A Game By It's Cover Entry 4

Balance is hell of a thing, especially when you're not sure how the flow of the game will go. How much do I want the player to grind? What should they grind? Could they grind everything and come out okay? I had to really tone down enemy damage lately, because even at a range of 0-8, taking 8 damage is devastating. Now I feel that the amount of gold you need to buy new GEAR might be a bit too costly. I still have two weeks left to get this on the right track, but it'll be a challenge!

Time spent on the game so far: 23 hours

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A Game By It's Cover Entry 3

I've done the screen where you can look at your GEAR, I'll add options to sort it by type, power and ID at some point, but right now it's good enough. I've also started working on level 2, which introduces loot and gold. I think the game is going at a right pace, but I hope it starts picking up next week when I don't have speedruns for charity to watch :)

Time spent on the game so far: 15 hours

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A Game By It's Cover Entry 2

Tutorial 2 is almost done and that marks the beginning of the 'actual' game, since after tutorial 2, you start fighting for a good while. I still have a few kinks to work out too, like the damage being dealt not registering properly. The core concept of the game is to get a bunch of different gear, so I'll have to be careful with balance and gear creation. The way you unlock new gear to buy (and upgrade, maybe? I'm thinking about upgrades) is by completing challenges. The progress of health and attack (and the scaling of enemies) is also something I'll have to think a bit about.

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Time spent on the project so far: 10 hours

A Game By It's Cover Entry 1

The AGBIC jam has started and the concept is making a game based on the Famicase 2016 entries; which is an art thing where you make fake (but real looking) Famicom carts. I've chosen Item Connect (http://famicase.com/16/softs/09.html) which is inspiring me to make a puzzle RPG that I'm going to call GEAR LINK. I have the core idea of the game, but I don't have much in terms of gameplay yet. With this week being SGDQ2016, it's a bit difficult to work on it as much as I could, but no excuses! Here's what I have so far!

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Time spent working on the project: 5 hours

Entry Four Hundred And Nineteen

The General G³ fight is done as well, so now I'm free to move on to State-9, the second to last area of the game! I still feel that the light gun is too strong, either that or my bosses take more than one hit per attack, but that's debugging I'll do later. In three days, I'll more or less start work on the famicase-based gamejam, so 100RTBD will be on hold again!

Currently working on: Continuing the story

Time spent on the project so far: 740 hours

Screenshot: General G³ fight

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Entry Four Hundred And Eighteen

The FirstClass F³ fight is pretty much done, it's a bit annoying because you have to ghost/unghost to get around the walls and hit it, but it's not too bad of a boss fight. It might be cheesable with the light gun as well. I have the impression that the Power of Three boss fights are too easy, but I'll work on that more on a later balance pass. Only need to make General G³ - which should be done tomorrow - and then I'm done with this part of the game! This bodes well since I'm starting a new game jam on july first!

Currently working on: Continuing the story

Time spent on the project so far: 739 hours

Screenshot: FirstClass F³ fight

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Entry Four Hundred And Seventeen

Ensign E³ is almost done, but I'm still not sure about a few things; Do I want it to be hit when it's in the middle of the screen? Maybe I should prevent that. Also I'm not too keen on the projectile pattern it shoots right now, since it's super hard to dodge. I'll probably tweak that a bit.

Currently working on: Continuing the story

Time spent on the project so far: 738 hours

Screenshot: Ensign E³ fight

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Entry Four Hundred And Sixteen

Defender D³ gave me a bit of trouble because the way I want it to work is for its shield to absorb bullets and unleash attacks when it has absorbed enough, then go off for a while, then go back up. I messed around with a few ways of doing this, but I think I've found the best one and implemented it.

The Power of Three bosses aren't that bad, but try beating them at level 1 and tell me what you think ;)

Currently working on: Continuing the story

Time spent on the project so far: 737 hours

Screenshot: Defender D³ fight

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Entry Four Hundred And Fifteen

Colonel C³ is done and I've started work on Defender D³, I'll probably be done with the Power of Three fights this week and then I'll be able to move to State-9, Tempo. Good boss fights are kinda hard to make, but I hope they'll be fine! Colonel C³ spins its sword around and moves around the room, when you shoot it, the sword gets bigger, making it even more dangerous. I'd recommend using a small number of powerful attacks instead of plenty of weak ones!

Currently working on: Continuing the story

Time spent on the project so far: 736 hours

Screenshot: Colonel C³ fight

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Entry Four Hundred And Fourteen

This boss rush of the "Power of Three" series is all about dangerous high-risk fights. At this point in the game, the player will still have plenty of options to defeat them, so they're not too difficult. I do have to keep in mind that me finding a boss easy doesn't mean that everyone will, so I try and make them on the easy side. Brigadier B³ is done, and now I'm working on Colonel C³, which should be done tomorrow! Watch out for that giant blade, Admiral!

