done too. I want to add a little splash screen when the game launches. I still need to write victory fanfare and gameover music, then redo those screens. I would also like to add a short story message when you start a new game and the ability to skip it. I already have it written and just have to decide how to implement it.

Then there’s some “post support” features I’d like to add. Namely stat tracking so I could add steam achievements if I decide to go that route. I likely will because I think it will find some players there, but Steam is no longer the monolith it once was and we’re finally starting to see small games become more profitable on itch than Steam. 

I do have to admit that I am losing a bit of steam with this project at the moment. I wasn’t expecting a ton from it, but it’s a bit dispiriting whenever you release something and get next to no feedback on it. The game is doing about as well as I expected (maybe even moreso) in terms of downloads for the amount I have been sharing it. To date, it has about 50 page views and 21 downloads. Obviously that’s not a lot by any means, but it’s the ratio that’s important to me. That’s more than 40%! Some of those downloads are the same people downloading the newer builds, which is cool. 

What is dispiriting, however, is the lack of feedback. I’m going to sound like a whiny baby by saying this, I know, but it kind of sucks when you say something like “Please tell me what you think” and don’t hear back from anyone. So please, if you played the game, let me know what you think of it. It doesn’t have to be detailed or positive. Anything would be a big help to keep me motivated. I should really just ask people I know to give me feedback, but I feel like that’s being annoying? I wish I knew of a community of people who just volunteer to playtest hobbyist made games. I would not be surprised if something like that exists for video games as there are quite a few for tabletop rpgs. I just don’t know of any. Outside of like… reddit… which is… uh… reddit.

That’s it for me this week! Hope you all are well!