Hello! It's been a while since the last devlog (24th April 2020) but the development has been going on with full thrust. Especially in the last two weeks it really accelerated. Beside creating so much new content, I've also had to delete some old progress from before summer, because it didn't fit. For example, the old art and code has had a huge rework, which definitely payed off since everything is far better structured and easier to expand upon.

Major code changes

In the beginning of the development of this game there hasn't really been a plan or a game concept. It all just started out as a side project. That's why the early code was really bad structured and a lot of it was quite unnecessary. For example, the early boss fight system was quite bad, because at that time I didn't have any experience in coding such a state machine. Since then I've done through three different versions of it and that will hopefully pay of in the future.

The early combat system had the same problem. It was based around Unity's physics-system which was fine in the beginning, but lead to major problems and bugs later on. The enemies and different puzzle elements and objects had similar problems, so I also rewrote their scripts.

All in all, the entire codebase is far more readable, and shorter. It's not finished yet, because the boss fight system still needs some additional work and I'll continue to add new objects and mechanics, but the major systems are finished.

Reworking the art

The first pieces of art which I've drawn for this project are the tile set, the background and the player sprite. These three were made with Gimp and I was quite unexperienced with pixel art at that time, so they were quite bad, but since then I've acquired Aseprite - a pixel art drawing program - and I've also chosen a simple palette which (in my opinion) has enhanced the games look by quite a bit. But the current art isn't final, there will definitely be a few more versions of it before the final release.

Game concept & story

The initial idea of this game was, that there will be a boss enemy, and the nearer you get to it, the more difficult it would become. But since the difficulty curve of (almost) every game already suggests that, that idea was ultimately pointless - of course the game will get more challenging and dangerous the nearer you get to the final boss. In truth, I didn't really have a game concept at that time. But at the end of this summer, I finally got to develop a new plan:

The story begins with an old artefact, in which an elder species has concealed evil forces. These have stayed concealed for a long time, until, by accident, they have been released. The forces inside manifest into three creatures - the Evolid, and escape. It is the players mission to find and fight them. The "moral" of the story should be: You can't solve problems by ignoring or hiding them away, you must face them. And hopefully, I can communicate this message with some good cutscenes and storytelling.

From the technical side, the game has platformer, metroidvania and puzzle-solving elements.

Hey! Thanks for reading this small devlog, I hope I could give you some insight! If you want to know more, consider checking out the Demo and my YouTube Channel. Cheers!