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[Magnesium Ninja]

I've been putting in a lot of time recently trying to tie up some important loose ends with Overclocked. These include:

- Completing and packaging the Wwise Plugin I've been making for GameMaker: Studio
- Improving and fixing screen shake + frame pause
- Optimizations galore
- Control binding
- Debug console
- Screen overlay messages
- Visual indicators

A lot of this stuff is kind of boring to talk about, but adds to the game immensely. I'm hoping to be able to talk more about technical development and content progress soon!

[Magnesium Ninja]

We've been working on the visual layout of the 'overworld' of the game recently. This is an area where you can chat with characters on your team, start missions, listen to unlocked in-game music, and more. It's not very large, but is meant to provide a base of operations for the player, as well as a way for them to learn more about the plot and characters beyond the mission dialogue.

I've also been working to wrap up the dialogue for the first two chapters. I added two extra levels to the beginning of the second chapter in order to more smoothly introduce enemies, and I think it's working out quite well.

[Magnesium Ninja]

We've made a few minor design changes recently that we think improve the quality of the game overall:

- We removed the "Race" level type, because it felt bad to beat a level only to realize that you hadn't been fast enough
- We added a "Collection" level type, requiring players to collect all energy shards in a level (typically laid out in a path to follow)

We've also been working on finishing up the overworld (almost done), and tweaking some animations.

Next up is some heavy-duty work on tiling the rest of the first two Episodes, as well as a boatload of miscellaneous improvements that will help the game feel awesome.


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A quick look at part of the overworld:

[Magnesium Ninja]

More work on level tweaking and tiling. We're making good (but slow) progress, which is fine, given that this time also doubles as our break from school.

My goal for the past few days has been to really nail the difficulty curve of the first two Episodes. Every level in the game is important, but the beginning is what needs to give that strong first impression, and a game that starts off way too hard doesn't give a very good message to new players.

What this means for me is doing in-person playtesting and watching for areas that players struggle with/find awkward. Making mistakes while playing through levels is okay; that's the challenge. Hitting a roadblock within the first ten minutes of playing the game isn't.

[Magnesium Ninja]

I spent some time today implementing a proper intro sequence into the game.

For Overclocked, that means a splash screen, followed by a main menu from which you can select one of 3 save files. Our goal with having multiple save files was to provide enhanced support to people like streamers and families with more than one player.

When you start a new game now, you are immediately launched into the opening cutscene, followed by the first stage. This removes any potential issues of not knowing how to navigate the overworld. Subsequent launches of the game into that save file will put you directly into the overworld.

The menu is pretty ugly at the moment, but like everything, it'll eventually look much nicer!

[Magnesium Ninja]

Currently working my way through all existing levels in the game, doing some balancing, tweaks, and in some cases full redesigns. My goal is to ensure that all the levels thus far match the intended difficulty curve before moving ahead, so that when we start making levels again (very soon!) it will be easier to slot them into the game, without fears of having to do complete revisions.

[Jasmine]

Man, I am loving the look of the environment! Kudos to your artist! How far away do you believe you all are from releasing a small demo (if you are, that is)?

[Magnesium Ninja]

Man, I am loving the look of the environment! Kudos to your artist! How far away do you believe you all are from releasing a small demo (if you are, that is)?

Glad to hear it!

We've got a few things to discuss before we settle on public vs. private demo, but in either case it will likely be ready in the next month, or two at most.

I'll be sure to post about the demo here if we do end up looking for more feedback 

[Magnesium Ninja]

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Prism gets a lot of email.

[Magnesium Ninja]

Today I made another level, and added 'prediction lines' to two of the newer obstacles.

These prediction lines act as a very clear way of understanding how an obstacle is going to behave, and where you are and aren't in danger. This system is valuable to us in multiple ways:

1. It drastically reduces the feeling of 'cheap deaths' from the player's perspective. Even if the obstacle has never been seen before, you can identify before you are hit how the obstacle is going to act.

2. It allows us to keep the pacing of the more complicated levels fast, because players are able to interpret the danger zones faster than if they had to figure them out for themselves. This also doubles as a more in-depth 'role playing' as Amber, due to the fact that she has biomods that allow her to more rapidly assess situations.

Hopefully this improves the playability of the game, even in the more difficult stages!

[Magnesium Ninja]

Raining, pouring, etc.

