Hello folks,

I’m a few days late on this so I apologize. The reason is I’m extremely close to finishing up the main parts of this game. (Also I spent much of last week distracted by blaseball, you understand.) So I figured I would delay any release until I get the last bits done. As of writing this I have 3 things I want to do. I got to put in the boss explosion “cutscene” and add music to the victory and defeat screens. Those things are in the new update that should be posted along with this dev log.

I was going to post a much more somber version of this Monday, but as I was writing the update I got some extremely exciting news that helped reinvigorate my motivation and made me decide to add some extra features, such as an in-game tutorial and POINTS. The tutorials will have some simple text explaining the concept and then players must either get to a thing marked “EXIT” or destroy all the targets, etc. 

The scoring system on the other hand is something that I wanted to do but wasn’t sure about since I started this project. You can’t just add in points and expect it to feel good or balanced. There’s a lot to consider. I brainstormed something yesterday that I think can work within the bounds of the game and be thematic to the series as a whole. In Void Wisp you earned points by coming close to obstacles without hitting them. Essentially like grazing in some bullet hell games. Something like that could work pretty well in this game I feel and would be a nice nod to my previous game. That wouldn’t be the only thing though, you will gain points for hitting the boss, lose points for getting hit, gain a multiplier for avoiding damage for a set amount of time, etc. 

Neither of these new systems will be in the next version of the game (the one I was supposed to upload Sunday), but should be done by the end of the month. I actually have a pretty hard deadline so that will be all the feature creep I can budget. 

In the more somber update I had thought about keeping the game free forever since it is so short. A run in this game can be as quick at 10 minutes. My worry is players who are skilled at this sort of game could do that in their first attempt. Players who are less skilled would probably find it too frustrating to get to the point where they could beat it. I’m still debating if I’m going to charge for this, but figure if there is replayability it makes it more justified. Alternatively, part of me wants to maybe crowdfund my next project (I have to do more research on crowdfunding first), and TOWS was always a sort of prototype of that project. It may be a good thing to keep it free to act as a sort of demo since so much about the art style and movement will be the same. The issue there is I’m probably not going to have the same sort of bullet-hell-ness that this game ended up with.

This project was extremely good for my ability as a game dev and for my confidence in that ability. I am fully ready to move on to something a bit larger and more interesting. There’s a lot that I realized I would do differently/better. Many of the bugs I ran into were because I didn't separate the states well enough. I was still figuring out my workflow and the new features of GameMakerStudio 2.3. There still is some stuff I got to learn and refinements to my workflow, but I would not have put in the effort if I didn’t have a project like this. This game is ultimately really small and the 3 months it’ll take me to finish feels kind of laughable. But, actually, whatever, the experience will help me make future projects quicker.

Thanks for reading and I hope you’re all doing great!