Currently working on: Continuing the story

Time spent on the project so far: 735 hours

Screenshot: Brigadier B³ fight

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Entry Four Hundred And Thirteen

Now this is for real, the boss rush starts, six rooms where you have to fight the Power Of Three series. This is going to take a while and balance out all of these 'empty' rooms that take about 15 minutes to create or so. The percentage of overall game completion based on the number of room is kinda iffy because there's much content in the game that isn't tied to specific rooms, but at the same time rooms require the generation of that content, so it kinda evens out.

Currently working on: Continuing the story

Time spent on the project so far: 733 hours

Entry Four Hundred And Twelve

After creating the State-8 Arena and the prizes you get, I'm now working towards the 80th infopack. To get the 79th one, you need to activate a computer that also starts the 'Power Of Three' program, a special defensive measure to protect Plan-X. A consequence of this is a boss rush, six new bosses will be fought in a row in order to get there. I think that's going to take me quite a while to create, but then I'll be 80% done with the core game!

Currently working on: Continuing the story

Time spent on the project so far: 731 hours

Entry Four Hundred And Eleven

A bunch more rooms, challenges and items were created! Now you have a gun part that allows all of your guns to deal healing damage, that's useful for state-8, but not so much for the rest of the world. I've created rooms with custom gameplay systems that I probably won't re-use, so that's a bit of time spent there, but overall I'm just continuing with the infopack collecting and the main storyline is still going on!

Currently working on: Continuing the story

Time spent on the project so far: 730 hours

Screenshot: Rooms created this weekend.

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Entry Four Hundred And Ten

I've created three more rooms today, but what I've mostly done is tuned the Energy Blast and Airstrike skills so that they behave a bit better. The airstrike skill was kinda useless as-is, so I modified it a bit to make it more efficient. I'm at 77 infopacks at the moment, so only three percents away from moving on to the almost-final world of the game!

Currently working on: Continuing the story

Time spent on the project so far: 728 hours

Entry Four Hundred And Nine

Still working on the infopack collection in State-8! There's only one enemy type to create and they'll all be in the game, and I'm about at 77% done now! Things are going quite smoothly, but of course since I'm gaining experience all the time I can't help but rage at some bad decisions my past self has made ;)

This happens to the best of us!

Currently working on: Continuing the story

Time spent on the project so far: 727 hours

Entry Four Hundred And Eight

A bunch more rooms, challenges and items were done this weekend! The overall core path of the game was also continued by a few percents and I feel like I'll get to the 80% range this week. State-8 is a bit weird because most stuff works in reverse, so machines that usually destroyed rocks now create them, sometimes the map is upside down, etc. I wonder how many more weird things I can work in the ton of remaining rooms!

Currently working on: Continuing the story

Time spent on the project so far: 724 hours

Screenshot: Rocks gone wild

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Entry Four Hundred And Seven

Finally! 50% of the rooms are done, and in a somewhat related statistic, 50% of the game is done! Today I've created a new challenge, new gear and a new enemy. Only two enemies left and the basic foes you'll encounter through the game will all be there!

Currently working on: Continuing the story

Time spent on the project so far: 720 hours

Screenshot: 500 rooms done!

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Entry Four Hundred And Six

Puzzle design is pretty tough. Especially in 100RTBD where puzzles aren't really the core of the game, but only a side activity you have to engage in from time to time. In a game where puzzles are key, you need to make sure they're really solid, for this one tho, they just have to be okay. 'Maze'-type puzzles are also their own thing. After iterating for a while over this one, I think it's okay, albeit a bit difficult. It's more of a platforming challenge than a puzzle because of the randomness, maybe I should fix that!

I've also changed the State-7 light beams so they're not solid anymore, that was just too weird.

Currently working on: Continuing the story

Time spent on the project so far: 719 hours

Screenshot: Puzzle design

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Entry Four Hundred And Five

A bunch more rooms were created this weekend and today, mainly in State-7 and State-8. The overall game is 50% done and the main story line is about 73% complete. If we extrapolate - we shouldn't - from these numbers, it'll take me another 700 hours to finish the game and 150 more to finish the main story. Let's try to make these numbers lie!

Currently working on: Continuing the story

Time spent on the project so far: 718 hours

Entry Four Hundred And Four

The heal gun is now in the game! This weapon fires expanding waves of healing energy that will heal any enemy you shoot - except monsters of the Inver family, which can't be damaged otherwise. I'll probably add some piece of gear or another that'll allow skills to damage Inver enemies as well, but for now I'll continue on the map. I might go back to previous room to complete challenges that I couldn't beat - since I didn't have the heal gun.

I'm also thinking about reworking the save system just to use unity's serialization and XML features instead of making a weird proprietary format.

Currently working on: The heal gun

Time spent on the project so far: 714 hours

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