Here's a video, that's it for today! I'm currently correcting a few of the bugs you might have seen during it.
Time spent on the project so far: 480 hours
Currently working on: Playthrough video and fixing bugs
I've been hit by some limitations of the way I've coded the dialog system in my game. Mainly that NPCs and events can't really span more than one box of text without me having to create flags specifically for them. I can also use the global 'Story State', but I only want to use that for main story stuff. So when you encounter someone else or read a computer screen, you're going to get three lines of text, max. I wanted to have a way to display more text on a specific subject - without needing to do weird things like putting three computers in a room in order to get 9 lines - so I've made big text boxes.
Specific computers - you'll know them when you see them - use these text boxes to expand the story even more. 100RTBD is about exploration and growth, but it's also about the story, since after all, 'Story' is the thing I wanted to do with this game in contrast to, let's say, Friday The 2013th or my other titles.
Tomorrow I'm probably going to record my commentated playthrough, so you should see that pop around sometime during the weekend, or even tomorrow! Don't miss it!
Time spent on the project so far: 477 hours
Currently working on: Side areas
Creating the rooms of side-content isn't as straightforward as going with the main path, I have to play in the game and find places where you couldn't go before that are unlocked with new movement abilities. So far, everything I've encountered is fine, but maybe at some point my design doc will tell me to make a room with enemies too powerful and I'll have to move stuff around. That being said, I think I have maybe 4 more rooms to make before I return to the primary quest.
I've also decided to maybe not include so many items with the "Increase Skill Effect" modifier on them. Skill effects are very powerful and right now they're gated by levels, and that works fine for me. I think that instead these items will boost certain aspects of specific skills, these boosts might be compounded with skill effects, but it's much more targeted than powering all skills up
Time spent on the project so far: 475 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Screenshot after the jump: Another look at the map
New enemies! New items! New rooms! Stuff is being created and the game is going fine! The latest item is a buff that revives you when you die, it's going to be useful for boss fights and difficult challenges, because while you never lose much progress when you die in 100RTBD, you are sent back to the beginning of the current room. The new enemy type shoots homing bullets and is very powerful, watch out!
Time spent on the project so far: 470 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
With E3 going on, I forgot to post this, but don't worry! I'm spending most of my free time this week on 100RTBD, and it should mean that a bunch of new rooms get made, further advancing the story! New items and enemies too! And probably some kind of video on friday! Videogames!
Time spent on the project so far: 467 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Plenty of side-story stuff to work on right now, since you're exploring previously locked sections of the planet in order to find the two InfoPacks you need to continue on your journey of discovery and power. A lot of stuff is going on at the same time on Plan-X, mysterious actors behind the scenes, items and gear to find, levels to get and challenges to complete. I'm still making rooms, at least, so the progress is steadily stacking up.
Next week is almost full time work on 100RTBD! Get hype!
Time spent on the project so far: 464 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
According to very crude completion metrics (Number of rooms created), I am about 23% done with 100RTBD. It's true that the actual completion percentage might be somehow different because rooms aren't all created equal, but I think it's still a pretty accurate representation on how the project is going. Multiplying by 4 (to make the math more simple) arrives at around 1852 hours total to make this game. Which would mean approximately two and a half years at the rate of two hours per day, or less than one at a regular 40 hours work week. Huh.
Time spent on the project so far: 463 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
I had to spend most of today working on a weird bug I've just discovered where you can get 'stuck' in walls and jump infinitely if you just hold the arrow towards the wall and jump. This isn't a desired comportment so I had to fix it and it was something about the way colliders are set in order to make up the basic shape of the main character. With that out of the way - and most of my sickness gone - I'll be able to carry on tomorrow!
Time spent on the project so far: 461 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Screenshot after the jump: Admiral A is stuck!
Still sick, I've added a challenge room where enemies are healed by poison droplets and I've fixed a few bugs here and there. It's crazy how many little details stack up both in code and design whenever you generate new content. I suppose being a good designer is to be able to see ahead and to quickly change gears when what you thought would be best doesn't pan out!
Time spent on the project so far: 460 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
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