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[marcgfx]

I released Devader in September 2019 with very little response and sales. I'm still working on a few aspects and trying to get something to happen, but my efforts have been in vain so far.

Today I decided to record myself playing. Pretty sure I will not end up being a youtuber/streamer

[marcgfx]

I had a trailer made in 2018 for gamescom by m.joshua with music by trommelfell.mb. Both did a really good job. When I was getting ready for release in september 2019, I contacted joshua to see if the trailer could be adapted. He did not have the time and I kind of dropped the ball on this, releasing with the 2018 gamescom trailer. Release went horribly and the trailer has been bothering me ever since. So I finally managed to kick my own butt and refurbish the trailer, meaning I only replaced the footage but kept the voice/music of the original trailer.





Since release I've been a bit lost, but could not working on my baby. I made a lot of balance adjustments, improved the effects & sounds, added more stuff. I've still got about 30 different enemy prototypes hanging around that are not in the game.

Recent feedback about the game being very multi-tasking heavy (I was aware) made me think about adding a new character class that would be more focused on the player. It's fun to do, but I know there will be a lot of balancing required + way more hidden work than I am currently aware of.

I sometimes wonder if there is a time I should just give up. Devader has only sold very few copies and hardly validates putting in even a week of extra work. I still can't just let it go as I feel it has more potential. But I could be completely wrong about this and am wasting my time and money.

[JobLeonard]

How did I completely miss this devlog until now...

[marcgfx]

So much stuff gets posted on TIGsource, it's a bit like Steam... Hard to stand out I guess. That pretty much sums up my experience as a dev so far, any advice how to change that?

I mentioned in the previous post, that I thinking about adding a less multi-tasking heavy player character. I've heard some would rather have a playstyle of crimsonland/serious sam. So the idea is to create a character that does not require the players attention to leave their character as much, allowing them to focus on avoiding and shooting. Not sure how possible this is, but I have already started working on some stuff.

Instead of turrets this Devader has a large protective outer ring. I am still very unsure how this will fit in to the game. What happens if the ring gets destroyed? How/can it be restored during a level? Or will it only be replenished after defeating a level boss. I'm also very unsure what it will be able to do. Is it just protective, or should it add additional firepower. Currently adding more firepower seems like the fun route. Maybe it can feel a bit like jumping in a tank in contra/metal slug.


The other two experiment you can see are replacements for the nuclear weapon. The missile can be targeted across the whole screen. This is fine for mouse and keyboard players, but requires some more work for gamepad players. So the new ideas don't require distance targeting, either firing a double barrel laser or a barrage of tiny rockets (or balls... as seen here).

I've also been thinking about players expecting a more TD approach... I might just end up adding some more building options as I have managed to free up some space in my 4006² texture atlas.

[JobLeonard]

Supporting different playstyles is probably a good idea, yeah. Lots of extra work though

[marcgfx]

I agree, but it's kind of fun with a new approach. Gives me back some motivation. The more focused play style should be doable, it will require balancing and some special features will have to be altered to accommodate it. In the worst case I will have to change some enemies and bosses, but currently I don't think so. Have not seen the full scope of what I am getting myself into. But I am positive about being able to solve this reasonable well.

The TD/RTS approach will be much more exciting. I've tested out some old assets I made over 15 years ago... lol. I just had to rerender them in the appropriate sizes and colors. Looks like I still have some space to work with in my texture atlas. This is just a test in photoshop, I can easily add a lot more static towers.

[marcgfx]

I've just been making random stuff lately. I tried to make something like a sea-slug, even drew my own little texture for it.



Then I continued an old experiment with IK and combined it with bezier curves (way more work than this sentence does it justice). The goal was to match my artists rendition of an enemy. I was kind of annoyed by the image as I never made an enemy that looks like it....


Something R-Type like:

[JobLeonard]

Don't worry, anyone who has actually worked with Bezier curves knows how much work that can be.

The results look stunning though!

[marcgfx]

Thanks man, appreciated! I'm in a bit of a limbo phase right now, still trying to find an audience. Maybe I can make something impressive enough to get a bit more attention.

[JobLeonard]

It does look like a good game that's still trying to find its audience, yeah :/

[marcgfx]

I'm still working on new stuff and today I had some fun adding boids. I had tried and failed a few times before, but it turns out it's pretty easy when you actually follow a tutorial. Turns out my interpretation and custom implementation of the rules was the issue.

[JobLeonard]

Noice boids

[marcgfx]

Thanks :D

Had a really productive day today.

A long standing issue I've had was my workflow for making small changes to units. My game is in one browser tab and my editor is in another. I switch to the editor, make my changes, save to database, generate json files. These json files then get loaded when I reload the game tab. It's ok when I make significant changes, but small values adjustments take way too long. So today I finally tackled the problem.

My original idea had been to integrate a small version of the editor into the game itself. This was going to be a lot of work, so I never went through with it. Today I thought about what I really need. I just need to refresh/reload the units in the game. A really simple solution would be to do this from the console, but also quite tedious. A much nicer solution is to have the editor inform the game what has changed and the game to reload the required data. To make things even nicer, the game can check if the changed unit is in use and replace it with a new version. Turns out it was really easy to do and now my workflow should be much more enjoyable.

As I was in problem solving mode today, I tackled another long standing issue. Due to some weird design choices at the start of the project player units have very high HP (100 times higher than enemies) and enemy bullets have very high damage (100 times higher too). The original idea was to allow player friendly fire, but have it do a lot less damage. The problem with this solution is that enemy friendly fire is crazy over-powered. It turned out that player friendly fire is no fun, but enemy friendly fire makes sense. So exactly the opposite of what I made. To resolve this I wrote two scripts to run on all my unit data. One to fix all HP of player units and one to reduce all enemy damage. It's always a bit scary running these kind of queries on a database, but it all turned out just fine. Now I will have to make sure there are no weird code-side-effects I have not taken into account yet. I am looking forward to adding some reasonable enemy friendly fire, could be fun.

[JobLeonard]

Sounds like you might want to come up with some kind of easy external config file format to adjust all these values easily

[marcgfx]

I have a custom editor for all my units, some of which can be rather complex. The one in the image is the Devader itself and there are a lot of parts to it. The data is then stored in JSON and is semi-readable. I'm sure there are still improvements I could make for quality of life, but I think the format is pretty solid.

[JobLeonard]

Oh wow, that's pretty sophisticated-looking, yeah!

[marcgfx]

I'm enjoying my new workflow improvement, it really makes developing and tweaking fun. Should have done this 3 years ago 

I've been making some new critters, but I have no idea what they are supposed to do. Maybe someone has a good idea.

[JobLeonard]

They remind me of that Legend of Zelda enemy that eats your shield. Does the game have shields?

[marcgfx]

Ha, sounds interesting. I do have shields, but not always... I do like the idea of an enemy that would just target the shields though as it does not cause death directly. Maybe if you get too close.

So I've found a little issue in my fresh auto-update from editor code. If you have a creature that is made up of multiple segments, every segment spawns a new creature... pretty terrifying


I also just gave a new structure setup a try. I quite like the idea of different base layouts, the problem is really just the AI/Bosses. As the game is pretty much Enemies & Bosses the problem is pretty big. But maybe I can do some clever tricks with the AI... will probably give it a shot. Might require new Bosses for different structures.

[JobLeonard]

Uh-oh, that sounds like an exponential growth disaster waiting to happen!