I'm feeling kinda sick - probably the common cold - so not much was done today, I've added a few rooms but now I'm stuck with spinning poison bubbles for a mini-boss. Maybe I'll manage to get it working tomorrow...
Time spent on the project so far: 459 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
There's something I'm a bit afraid of, and it's to make too much rooms and stuff for my game without it being good. I feel that a big number of skills and items, enemies and weapons, challenges and bosses might interest a certain portion of the playerbase and that following the story might of interest for another segment of potential players. But I also fear that with 1000 rooms to go into, nobody would ever go through the whole thing and they'd stop after a while and feel that there is too much.
I'm not sure if it's a real problem, or maybe that the game being 'good' would fix this, as the length wouldn't matter much since it would be a fun experience all over. Tough to tell when you're making a game and playing it at the same time all by yourself!
Time spent on the project so far: 458 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
In about two weeks I'll have a week off from work so I'll be able to work on 100RTBD in a more 'full-time' fashion. I also plan to record a playthrough of what I have so far so people who don't want to play the game but want to see a bit of what it looks like can do so. The idea of livestreaming is a bit less interesting for me, but I could easily record a good run, without going over every detail of the story and such.
The game is progressing smoothly, I've added a challenge with rising poison gas that I feel works pretty well. Also fixed a bunch of bugs and tweaked some stuff. The usual!
Time spent on the project so far: 456 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
After completing room 0-4-1 and moving on, I now am working on new rooms to visit. You'll need to breakdown a fair bit in order to collect the required InfoPacks to progress, and I've built in challenges and other rewards along the way. Still the fair amount of post-design doc balance, but that was to be expected.
Time spent on the project so far: 454 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
So it took me about three days but room 0-4-1 is okay now. The four bosses (B,C,D and E) work well in their new environment - there is still the odd chance that they will be broken in some way when you fight them for real, but that's what testing is for - and you can fight them to your heart's content. That led me to fix many small other things, such as the elemental blast skill homing on bombs and other projectiles. Now to move to other, newer things!
Time spent on the project so far: 452 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
I was dreading this for a while now, but it's finally here and I think I'm up to the task; The dreaded room 2-4-1, aka where you re-fight bosses you've already defeated, either for fun, to get loot or to get achievements. Initially I thought I would have to make ten identical copies of the same room, but that's too much trouble for nothing, so I made it so each X-4-1 rooms has a hole you can fall in that brings you to 0-4-1, and then when you leave, it brings you back to the room you left. It even works if you save and quit!
But now I have to code the rematch against Defender D and Ensign E. It should be straightforward enough but I still have some coding and testing to do!
Time spent on the project so far: 451 hours
Currently working on: Working on room 0-4-1
Screenshot after the jump: The new room 0-4-1
I had forgotten to take note of the proper hue/saturation to use in order to make the yellow tiles for the 'caves/surface' tileset, so I had to redo them all. I'll have to be a bit more careful in the future, because it's easy to lose a few minutes messing around with that thing. I'm moving along with the creation of new rooms, but I'm a bit dreading 5-4-1, which is identical to all of the other 4-1s as it contains the boss rematches.
I feel that room 4-1 should be the same, no matter in which State you are, but this causes a few problems, for instance if you quit the game in that room, I wouldn't be able to statically remember where you came from. I would have to save that somehow, and I'm not sure I want to. The main reason why I don't want to reproduce 4-1 ten times is because it's a room I'll tweak often and I don't want to have to do it 10 times each time.
Time spent on the project so far: 447 hours
Currently working on: Moving on with the story
I think I figured out why most of the stuff hidden behind C6 was deemed to be endgame only in my design doc; It's because you can't go back to most of these places at the moment. Since you get warped to later stages by defeating bosses and collecting infopacks, you can't just waltz back a stage behind at-will. I'm seeing on my map that there will soon be a spot where you can explore a little more, but as always, actual design trumps over what I've wrote 'ages ago' in a doc.