We've been doing some intensive testing and feedback gathering recently. From this feedback, we've reached some conclusions:

- The HUD needs some work [Mostly done]
- Some visuals are confusing
- The intro isn't working

We've put a lot of time into the HUD to ensure that it's far more streamlined and stage-relevant than it was before. Currently, the only permanent fixture is the stage type and goal. When you kill an enemy, the combo appears (but only for as long as your combo survives). We've removed the timer and made it an optional menu-selected fixture, because we noticed it was stressing players out and making them want to go faster than they should have.

That last bit of feedback is a big task to fix. We came to the realization that almost all our players were ignoring important information and getting confused later. To us, this means that we need to spend more time tutorializing, and more time ensuring that the key concepts are being learned, not just seen and forgotten.

We're using this as an opportunity to re-address the intro altogether and bring in something with a bit more of a hook. There'll be more on that as it comes, but it will hopefully help pull players into the story and game far faster than "training sequence" will.

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Beyond this, I've put together a rather handy analytics server/overlay that lets me gather data on player death over the internet. This data is displayed visually on the server, but can also be loaded into Overclocked itself and displayed on the level. What this means is that I can run through any level of my choice and see exactly where people are dying, and to what.

It's pretty awesome.

[Magnesium Ninja]

It's been a while! Probably a little too long, to be honest. We've been hard at work on Overclocked all this time, I'm just terrible at remembering to update our devlogs.

A lot of the work that we've been doing is sort of behind-the-scenes, QOL stuff. All the same, we're hoping to launch a demo of the game in coming weeks! It's exciting and stressful, but hopefully you guys love what you see and have tons of feedback for us.

Moving forward, there should be more to show off. Check back here soon! 

[Magnesium Ninja]

Tonight we went to Full Indie, a gathering of Vancouver indie game devs, for the first time! We got a lot of great feedback, and it was a lot of fun to watch people experiencing the game for the first time.

Most of the critical feedback had to do with tutorialization of some key elements, and while part of that is likely because of the loud/busy atmosphere of the event, it's something that we'll look into moving forward.

[Magnesium Ninja]

Improved snowstorm particles (A little hard to see in a still image. Imagine a really cool looking snowstorm).

[Tangleworm]

Full Indie was awesome! It was really encouraging to see people having fun with the game, and we got a lot of helpful feedback.

Unrelatedly, here are the finished conversation portraits for the main cast!

[Magnesium Ninja]

Work in progress screenshot of our updated training/challenge room tileset!

A lot of our work over the past few months has been a dedicated effort to polishing and streamlining the core experience. We've come a long way and the game is vastly more enjoyable than it was when the summer began.

As an exciting addition, we now have a set of challenge levels that you can unlock by getting the bonus objective on a certain number of stages. We're expecting to have roughly one challenge level for every 5 regular levels, so you can expect somewhere in the realm of 20 to 30 highly difficult stages outside of the main story.

It's been super fun to watch people fight through the challenges so far. I'm excited to see them out in the wild.

[Magnesium Ninja]

New gameplay preview video! Let us know what you think; it's the first public footage of Overclocked in a very long time, and the difference shows.







We hope you enjoy! A public demo is coming in the near future, so look forward to that.

[Magnesium Ninja]

For screenshot saturday, a taste of the simulation levels in the game!




Check out the new gameplay video in the post above if you're interested! 

[Magnesium Ninja]

In an effort to keep a more consistent devlog, here's what we've been working on in the past couple of days:

• Added 'dynamic intros' to some levels (For example, in some levels Amber enters by dropping out of the ship to the ground).
• Drastically improved the first boss stability and feel. It used to feel kind of messy when you hit him. Now, it's very satisfying and clean.
• Improved key-rebinding stability. You can no longer rebind your controls in such a way that you destroy your configuration. Woo!
• Added input buffering to the stage select. It's been bothering me for a long time.
• Made a bunch of UI improvements.
• Played through the game, took notes, and improved/fixed over 30 small issues.

A lot of the programming work leading up to the public demo is focused on polishing up the overall experience so that players don't get confused when, for example, you unlock a challenge and immediately enter it because of the way the controls worked. The demo should feel like a completely finished product, and we're very nearly at that stage!

[Magnesium Ninja]

School is just starting back up for most of us on the team, but that hasn't stopped us from getting work done!

We've been working primarily on optimizations and UI improvements for the past couple of days. We've run into a couple odd GameMaker issues that will hopefully be fixable, but it's admittedly a little frustrating to hit roadblocks that are beyond your control.

The game should be getting a relatively large dump of sound effects soon, which is exciting. Audio is one of the bigger areas standing between us and the demo!