Another Catch-Up Update
January-April 2018
Ok, I've been putting off covering this period here. I've been talking about it a lot with my Kickstarter backers but was debating whether to cover it here. Then I figured it'd probably be weird if anyone noticed that these catch up updates had suddenly jumped from December to April. Anyway, my Mum got diagnosed with stomach cancer around the beginning of the year and it hit me pretty hard. She's had a load of chemo but ended up having an operation to remove her stomach, which was successful (in that she survived the op and they reckon they got the cancer).
I'll not linger on that here, but hey so that's why things got a little slower from this point!
This is what I got up to at the start of the year:
Art updateAfter I'd uploaded all of the screenshots for the Steam store page, I didn't think the game looked good enough at a glance. A big part of this was just down to the ground. Here's the old ground art for the forest:
Look at the ugly fern creeping into the top right at the end of the gif
Firstly, the top of it just looks crap. The detail like the ferns, grass and flowers look amateurish. And they are, because I was (and still am) an amateur. But I'm better now at knowing how I want things to look, and I didn't want them to look like this.
Secondly, the ground is taking too much of your attention. It's got little bits of detail in it that are just unnecessary. From a compositional point of view, because the ground sometimes takes up such a large proportion of the screen, it's a great opportunity to add some visual breathing space and let your eyes focus on the important stuff. When I've got occasional clusters of random pixels in there you can't do that.
So, it now looks like this:
Hornets' NestAnyone who played any of the very early builds may remember this:
Well, she's still in the game but she's a bit too tough to fight when you don't know what to expect. I'm trying to avoid teaching through death where possible, as the game doesn't have the short levels and quick reloads of games like Super Meat Boy or N.
So, I've introduced the hornets' nest, which kind of introduces you to the idea of these relentless homing enemies:
GargoylesYou've maybe seen these guys before, but they were a bit rubbish. They weren't really different enough to the bats to be very interesting. I was kind of trying to convince myself that this was okay, because you only come across them in a couple of rooms, but that's a pretty lame way to design enemies so I decided to have a bit of a rethink:
They still stick to the same rules of how all of the statue based enemies trigger their attack, but now they try and dive bomb you.
I really like them now, they're fun to play with! You might see more of them in later areas if you look in the right places
Sword LineThis was a simple thing to do, but it's made a big difference to people who haven't played the game before. I made it so the line between you and the sword gives a clearer indication of what's going to happen when you press fire again:
Poof!There's a new poof of smoke and sword slash effect for when you kill creatures:
These animations and the fire one above are all courtesy of Mattie, who's helping out with some of the background and effect animations so that I can focus more on the design and narrative side of things.
Check his other work out and say hello on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/swonqiWindI accidentally made the 'blizzard' snow particles so that their x_scale changed depending on their x_speed:
This had the happy side effect of making it clearer when the wind if blowing so I left it in. Late night coding is good for some things after all!
I'm sure it's probably introduced a bunch of bugs somewhere else though...
New Area LayoutFollowing the beta release I had chance to get some decent analytics back for how people are playing the game. Almost everyone were spending way longer in the mountains than expected, and speaking to a few people the common thread seems to be that they were getting lost.
This is almost entirely down to bad design and only slightly down to their incompetence. So I've also been redesigning the mountain area.
I've been thinking a lot more about how the area plays as a whole, rather than each room in isolation. I've been thinking about things such as symmetry (or lack of), how the length of a room affects tension, how far down a divergent path is it clear that this is a divergence and not just the normal way, how fast does a room play and how this affects the flow of the area, and a bunch of other stuff. I've had quite a bit of time to just sit and think but not with a computer nearby, so it's been a good time to focus on design.
There's not a lot I can show from this, but it's been the work that I think is the most important over the past month and I'm going to be doing the same for the caves area and the other areas that are currently in the game. So, I want to show you at least something:
For those of you who have played the beta, there was a small bridge in the game but it was a bit pointless. This bridge is less pointless and, depending on what actions you've taken so far, will be the spot for a neat little narrative interaction.
I'll say no more.
The Corrupted ParishionerI did some work on this boss fight:
The chapel art is VERY work-in-progress here by the way...
And there was probably a bunch of other stuff I did that I've changed again since then...
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