I've also decided to remove the 'Ultimate Teamwork' skill and instead upgrade the 'Teamwork' skill by itself. The reason why there were two was because I didn't know at first that you would have many skill levels with different effects. I've thought about what the new skill would be, for a little while I thought that it could be a turret, but that looks a bit too much like the 'Admiral Stand' skill. So I've came up with something called 'Gun Roulette'
Time spent on the project so far: 446 hours
Currently working on: Moving on with the story
I've tweaked how the rocks react to C6 and I've created a new room that you can uncover by blowing some up. I've noticed in my design docs that I've considered these rooms to be "end-game content" regardless of when you could get into them, so I have to tweak that. It doesn't make sense for you to fight the toughest enemies that early only because I thought people wouldn't go back and explore the places that they couldn't previously get into. It's not a big deal, I'll shuffle the enemy placement around, that should do the trick.
Time spent on the project so far: 444 hours
Currently working on: Creating new enemies, moving on with the story
It wasn't too tough to create C6 plastique and having it work by double-tapping the down key, I think I'll do all movement skills based on key taps. Maybe the left and right keys will need to be mashed more than twice in order to trigger the skill, so you won't do it by accident. C6 is pretty straightforward, it destroys specific rocks when you place it nearby. I was thinking about also making it shred armor from enemies, but I'm unsure. Now I have a bunch of rooms to create - the ones you couldn't get into before now!
Time spent on the project so far: 442 hours
Currently working on: Creating C6 Plastique
Screenshot after the jump: C6 Plastique
Now that the player has saved FirstClass F for a bunch of lightning shooting monsters, he grants them the C6 Plastique, two versions up from C4. It destroys certain types of rocks in the world, allowing the player access to even more of the map. I hadn't thought about how I would implement the various 'traversal' skills, such as C6 Plastique, Ghosting and the B&R engine. I was thinking that double-taping the arrow keys would activate them, but I also wonder if there is a better way. Up and down might be fine, but I can see tapping left and right by mistake. I'll think about that tomorrow!
Time spent on the project so far: 441 hours
Currently working on: Creating C6 Plastique
Screenshot after the jump: Chain lightning
I was a bit annoyed about how the P.R.I.D.E. system worked - achievements - because I had to enter all 12 levels by hand (how many things you need to do to get the different achievement levels) and that was a bit cumbersome. Now it's a flat growth curve, if you need 1200 kills to get level 12, while before it might have went 10, 50, 125, 300, now it will go 100, 200, 300, and so forth. Achievements aren't that important for a normal 100RTBD playthrough, but they have to be obtainable without frustrating the player too much, since you'll need 100% achievements to unlock some story ending stuff.
Also, the lightning gun isn't completely done yet, but I like what I have so far. It's not shooting chain lightning - maybe I could make it leave a trail behind - but it's bouncing between enemies and while it shoots slowly, I feel that it could be useful for certain rooms.
Time spent on the project so far: 439 hour
Currently working on: Making the volt gun and fixing the achievements
Apparently, I had made a mistake where everything electric in State-5 was using the sprite of the volt gun ammo, so working on the lightning gun by itself messed up the sprites for most of the rooms I had made so far. I fixed that. I also added the finishing touches to the mini-boss you have to fight in order to get the volt gun. Next is making how it works, I think going through walls isn't such a big deal especially if it's slow to fire and doesn't do much against single enemies.
Time spent on the project so far: 437 hour
Currently working on: Making the volt gun and fixing some sprite errors
Should chain lighting go through walls? Maybe if it was a skill you would use that shot lighting I would allow it, but a gun you can just fire nonstop? Maybe not a great idea. I'm still unsure if the toxic gun is fine so I really don't want to open the can of worms that a gun shooting bouncing electricity from enemy to enemy through walls would represent.
Time spent on the project so far: 435 hours
Currently working on: Moving on with the game
State-5 is pretty story-less so far. It's about in the middle of the 'critical path' of the game, so a lull in story beats doesn't bother me too much. I have to say, still, that the lack of treasure chests and other rewards is starting to bring me down a little, since all I'm doing is exploring around and finding nothing good for my troubles. Don't leave me hanging too long, past version of myself writing a design doc without knowing anything about what the game is going to be like!
