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[Codebread]

It's been a couple weeks since the last update, and we've done a lot. Most of my work has been going toward balancing everything for Chapter 2, which took a few days of nonstop play testing. This uncovered a few bugs (naturally), which I got rid of as I went along.

We also added a bunch of new equipment, passive abilities, and quests. A few cutscenes are in, too, but those are in an alpha-state.

Hats, Outfits, and Weapons are drawn on Daryl in his Inventory in the form of a doodle. Accessories (The bottom two slots) aren't drawn on him for some technical reasons. Mostly that accessories vary so wildly that it's hard to make sure all doodles will fit together nicely.

We wanted to draw the equipment on Daryl in game, but that would require an insane amount of work for only a single artist. Plus, our attacks switch weapons inherently so it would get weird with equipped weapons.

Here's a new environmental hazard, the Corrupted Coffin. It spawns mummies over time and can be destroyed.

Finally, a quick shot of a cutscene from the chapter, when Daryl meets the Principal of his new high school. As you can see, the art is still somewhere between a doodle and the finalized state.

[Codebread]

Oh boy. It's been over a month since the last update. A lot has changed. We added a new mode called "Dwarves & Druids", which is a battle arena style mode where the player chooses a challenge and has to fight rounds of enemies to earn a roulette-style prize at the end.

We also added a bunch of new skills, and added the ability for the player to have a second skill set that they can switch between on the fly. Cooldowns persist and don't update if the skill set isn't active.

Two of the new skills:


Two skill sets:




A video of the new mode:




The video doesn't have sound because I was using it to try and determine what background music would fit nicely.

[Codebread]

It's been about 7 months since I posted an update here. Although I was enjoying posting updates here and on our Kickstarter page and anywhere else that we had people checking us out, it was taking up way too much of my time and making it hard to actually create the game.

Up until very recently I was working 10 hours a day at my full-time job while also trying to finish Daryl in a reasonable amount of time. Since the bulk of the development (programming and art) is just a two person job for us I decided to cut a few other things out of my schedule... with one of them being updates here. I'm happy to say that we've been really busy since then, not only with the progress of the game, but with our growth as an indie studio.

The first big thing that happened was our acceptance into the Indie Megabooth at PAX East 2016. We had never been to PAX before, even as attendees, and it was awesome. We set up three stations (two laptops at a table and a TV on a 7' stand) with two separate demos and let people go nuts. We'll definitely be going back to PAX.
 
We finished the first half of the game for the most part, leaving out some optional content we have planned. We added some really cool enemies and content to the start of the second half of the game...

...before realizing that we wanted to completely finish the first half and polish it before continuing. This was we can get a better idea of the amount of time it will take to polish and make everything fit together nicely. We started this by tackling the biggest piece of criticism we've received about our demo: we don't get to the action quickly enough in the Prologue chapter.

We designed a new opening scene that showcases the best parts of the game: the crazy, combo-based combat, the humor, and the unique artstyle. It begins with a grayscale, detective noir theme and progresses quickly into... well, I'm not sure what exactly, but it's weird and it's fun. We re-purposed a bunch of characters from the game for this section and gave them ridiculous roles, as well. The game's shopkeeper as an enemy, for instance:

You can also see one of the new skills we added, an endless attacking combo that decreases in damage and speed as you use it. I wanted to give the player an ability for them to spam, but I also needed to give incentive to chain it with other abilities.

We launched our new website (http://danandgarygames.com/superdaryldeluxe) to cut down on hosting costs and allow more flexibility with the content we want to show. We were using Weebly before, which was a decent service, but after a couple of years as a web developer I wanted to have full control over everything.

Finally...we moved to full time development. This is the big one. After three years of finding a couple of hours here and there to work on the game, Dan and I finally found a way to switch to full time game development and make Daryl our top priority. I'll probably post a better update about this point in the near future, but for now I'll just say that it feels amazing to be able to wake up every day and get straight to work on our game. It's finally getting the attention that we always wanted to give it. A side effect of this is that I can begin focusing on sharing updates and making content to post again, which is exciting for me.

More soon!

- Gary

[Codebread]

New map art!

These are the school vents, a low level area with the game's first set of hidden items and quests to complete. They're infested with rats and bats, and some claim to have heard loud hissing and cackling through the vent grates...






The loss of quality when making these gifs makes me sad. It's much prettier in game.

[Codebread]

The last week has been all about making UX changes to various menus. We wanted players to have more information about the abilities that they purchase so they could make more informed decisions about spending their hard earned textbooks.

