Out of the 27 enemy types in 100RTBD, I am done with 20 of them. They all do more-or-less different things, plus the state variations, plus the giant forms, that's a lot of enemies! Killing all enemies enough times is integral to get the true ending, so you might want to equip that monster bait and farm for a while!
Time spent on the project so far: 551 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Only a few rooms to go and the Ghosting Engine will be in the possession of player! This movement-based skill will allow the player to go through certain solid blocks and that will open a bunch of new rooms - optional ones - that I'll have to visit and create immediately after that! Sounds like a ton of work, to ignore the critical path and work around it? Well, the player might want to visit these side areas first, so I have to see how that'll work!
Time spent on the project so far: 549 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Experienced unity developers, how do you instantiate new things? I have this enemy that shoots a very high stream of bullets. If I get a few of them on screen at once, the framerate drops like crazy. Is it because there are too many objects on-screen? Is it because my way of creating new bullets is not very good? If you have any idea, please tell me :D
Time spent on the project so far: 547 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Today for a cutscene, I've started working on General G's signature move, the air strike. A few target markers appear on the screen, and after a few seconds, projectiles rain down on them! Although it's just for a little bit of cinematic flair, I'm also trying to work how the actual skill will function when you fight against him. That's just good design!
Time spent on the project so far: 546 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
More rooms done, more enemies created, and all that...
Hey you! You reading this blog post! Are you good at pixel art or chip-tuny sci-fi music? Wanna help my little indie game get some identity by having sprites NOT from a free pack I found on the internet and/or save me from having to take Hero Core music for 100% of my soundtrack because what else could I do?
Could you work for free? I also work for free :D There are a few hundreds of sprites that could be redone and maybe between 12 to 15 music tracks? That'd be awesome!
Or maybe you do know someone who would fit that bill? Send them this way!
You know how to contact me! (at poik007@gmail.com or on the twitters @poik007 !)
Time spent on the project so far: 545 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
I didn't have much time to work on the game today, but I did finish that challenge room I was talking yesterday! It's a bit less involved than it originally was, but the challenge is much more possible and not frustrating at all if/when you fail. I've added a new enemy and that made me think that I might need more than three sprites per enemy, so I've refactored a bit of how sprites work.
Maybe I should've made only one sprite per thing total and change its color in-engine (using the SpriteRenderer Color property, for instance) but no, I've made all of my sprites in paint.net, changed all of them to red for the fire world, blue for ice, etc. So when I instantiate an enemy, by default it uses the 'base' sprite, so I have to go through some code so it changes to the right sprites depending on the world. I've tweaked that code to allow for any number of sprites, not only 3.
Time spent on the project so far: 544 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Most of my work on 100RTBD is pretty iterative. Like this challenge I'm working on right now, for instance! My design doc states the following "A challenge room where the player dies if he's not in darkness". That seems vague enough, but I've figured out what it meant; A spot of darkness moves around the room and you have to stay behind it, otherwise you fail the challenge. Then I've started playing with the idea and figured out that jumping and falling does not work very well with the whole 'follow the dark circle' mechanic, since you have less control over these things, so now I'm reworking it a bit!
Most of the game is like that, I start from 'old' ideas, interpret them, then rework them!
Time spent on the project so far: 543 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Screenshot after the jump: A challenge in the dark
Today went well as well! I finished a few rooms and added another mini-boss fight against two giant enemies. The framerate is pretty inconsistent in the darkness world, that must be because of all these sprites I'm drawing on-screen to make a dark effect. Is there a better way to do it? I'm not using real lightning so I couldn't just block it out, I know nothing about shaders... Well, one way to reduce the performance hit would be to decrease the number of sprites that make up the veil. The only drawback is the quality of the effect! It's already pretty blocky
Time spent on the project so far: 541 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Everything is still going well. Darkness world is still on-going and I won't be done with it for a good while, but I don't mind. Much like the player, after the darkness is replaced by a world of light, I will be relieved. Even if I'm making the game, some of these maps are tricky to navigate in pitch-black conditions. I also have a few more things to do before getting there; Such as the re-fight against FirstClass F and, of course, the boss fight against General G. Creating so much content is really time-consuming!
Time spent on the project so far: 539 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Today I added more rooms. All rooms in 100RTBD are hand-crafted hobby-grade video game maps! All of my other games were procedurally generated in some ways, except maybe Jester's Quest 3D, but 100RTBD is a labor of love. The story is progressing quite well and I'm almost a third of the way done with the whole game! That being said, there are no shortcuts I can take in this project, all rooms have to be made to be somewhat interesting and make some sense, and I have to make a thousand of them. In any case, I'm not done yet, but I'm not losing heart either!