Time spent on the project so far: 434 hours
Currently working on: Moving on with the game
Three more rooms done today! A mini-boss fight against a giant megabot is the last thing I'll have done, and I enjoy making mini-bosses. They're not as complicated as the actual bosses of the game but I can get creative with what they do - after all, fighting against a bunch of giant enemies with no special attacks or no variation in what they do would be boring. The giant megavoltbot, for instance, will warp into specific spots of the map and, a bit like donkey kong, it'll shoot bullets that roll around the floor and drop on you.
It's more interesting than just fighting a giant enemy stuck on the wall that fires in a straight line while waiting for you to destroy it! I'm a InfoPack 43, so we're about 1/3rd done with State-5!
Time spent on the project so far: 432 hours
Currently working on: Moving on with the game
Screenshot after the jump: Mini-bosses ahoy
Today I've added the challenge room where you kill enemies while chain lightning moves between them. You have to be careful because the lighting deals very high damage and it moves kinda unpredictably. I've also been a bit surprised that the basic UnityEngine.Random.Range(min,max) function returns between (min,max-1) rather than (min,max) as I expected. I wonder if I'll have to change many other things!
I've also noticed that the player skill level could get to 3 around that point in the game, so I added level-3 functions to the various skills, that meant noticing that there are no altars/pits in state-5 so far and because of that, the teleport skill is a bit useless, and the player is stuck there without any options to go back and try its hand at earlier challenges. I fixed that and tested all skills, fixing a few glitches here and there, things are going smoothly.
Time spent on the project so far: 431 hours
Currently working on: Upgrading the skills and moving on with the game
Screenshot after the jump: High-voltage challenge
I've fixed the whip because it was acting very weird. It's not an important part of 100RTBD but I still took a few hours making that whole #igavania special thing. Just so you know, you'll need to get to 5-10-5 and then - usually by arriving from the top entrance and killing the enemy to your right without moving - you input the konami code in reverse (Enter, A, B, Right, Left, Right, Left, Down, Down, Up, Up) and the barrier to the right should break, allowing you to fight a teleporting, fireball launching boss. Then you get the Whip Module that turns your gun into a whip-like attack.
But now that it's done, I'm moving on with the rest of the program, mainly collecting the infopacks in State-5 and all that!
Time spent on the project so far: 429 hours
Currently working on: Moving on with the game
"Igavanias" as they're called on his kickstarter page, are the specific kind of metroidvania you had, starting with Symphony of The Night, moving forward to every other castlevania game I've played on DS. The Arias and the Portraits, what have you. They're my favorite genre of game, from all the genres. And that's pretty much why I've began working on 100RTBD, because I hadn't played one of these in forever and I wanted to make one that would be enjoyed by people. RPG elements, exploration, items and skills and achievements and what not.
All because of my love of Metroidvanias. This was of course my main inspiration behind 100RTBD, and I hope it'll be a good 'one of these', with as much originality as I can.
So donate to Iga's kickstarter! I'm all for it and I hope the project will go smoothly - as I know these things can go sideways, but I have faith in the result.
And as for myself, I'll keep on making my robot game with the world shifting and the weird story and now a special room where you'll fight an optional boss!
Time spent on the project so far: 427 hours
Currently working on: #igavania special
Screenshots after the jump: Secret room and special whip
You can now equip as much G.E.A.R. modules as you want at once, stacking their advantages and inconvenient together in order to play Admiral A as you want it. I'm still not sure about the actual balance of these items right now since it clearly provides a big benefit just to equip them all at once. Maybe adding drawbacks to all of them is a bit intense, but I'll think more about it in the future.
I've also added some info on the stat screen, now you actually see your 'real' stat, modified by the gear and items you're using, it's valuable information, I think. I have to move forward with the game now, but I have skills on my mind. How can I make them more usable like I did with gear? I sure can't make it so you use them all at once every time..
Time spent on the project so far: 425 hours
Currently working on: Continuing with the story
Screenshots after the jump: New gear screen and new stat screen