More Skill Info


I added all status effect information as well as cooldown and the amount of times a skill hits. The problem I had was that some powerful skills will do less damage per hit, but hits more than a weaker skill. I want the player to take into account all of this information instead of just assuming "bigger damage number = bigger damage".

Tiers and Tags
I also added "Tiers" and "Tags" to all skills. Tiers are: Trash, Ok, Good, Great, Excellent. The higher the tier the more it costs and the better it is. Tags are a bunch of things like: Melee, Range, Stun, Poison, Combo, Dash, etc. These can be used to sort your skill inventory or quickly find something to fill the gap in your current skill load-out.

Skill Tiers also helped me immensely with skill balance. Before I was balancing every skill individually and trying to figure out how much EXP it should take for the skill to rank up each time and all of that. It was a nightmare as our skill library grew. NO MORE! Now that I've broken all of the skills into their appropriate tiers I can keep EXP requirements, level caps, and other similar things the same. The lower the tier the less EXP needed, but the level cap is also lower so it maxes out in strength earlier. This has the added benefit of incentivizing the purchase of new skills. Yay game design!


New Skill Inventory





I made a pretty big overhaul to the Skill Inventory menu. I wanted to show more of the player's earned skills, as well as present all of the selected skill's information. I also added the ability to sort your skills, which was actually not that hard to do, despite never planning on allowing that sort of functionality.

Obviously I'm no artist, but this is my current test branch so I can play around and make sure these changes are something we want to stick with. I'm 90% sure they are.

The final (huge) change I made to this menu was the addition of that locked section. I made an update in this thread a while ago about adding a fifth skill slot for the dash ability. I've expanded that a bit and made it a "Special" skill slot for utility based skills. There will be a small pool of Special Skills you can buy and equip that will go in that area of your Skill Inventory. It shows up as locked until you unlock the feature in Chapter 1.

Changes to Skill Leveling

The final change that I finished this week was changing how skill's level up. Before they would gain EXP and level up/transform as you killed enemies and completed quests. This is no longer the case. Instead the player will earn "Skill Experience", or whatever final name we choose, as he does these things. Skill Experience will be equal to the regular experience you gain, but it won't be automatically applied to all of your equipped skills. You will have to go to your locker (Skill Inventory) and manually rank up your skills.

I think the added feature of letting YOU choose your upgrade path is much more satisfying and keeps you aware of the state of your skills, instead of simply equipping four of them and never checking their progress again.

[Codebread]

I just got back from TwitchCon in San Diego. Taco Bell brought our game along with three others to be a part of the Indie District there. I've exhibited at PAX, GDC, Boston FIG, and a few other places before so I knew what to expect for the most part, but this was a lot different.

Instead of there being dozens of games present, there were probably around 20 in the Indie District. The only other games there were really big ones, like Uncharted 4, Breakaway, H1Z1, Battlefield 1, etc. I thought this would mean higher traffic to our area, but the opposite was true: we probably had less than 100 people play our game over the course of all 3 days, which is minuscule compared to PAX. Honestly it didn't bother me much, I was there with the goal of gathering feedback on our new opening scene and I got what I needed out of it.

The cool thing about this was that it was easier to walk away from our booth and explore, which I did plenty of. Also, streamers were everywhere (what a surprise)! We had quite a few play SDD and offer to stream it live, so I'm excited about that. All in all it was a successful convention.

I didn't get any actual development done on the game I can't post any real updates here. Instead I'll be posting a short review of the 11 different pizzerias I ate at during my 5 days in San Diego, 9 of which were during my last day there. The "review" line is the first thing said by one of us after finishing the pizza.

Napizza
Review: "Not bad"
First stop on the list. We got off the trolley at Little Italy and walked into this little shop after a quick stop at a bar for a drink. The slices are square instead of, well...triangles, which sort of put me off at first because you know how you can get those corners that are basically all crust and you feel ripped off and whatever? Anyway that didn't happen, but I did notice that there were flies all over one of the pizzas. Also there was a fly in one of the Parmesan Cheese shakers. That was impressive.

I had pepperoni, it wasn't bad.

Landini's Pizza
Review: "Pretty damn good"
Our second stop was a bit farther up the street. Dan and I decided to split a single piece here (it was New York style, big slices) to increase or pizza eating longevity for the day. The guy kept trying to up-sell us to two slices for a dollar more, but we weren't having any of that.

We had a pepperoni/sausage slice. I enjoyed it a lot.

