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[MissingTheMoon]

How 1 month became 6 months | Devlog #1

Welcome one and all!
The last months of my game development journey have been filled with ups and downs. Join me as I share my experiences with you all!

What happened?
Initially I set out to complete my new small game in just one month. I didn't... I know, very original. In my determination I pushed myself throughout September to finish in time. Overworking caused my wrist condition to worsen, and it wasn't until December that I was able to resume work. Even then, my wrist was far from healthy.
So lets talk about something original, my brand new workflow which enabled me to overcome my health problems!





How to work with Talon
Last year I discovered a game-changer called Talon. Talon is a voice recognition app that transforms your voice into a powerful keyboard, allowing you to trigger commands and create custom scripts which you execute with your very own voice commands. Although it took me several months to adapt to Talon and code at a normal speed, it allowed me to work again in December. Although progress was initially slow, using Talon prevented further harm to my wrist. I'll delve deeper into Talon in a future post.

Progress
September I started working on the project full speed.
After two weeks I made the decision to slow down my work to avoid causing irreversible damage to my wrist. However, I soon realized that even working at a reduced speed was to much and stopped to let my wrist heal.
In december my wrist was healed a bit and I started using Talon.
In march I was vibing with talon and started writing my own voice commands to do things even faster than with a keyboard. Some things. Others still take longer. Which might be due to the big difference of years of experience of using fingers to press buttons on a keyboard vs 3 months of experience of using my voice.

Finish Line
How is the games development? We finished the game a month ago. I just finished the trailer yesterday! It looks sick so make sure to check it out. Its on the steam page from which you can wishlist the game as well.
https://steampowered.com/app/2428750



Now you up to date!
In future posts I'll share the Talon workflow and some devlogs about design, development and other things.

Have great day everyone!

[MissingTheMoon]

It's been a while since the last post and believe me I was busy as a bee!

First and foremost, I'm super thankful to everyone who played the game and showed it some love! We just the notorious 10 steam reviews and surpassed 700 wishlists! All thanks to you, I appreciate all of the support!

Also we just finished the basic game. Meaning we just started working on more content! New characters/weapons/upgrades and and and new features! ... I'll talk more about that at the end of this!



Can people understand the game?

Here you can see how the tutorial only shows whats essential. It gives you one new thing at a time. If I wouldn't do that, people would not know where to look.

How did I come up with the order I introduce things?
I make someone play my game who has no prior knowledge about it. I don't give them tips or help either. I just give them a controller. Let the game talk for itself!

Watching them like that, lets me see how you will play the game. How you will interact with things
-> what's fun?
-> what's boring
-> and most importantly what would you not understand?

That's how I decide what to change to make the game better, what to make self explanatory and if not possible what needs explanation.




Thats why for this update I focused on the tutorial
Tutorials are hard to make, especially because no one likes to read. People just want to play the game. That's why I made everything more intuitive and shorter without taking game away. How did I do that?

I made tutorial paths shorter so you get to the action faster.

Towers no more have to be build. This takes away confusion whether they are build or whats going on. It takes away unnecessary complexity while keeping the game the same in difficulty.

I made explanations more understandable by creating lots of small icons that are buttons to press.
That way "Hold the right mouse button to open the state menu. Pick Attack"
becomes "Hold [right mouse button icon] - open state menu. Pick Attack".
This reduces 12 words to 1 image and 6 words. Super simple! People usually just press the button they see and ignore the text. Which is fine with me! They'll figure out what the button does. If not, they can read the 6 words.




What's next?
I want to make the game more approachable. That does not mean easier! Actually the opposite.

Right now a lot of people expect the game to be more like vampire survivor which isn't the case... yet!

I can add many cool things to this game. But to address this issue and some others at the same time I will add ... many things. Sorry hehe this is just a little teaser. I'll share one small thing though.

There will be a level system like in vampire survivor. Meaning killing enemies, destroying scrapyards (yep that will be a thing too), and other things will give you xp as a reward. Collect enough xp and you get a level up / a new upgrade to choose from.

