Entry Two Hundred And Twenty Eight

Cool Glasses protect you against status ailments and also stop the dialog boxes from being all messed up. Creating this piece of gear, I can't help but feel that every piece of gear is very situation-dependent and therefore the player will never be tempted to switch them around when he finds one he likes. Or he just won't care because it's not having a big impact.

Instead of individual pieces of gear, maybe these could be modules you equip with positive and negative effects, and you can equip as much as you want, so you wouldn't have to switch around between them for no reason. I wonder if that's a better system? Maybe! I'll try it out and see how it turns out.

Time spent on the project so far: 422 hours

Currently working on: Continuing with the story

Entry Two Hundred And Twenty Seven

Are skills useless? This is a question I've been wondering for most of my time playing the game this morning. Although they have useful effects, like killing enemies you otherwise wouldn't get at, or protecting you from damage, or stuff like that, I feel that it's quicker to just use the toxic gun to kill everything than to take the time to use skills properly. Is this about skills or about the toxic gun again?

I suppose that if the player finds one skill that he likes and runs with that, it should be enough. Some people might enjoy the shield skill, others bombs, etc. Also there is equipment that can trigger skill usage automatically whenever you attack, so it's not entirely lost.

But is this about the toxic gun again? Maybe I should change it so instead of exploding in a 360 hail of bullets, it just explodes it front of itself? That way you couldn't clear a room just by firing. But then it'd become not much than a spread shot...

Time spent on the project so far: 421 hours

Currently working on: Continuing with the story

Entry Two Hundred And Twenty Six

I'm STILL having trouble with the toxic gun and the way enemies take damage multiple times from the same source whilst I wish they wouldn't. I think I fixed that by increasing the invulnerability timer for giant enemies a bit and by tweaking it so all sources of damage don't trigger it. If you attack with certain gun parts equipped, you'll trigger more than one call to the 'take damage' function, since each damage has only one type (fire, ice, etc.) and you can deal multiple types per hit.

I've also increased the health of enemies a bit.

Time spent on the project so far: 420 hours

Currently working on: Continuing with the story

Entry Two Hundred And Twenty Five

Enemies are dying too fast to the toxic gun. I figured it was because their invulnerability period wouldn't trigger after they got hit, and fixed things around. I do want that gun to be fun to use, but like I said earlier, I don't want the player to just stand around and shoot down a whole room in seconds. State-5 is going okay, I'm a bit finicky to add boxes with treasures in them because there hasn't been any new piece of gear or item in a while. Then again, killing enemies will yield gear and items at a later time.

Time spent on the project so far: 418 hours

Currently working on: Continuing with the story

Entry Two Hundred and Twenty Four

A lot of work has been done on 100RTBD this weekend, mostly making new rooms in State-5 and tweaking enemies and skills. I've tweaked the poison gun yet again because while it has to be powerful enough, I don't want the player to be able to just shoot into a room, waiting for everything around to die. State-5 is full of electricity, so there's that to watch out for! There is also plenty of static electricity around and the dialog boxes get corrupted a little, I'm probably going to add a piece of gear to prevent that, for the people who want their text boxes proper!

Time spent on the project so far: 416 hours

Currently working on: Continuing with the story

Entry Two Hundred and Twenty Two

The fight against Ensign E is over and the elemental blast skill is more or less done as well. I'm changing the way it works - and I'll have to change the slot machines as well because there is a bit of overlap between the two  - but it didn't take too much coding around. Now I'm working on the yellow-tinged State-5, home of electricity and overworking computers.

Time spent on the project so far: 410 hours

Currently working on: Starting work on State-5

Entry Two Hundred And Twenty

Design documents are sometimes wrong. Well, in my case I haven't got the slightest clue about writing them, so they are quite wrong indeed. Ideas are easy to come by and translating them to code is a bit harder, even more hard is to write a doc that will talk about a good, fun game that represents your vision. I try to follow what I have written for 100RTBD as much as I can, but it's not always good to do so.

For instance, elemental blasts should have elements and either deal more damage, freeze you, or bounce between enemies. I find that a bit boring and instead I'll make them break into different patterns by default. Maybe the elemental effects will be added after that. The fight against Ensign E has started and already the toxic gun has proven too strong, dealing multiple hits per shot. I have to tweak the invincibility period of enemies a bit. To do so I've removed the 'monster' class out of controller.cs - my controller class file is littered with other classes that should be in their own files.