Giovanni's Trattoria
Review: "Only OK"
Third stop, another shared piece of pizza. Not much to say about this one, except that I paid for a $3 slice of pizza with a debit card and the man wasn't happy with me for it. I tipped $2 on the receipt to make him feel better about it.

It was Pepperoni/Pineapple/Jalapeno (I had no idea this combination even existed). It was the worst slice of the day.

City Pizza
Review: "I would totally order this."
After we stopped at another bar and had a few more drinks (I'm a cider man and I was in a beer city, so it was tough to find good stops) we wandered over to City Pizza. The bathroom said "Out of Service", but it wasn't. They had the same weird combination of Pepperoni/Pineapple/Jalapeno, and Dan and I each got a slice of our own. It was really good.

Po5 (Pizza on 5th?)
Review: "I actually liked this a lot"
This was a pizza/bar combo and we stayed here for a few hours. The slices were New York style again, as they all had been except the first stop. The woman behind the counter told me that they were out of cider, so I ordered wine. Afterward I went in to order a second drink and noticed that they were, in fact, not out of cider. The cider was good.

We shared a slice of Meat Lovers and it was really good, but the sausage was a bit too sweet. It kind of threw off the whole thing a bit.

Gaslamp Cafe and Lounge
Review: "Tied for the best we've had tonight (City Pizza)"
We found this place on accident while going to our next stop. The guy we talked to (the owner I think?) was pretty cool and told us about his desire to fill the place with arcade machines after we told him why we were in town. He was confused about why we were ordering and splitting a single slice, so we told him about our pizza adventure and he thought we were going to do a review. Dan assured him that we are not influential at all.

We split a slice of Pepperoni. They use egg yolk in the crust so it's a bit fluffier than normal NY style pizza, but it was pretty good.

The New Yorker
Review: "This is great!"
After feeling slightly arrogant due to the name of this place (Dan and I were both raised in New York, but not the city, and we expected the pizza to not really come close), we were pretty blown away by how good the pizza was. Also it was a bar.

We split a Supreme slice. It was the best we had so far that night.

Gaslamp Pizza
Review: "The best NY pizza"
Oh man, this place was great. It was the perfect combination of greasy, cheesy, chewy, and crispy packed into one big slice of NY-style pizza. I talked them up a bunch while we were there and they gave us a free cheese-filled breadstick.

We shared pepperoni, but we had ordered this the day before as well. It was fantastic.

The best part however was the beautiful pit bull that we met outside after leaving. Her name was Cammy(sp?) and she licked me in the face. I squealed like a girl. I love dogs.

Berkeley Pizza
Review: "f***ing incredible."
This is the only place that had Chicago style, from what we could tell. The wait is pretty long after you order, but MY GOD it was delicious. Hands down the best pizza we had. We went twice, same as Gaslamp.

I had pepperoni both times. I wish I had more. This was also our last stop for our pizza hopping adventure.

Tony's Pizza
We had this the first or second night we were in San Diego. It wasn't a bad start. It's also the reason we decided to pizza hop at some point.

I had Pesto Chicken and liked it a lot.

Fifth Avenue Pizza
This place was pretty meh. It was the very first pizza we had in San Diego, right before we tried Tony's. I had Sauusage/Pepperoni and it didn't impress me.

The Aftermath
We stumbled back to our hotel, somewhat drunk and full of pizza. I was feeling great, but Dan was dreadfully sick. I didn't notice; I was slumbering peacefully. I'd probably do it again.

[Codebread]

Unfortunately my life can't only be about pizza, so we got back to work.

While Dan continues to make new art for the game I've decided to organize our design and story documents a bit better and clean things up. We've made a lot of changes to the story that aren't reflected in the documents, which is going to make future work a lot harder because a lot of the dialogue is just temporary right now. I've found that using a bunch of Google docs for this purpose is a huge pain, so I built a wiki-like website where I can see the synopsis and in depth views of each chapter of the game, including all spoken dialogue from every NPC. I also outlined where every item/shop/chest is so far.

Having it in a private wiki like this makes things way easier for me to find things we've written and edit them. Additionally, it will make writing the scenes later on a lot easier because I have outlines for all of the major characters and where they are throughout the entire game.

I wish I had done this a lot sooner. I'll definitely be doing this for all future projects.

Here is some new map art that we have from last week:

[jordanchin]

Wow, love the look of this game. I think it's interesting how you choose to remove (or keep) color in various parts. Smooth animations too. Really looking forward to seeing where this goes!