There is not much reason to fight enemies at daytime right now. To address that issue, while also making the game more approachable to vampire survivor fans I'm adding the leveling system as you are reading this. These changes will allows me to add bigger things in the future. Which ones? Hehe stay tuned!

I'm already super excited about them! But for now, I'll go back to coding and see you in the next udpate!
Peace

[MissingTheMoon]

This update, I took things away from the player! Why would I do that and how does it make the game bette

I took away the buildings the player has in the base.
But not all and not forever. You now start the game with one or two buildings. E.g. the paranoid grandpa starts with two towers. The librarian starts with the library. Each character starts with different buildings which makes them more diverse and interesting. That's the first improvement that this update creates.




Why is that better?
Instead of just having every building from the start, you only start with one or two. The other ones you have to pay for with scrap. An interesting decision is born that you as the player will make every game. Do you want defense? Build a tower. More robots? Build a factory. More upgrades? Build the library. But it's not that simple!

After paying for a building, the prices of the other buildings increase. Making it harder and harder to get the next one. This means you really need to make a choice! You can't just get every building anymore. I also raised the production costs of robots to make your decisions even more difficult. No worries the game is still pretty simple, but only when you play well will you be able to have a gigantic army of robots with tons of upgrades! In later levels that will be necessary of course as the difficulty of each level will grow.


So less is alwys better?
By taking away the buildings and forcing the player to choose, we give the player an interesting choice. Even if they always use the same buildings, they choose them. Because there is less, everything you have has more value. But less is not always better. Scrap now has more value because there are more things to do with it. In that case more is more. And also we made more in this update! We didnt just remove the buildings but added things to them!!!


That's it?
Pffff, of course not. I worked for a month on this update, don't underestimate me!



When you pay for a new building you get 3 options with it and decide which buff you want.
The library has the following options:
Library of Progress: produces 10% faster with 10% higher costs
Library of Haste: immediately grants 1 free library upgrade
Library of Knowledge: gives 3 xp when a robot collects scrap

To break it down in simple terms, if you build the library late, the library of haste gives you the most. If you build it early on but dont want to produce too much, the library of knowledge is perfect for you. It also gives you an early boost. The library of progress is difficult with it's higher costs but the best option if you want the most amount of possible upgrades! All the buildings have these buffs that make you choose between instant reward/slightly delayed reward/strong but very delayed reward. The next levels will have more days to survive so the differences will become even bigger!


You can level up now?
You now have XP to level up! Of course it's not RPG style where your character stats go up. Each level up gets you a new upgrade. The XP needed to level up goes higher each time you level up. In the early parts of the game, you can get lots of upgrades by leveling up and later it takes long to get them. The leveling makes the game better in so many ways! Here is some.



First there wasn't really a good reason to fight enemies before, unless you played the collector. But now that killing enemies and destroying their base gives XP, there is a big reason to hunt them down! But if you want to produce lots of things, you can't forget to find lots of scrap too! There is a balance you want to strike that gives the game more depth than before.

XP allows people who play the game for the first time to realize that there are upgrades. People who start with the tutorial in level 1, play for at least 5 minutes to get to level 2. In level 1 there is no library. This keeps the game simple to make sure new players are not confuse with too many different things. People used to have no idea about upgrades until they reached level 2.

But even then, they sometimes would play without the library. Taking away the upgrades from the game! That's such an important thing of the game. There is other things people wouldn't fully understand. But now that there is XP you always get lots of upgrades. This teaches you about parts of the game you might have not understood yet. XP has become a tool to teach people more about the game!


That's it!
There are more reasons why it makes the game better and more things I did in this update, but this has gotten rather long so I just shoot some at you real quick. I worked over the levels to make them better and more intuitive, added a new area to level 3, improved the visual effects, worked over visuals, worked over upgrades, added some new ones, changed lots of small things to make the game feel better that you will never notice but feel, fixed tons of bugs no one knew about, and and and ... there is a lot!

If you feel so inclined, you can check out the update as it's live.
If you have any suggestions, ideas, or thoughts, let me know!

Thank you for reading all the way, you are awesome! Peace