Time spent on the project so far: 405 hours

Currently working on: The fight with Ensign E

Entry Two Hundred And Eighteen

I've spent a bit of time messing around with the toxic gun because the idea of cool, useful weapons - opposed to so-so weaponry with horrible drawbacks - opens a bit more doors as to how I'll design them. But I think I have something I'm okay with right now. A very useful gun, but not too overpowered.

So I'm continuing with the maps I have left in State-4. It's pretty soon that another boss fight will be upon me and that afterwards you'll move to electricity land! That being said, being at State-5 (out of 10 possible states) doesn't mean I'm 50% done, sadly.

Time spent on the project so far: 401 hours

Currently working on: Moving on with the story

Entry Two Hundred And Seventeen

Guns in 100RTBD are you main weapon, they are the way you attack most of the time, and they all are kind of terrible in their way. The normal gun is the better one, followed maybe by the flamethrower with its very short range or the ice gun with its unpredictable bounciness. When I added the toxic gun, I had in mind a thing that would shoot upwards and then the projectile would fall back down. After playing with it for a while, I realized that the range was less than the flamethrower and that its upward trajectory meant that it would probably hit the ceiling 80% of the time.

Now the toxic gun fires blobs in a straight line, after a while they explode into a smaller number of blobs, which explodes into a smaller number of blobs, until they just disappear. It means that I have to tweak it's damage value because right now it hits a big chunk of the screen. But at least it's an upgrade on your previous guns, and not another useless thing!

Time spent on the project so far: 399 hours

Currently working on: Upgrading the toxic gun

Entry Two Hundred And Sixteen

Thanks to my third player ever (!!!) I've fixed a few bugs and tweaked a few systems, here and the small patch notes if you care!

• Brigadier B's movements should be a bit better
• Changed the way exiting a room from the top exit works, now instead of applying your current velocity to the movement, you'll always use a fixed velocity and move (hopefully) out into the next map without falling back in.
• Fixed issue where starting a challenge would make you fail it instantaneously.

I wish more people played what I had so far, but that's how it is, isn't it!

Time spent on the project so far: 397 hours

Currently working on: Correcting bugs

Entry Two Hundred And Fifteen

I have to say that following my design doc to the letter is more difficult than I thought initially. Adding challenge rooms here and there sounds like a good plan on paper, but it's a bit tiresome to generate unique code in order to make such rooms work. At least if my challenges rooms were more similar instead of having more or less all unique contents, it would be easier. Generating content still takes quite a bit much of time. It's all a question of tweaks, I'll probably add some content that wasn't planned in the design doc while cutting from it at the same time, the end result will still be in the spirit I want 100RTBD to be.

Time spent on the project so far: 395 hours

Currently working on: Moving on with the story

Entry Two Hundred And Thirteen

There's much balance work to be done, even in the parts of the game that I consider completed. It's actually pretty tough to properly balance systems - it's something I usually never do. Especially in complex-ish projects like 100RTBD where you can fight certain tougher enemies with certain gear to make the fights easier/harder, where bosses have to be re-fought in order to try and get their item drops, etc. So far I think I'm doing okay, but I just noticed that I increase the monster damage when they spawn and I ALSO increase it when they hit the player, oops!

Time spent on the project so far: 390 hours

Currently working on: Moving on with the story

Entry Two Hundred And Eleven

I've got two full weeks of vacation this summer, and I plan to use them to work on 100RTBD full time. That's right, about eighty hours of progress done in a matter of days instead of months! That could mean a lot for the game, as time is pretty much all it needs.

...well, I could use a good pixel artist and someone familiar with making chiptune music, and also some kind of web hosting for daily increments of my game, and someone good in marketing too so it doesn't stay practically unknown forever...

But eh! Game design!

Time spent on the project so far: 389 hours

Currently working on: Moving on with the story

Entry Two Hundred And Ten

Most items in the game aren't required for you to proceed; challenge rewards are especially not required, although some guns and special gear here and there can make the difference between an easier experience and having less options. Some items are especially not required and will probably only add flavor to the world. An item that tells you how many HP enemies have left might be 'useful', but it's not doing much besides giving you data, for instance. There will be a fair number of 'useful' items too, so don't worry about it!

Time spent on the project so far: 388 hours

Currently working on: Moving on with the story