[skibbitybebop]

Wow, love the look of this game. I think it's interesting how you choose to remove (or keep) color in various parts. Smooth animations too. Really looking forward to seeing where this goes!

Ayyy thanks. I'm the artist on this thing. Glad you dig it - I'm never quite sure where color is gonna come or go in this universe either. All the animation is done using the Timeline in Photoshop.

[Codebread]

I spent some time last week playing around with the combat system and seeing if I can make the fighting feel a bit more smooth and intense. I haven't received in complaints about it, but it's something I like to tweak every once in a while.

After playing around and adding more camera shake, some subtle zoom effects on heavy hits, and a few other things I realized that I'm constantly flipping back and forth between wanting really smooth, quick combat and wanting shaky combat with a lot of "hit pausing" (those few freeze frames when you land an attack that make it feel powerful). So I decided to combine the two of them.

The game will now take note of how long you've been in combat and how intense the combat is (enemy deaths, hits landed, damage taken from enemies, etc) and slowly ramp up the amount of screen effects that happen as a result. It's subtle, but it feels noticeably more intense as it goes on.

Just starting combat:



Prolonged, intense combat:



It's most notable in the baseball bat skill in these gifs. I hope this strikes a fun balance and makes it so the combat will feel fresh and rewarding when fights last a while.

[Codebread]

I spent the last week working on adding a new questline in the first chapter to fix some pacing and storytelling issues. We designed the boss for the chapter and then I decided that it would help if Daryl had pressure-sensitive jumping instead of a single jump height.

The reason for this is the inability to dodge things at a certain height if you can only jump the same way every time. If something comes at you at ground level and above head level there's no way to thread it and jump in between them without timing your jump perfectly, which felt awkward.

 After some playing around with values I made it so holding the button down longer gives you a higher jump, which is actually just the previous jump height. Holding it for a shorter amount of time means smaller jumps.

[Codebread]

I don't have any screenshots or gifs to show this week, but for the sake of consistency I'll make an update.

Our opening intro scene (the one with the octopaul fight you can see in gifs above) is really close to completion now that we have music for it. I hope to send that out to people by the end of the week for playtesting and to get their opinions on it.

I spent an entire day combing through a giant press list that I had compiled, only saving the relevant ones, which I'm sure will come in handy soon. I'm most likely going to be the only person that handles our marketing.

Finally, I spent three or four days working on a huge feature that I'm not ready to show off yet. It's going to be awesome, though.

Oh, and I added a progress bar to our website. So I guess that's a screenshot I can show:

[Codebread]

Dan's been chugging away on the finalized art for CH1 still while I work on my super secret addition to the game. Here's the opening to Chapter One, since it's spoiler-free and short:





We haven't added sound yet, but that will come soon.

[Codebread]

The last week has been busy. The biggest development is that we have finally launched our "Coming Soon" Steam page, which can be found here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/361230

After gathering a bunch of advice from other developers I decided that launching it now was better than waiting. I'm trying to handle this marketing thing all on my own and it's pretty tough, but I think this was a step forward. I also created this album on imgur that explains the game mechanics visually:

http://imgur.com/a/jqaMs

I really should have done that a long time ago. It was pretty successful on reddit (/r/gaming and /r/indiegaming)

As usual the feedback and reactions to our game is very positive, but not very widespread. I hope to change that over the following months as I start to focus more on getting the word out. Plus, it's still early. We don't plan on releasing until Spring 2018, so building up a TON of hype now might not be for the best.

The second big thing, despite it seeming like a very small thing, is a new dialogue feature that I added to the game.

I've added the ability to use different font styles and colors in the same snippet of dialogue, combined with the word wrap and scrolling that I already had. To my knowledge there is not a single tutorial on how to do this in Monogame/XNA because I have attempted this before and always failed.

I think there are much better ways to do it then my method, but I'm a solo developer and I don't really give a shit so as long as it doesn't have a noticeable effect on performance I'm fine with it. That's basically my motto.

I wrote up a pretty in-depth tutorial on how I did it below. If you happen to be using Monogame/XNA and want scrolling, word wrapping, dynamic text like in the gif above, look no further:

https://gist.github.com/codebreadGist/8f12f90664f8a66db37b6f0f3f690f1e

[Codebread]

The holiday week was mostly writing dialogue and stuff, since it was lower effort and I could do it easily while traveling.

