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[WashingMachineGuy]

DEVBLOG

Wishlist The Game On Steam!

The Game
Amant is a 3rd dimensional Sokoban game with magnets! I have made 2 YouTube videos about the game, so they should a good start for showcasing the mechanics and the mood of the game:






Pardon the dankness of the videos, I couldn't help myself.

Intro
Hello, I saw the other day a documentary about rain world and I never thought in a million years that a Devblog has an actual thing. I think it was more popular back in the days, but I might as well jump into it now since I always wanted a quick and dirty way to document my progress somewhere.

The plan for the DevBlog
I will try to do daily Devlogs! But with a full time job and a social life, this will be quite difficult to post daily progress on the game. So most of the days I will either ramble out some hopes and dreams or talk about future plans/things that I learned on a daily basis... Now then I think of it, this is pretty much impossible, but I will try my best!  I am also thinking of posting some quick YouTube videos to visually show what I have been doing to the game.

What I'm doing right now
At the moment, I need to add a mechanic that will fix a game design decision that's been plaguing my game for quite some time… And it's all because of this guy.


Everybody and their mother how played the game assumed that the Magnetizing and Demagnetizing tiles would act more like minecraft pressure plate(partially because of the visual design of the tile, or the lack of clarity). Meaning, when a magnet goes on top of a tile, it will activate the property of the tile. This is a much simpler mechanic than what I have right now and this is such a better introduction to the magnetize and demagnetize rules, which begs a question. Why didn't I do this sooner? Pretty simple, because I'm a bad programmer… and I think this is going to be a recurrent theme for this blog post.

In this case, it's magnetizing both magnets

So after a lot of debugging, here's the result. There are a lot of bugs that I need to squash before I can start making levels for it. So for the next couple of days I will focus my attention on that.

[WashingMachineGuy]

What daily dev Blogs ? Who said that ?

Hey, I wanted to lay down publicly my game plan for this year. I promised myself and to others that a vertical slice has due early 2024, but this is clearly not going to happen, so I am once again giving myself a year to finish the vertical slice.
I have many excuses as to why I didn't have a vertical slice for 2023, but I am going to lay down the ones that got me the most amount of trouble and how I can overcome them for this year.

Making a solo game for this long is pretty isolating. You either suck it up, or find a workaround. And for this year, I got some workarounds that I want to try or continue trying.
- starting a twitch stream for the game (there will probably have 0 viewers, but it is worth the try)
- more coworking with the squad (aka yann) : wishlist is game! : https://store.steampowered.com/app/1856810/Miner_Rogue/
- and actually hiring some people to help me on certain aspect of the game (aka : art, writing, programming) This one may be wishful thinking tho. but until I know what I am doing, I don't feel confident to have someone helping me on the project. I think that will come much latter so I can plan out the game accordingly.

I still have doubts in the game, about how fun it will be and the amount of effort that I am putting for a end product that will be for nothing. For years at thought that once I put this mechanic in the game will be good, but so far it hasn't been the case.
Don't get me wrong, I love the game and I will 100% finish it no matter what.
Its just that I don't think that I got it in me to finish to fulfill my vision of the game if I know deep down that the game is fun or interesting.
But for the past 3 months I have been in the lab testing some new mechanics. This is definitely the way to go until I found the thing that I will make or break the game. But I already know what it is and it scares me. and its this :

This is the first initial sketch for Amant, even when I first heard the game jam theme I had in my mind a Rubik cube type of game. 5 years later and I still didn't add it. I think this is mechanic is going to break or make the game. If it turns out by playtesting that this sucks. I will certainly scope down the game, so I could make the game in a year no less. But if this turns out to be good. I am going to go all in. I will see pretty soon if this mechanic will pan out or not.

 might has well post the early notes that I have in there, back then it has called Magnifice. What a terrible name lol.



here's a sneak peek of another mechanic that I have in the works, I really like it, but like everything I touch, it's filled with bugs.

dual-purpose mechanic is goated
### Plan
last year I had planned the year out for the game with deadlines and events to attend to. I hit zero deadlines and I got to go to one event which has pretty much the highlight of my year. But overall I lost focus.

This year will be the year of the planning, but not too much. it's too intimidating to see the big picture and how much work there's left and working on a day can lead to unfocus working hours.

Here's the big picture that I have in mind for this year :
- Prototyping new mechanics
- playtest a tone
- See how I am feeling about the game
- Start rnd the look of the game
- making art pipeline
- make art polish phase
- Vertical Slice
- See how I am feeling about the game
- Refactor the entire project

You might be wondering what refactoring means. Pretty simple,
I am going to nuke the entire game and start from scratch. Now, you might be like :

But me, am more like this :

so yea, after the vertical slice I will probably take a good 6 months to refactor the entire project. This is for a number of reasons which I will probably talk about another time.