Time spent on the project so far: 537 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
I've read recently that metroidvanias shouldn't have stories that interrupt the flow of the game because it breaks the mood and that the genre is about free-flowing exploration, not skipping through tons of dialog boxes. I guess I agree on some level, if the original metroid had cutscenes each ten rooms or so, it would be weird. On the other hand, some other metroidvanis like metroid fusion and most castlevania games have a fair dose of stopping to talk with characters about things. So I guess that 100RTBD is in the "talky" side, in this regards. Adding a story to a game is one of my goals with this one anyways, I really couldn't take it out.
Time spent on the project so far: 535 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Not much to say today, I've added a few more rooms while wondering what I had meant in my design doc when I said that the player would "climb ladders". There are no ladders in 100RTBD, only blocks you can jump on. Ladders would be like, one way blocks, but you also should be able to climb down them. I don't think I have a climbing animation either so... no ladders!
Time spent on the project so far: 533 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Although I'm having some Unity problems again - the editor is sluggish as all hell - I've created a few more rooms today, bringing their total at 281, which means, strictly by the numbers, that I have about 28% of the game done. Not 28% of the critical path, mind you - but I feel like I'm saying that all the time. Anyways, I'm still working on it! Hope the unity issues fade out tomorrow...
Time spent on the project so far: 532 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
A few more rooms are done, some of them have challenges in them and I've created a few new items as rewards. One item that I didn't plan on having at first - in my so called 'design document' was something to temporarily illuminate a room. Now that I've been playing in darkness for a few days, I see how important it is. I also had to fix a weird bug where the Energy Blade skill would disappear off-screen the second you used it, weird huh!
Time spent on the project so far: 530 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Meet the black hole gun! It's quite powerful and you can hit enemies with it multiple times since the black holes don't disappear when they hit anything and they move slowly! This also lead me to add the 'blind' status ailment on enemies. On the player, it's simple, the blind ailment prevents you from seeing well, but enemies are controlled by AI, so they don't exactly have the concept of 'seeing'. Except in some situations, where enemies will try to move toward you, or fire at you, or things like that! In this case, blind enemies will not be sure where you are, so they'll be more or less blind!
Time spent on the project so far: 528 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story, implementing the black hole gun
Screenshot after the jump: Black hole gun
Horror! I was working on the brand new Dark Gun that shoots black holes, but unity froze while I was transitioning between two rooms. That's when the game auto-saves, and it appears that it froze just the wrong way, deleting my saved data. I wanted to move on with new stuff before restarting the whole thing, so I tried to re-create a workable save file by hand. I'm wondering if it's worth it to spend some time to create a debug menu of sorts? Just a simple console where you could change in-game values directly, that would help future tests, but it would take some time to implement properly...
Another thing I've added, however, is the creation of a backup save file, whenever you select 'continue' on the main screen, it will create a backup.sav file for 100RTBD, so if the game crashes and you lose all your progress, you can at least recover from that. It's not a huge deal what happened today, but it's still a bummer ;(
Time spent on the project so far: 526 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story, trying to fix my save
Screenshot after the jump: Catastrophic failure
Back to our scheduled programming! I've fixed the details of that boss fight in State-6 against a giant kilobyte, now I'm working on a new enemy type! The ExaBot! This wiggling tower of uncertain death shoots bullets around, but when it stops its defense is much higher and that makes it tougher to kill! State-6 is still pretty new, so I have a bunch of work to do before the next big event in the game! The player should acquire Ghosting pretty soon too!
Time spent on the project so far: 524 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
I'm done with work on VIRTUAL PET! I've tested, tweaked and re-tested it all. You can go play it at my itch.io page, I know it's not perfect, but it was a small gamejam project, and I enjoyed the first hours of the projet very much. Then when the additional days got added to it, I started working on a bunch of features and then it became kind of a bog ;) But I'm happy to release what I have so far :D
Time spent working on VIRTUAL PET in total: 35 hours
This is my second to last update, since tomorrow I'll just test everything and submit my VIRTUAL PET to the #petJam! I have to say that I'm a bit bummed out that the deadline got extended twice, because otherwise it would've forced me to keep things simple. Now I've tried to do many different things and I'm not sure if I've done any of them well ;)
The final activity sure is something, by the way :D
Time spent on VIRTUAL PET so far: 35 hours
After messing around with Unity's client/server infrastructure for a short while, I've figured out the best way to make VIRTUAL PET work on the internet, it involves a website, actually! I know how to make these, so it wasn't that big of an issue! Now VIRTUAL PET can send and receive data from the internet!
I should probably put a big bold note somewhere on my game's page when I'll release it to warn people that everything they tell VIRTUAL PET might be seen by someone else. That's part of the game tho :)
Time spent on VIRTUAL pet so far: 33 hours