I also did something that I've been dreading for a long time: handle different resolutions and aspect ratios. I ended up using letter/pillar boxing for it, which was pretty simple. It's just setting a virtual resolution (which I was doing already) and scaling the game's viewport (and centering it) as needed while keeping the aspect ratio the same.

It feels good to get these kinds of things out of the way; it makes the game feel more professional and it's one less giant hurdle to worry about when we go to release.

[Samaras-Sama]

Dan's been chugging away on the finalized art for CH1 still while I work on my super secret addition to the game. Here's the opening to Chapter One, since it's spoiler-free and short:





We haven't added sound yet, but that will come soon.

So delightful, me gusta! You have great writing and comedic timing Codebread and this is hilarious even without sound :D :D

[Codebread]

Thank you! I'm sure it will be much better with voice acting and sound, too.

[Codebread]

A few posts ago I showed off the new Skill Inventory with temporary artwork. I have a couple gifs of the finalized artwork now:

Skill Shop:

Locker Inventory:

The first gif shows the player purchasing a couple of skills in the Skill Shop. I've made it so you can simply right click to buy them, which is way better than clicking the button (although I left the button there anyway).

The second gif shows the player sorting their Skill Inventory to only see "Melee" skills, then selecting it and ranking it up. Every few ranks a skill will transform, which causes a lightning bolt animation.

We've also added a small pop-up when you complete all quest objectives. We noticed that people weren't aware of it when they gathered all the items for a quest, or killed enough enemies, so we added this to help make it more obvious:

The checkmark will show up next to the name of any completed quest, as long as that quest is in your "Quest Helper" on the top right of the screen.

[Codebread]

A thing I've been paranoid about lately is the game's saving system. It only allows 3 save slots and you can't easily make duplicates of your save files (you can only overwrite your current save file, not choose a new slot). That means if someone gets into a position where the game breaks and they save, their file would be stuck in that broken state. Reaching an area you're not supposed to be in via some glitch then saving, for example.

I've made a lot of improvements recently to prevent that from happening; in fact I haven't found a bug that would cause a problem like that in a long time. However the possibility is still there and in a game that is looking to be pretty long that possibility is unacceptable.

To help fight this, I've changed the way saving works a bit. To start I increased the available save slots to 100. This required a bit of Main Menu redesigning, but we expected that when we made the main menu years ago anyway. Now when someone goes to start a new game or load a game they will see this screen where they can choose one of the available save slots.

It's probably obvious, but that's placeholder art.

That fixes the problem of only having 3 save slots, but players still can't back up their saves. Saving in our game works by entering a Bathroom and pressing 'F' at the stall, which was always meant to happen quickly. It overwrites your current save and you can be on your way. I still wanted that quick functionality if people just wanted a quick save or to replenish their health, so I kept that in, but slid it over (you now use the urinal to quick save, heh).

The stall is now "Manual Save" and takes a bit longer. When you use that option you see the following screen:

It's very similar to the main menu, except you can't delete saves here. The golden key represents the game you're currently playing, that way you don't accidentally overwrite the wrong save.

Now players can make copies of their saves and manually overwrite old saves as they wish. I want to add a "Continue" function to the Main Menu so you don't have to choose "Load Game" to continue where you left off. I also want to come up with some sort of system to back up your last couple of saves in case you aren't doing it yourself and something foes wrong (Witcher 3 does this...they basically create a list of save points). I'm not sure what the best solution is yet.

[Codebread]

3 weeksish since the last update: A lot has been completed despite the holidays and CH1 is almost finished (we just need some music and sounds now). I'm excited to finish it so I can move the progress bar to 50% and get some play testers to try it out.

One of the major things I finally added is an options menu (drawn by me, so the art is bad).

This was my first time creating a slider for a menu and it was easier than I thought it would be. The most difficult part was figuring out what should happen if the player drags their cursor really far beyond it then starts moving back toward the bar, all while dragging it. Obviously the slider-piece needs to not go beyond the bar itself, but I was moving it based on mouse movement before which meant moving to the left (even if you're on the right side of the screen) would move the slider-piece backwards... which was weird.

I decided that it can only move if your cursor is between the X-Positions of the leftmost and rightmost points on the slider bar. It feels natural now.

I also spent some time designing a major area in CH3 that hadn't been designed yet, as well as the enemies that go there and a few side quests. There were a bunch of small bug fixes and dialogue being written as well, since I was traveling and wanted to focus on less programming-heavy things.

We've began work on CH2 which means I get to spend a week or so figuring out everything we need and playing through the alpha version to see what should be changed. I'm hoping to have this chapter done by the end of March.