Items, difficulty modes, challenge rooms, game production and hormones
Hello! It's been another super busy couple of weeks so I crammed as much as possible into this newsletter. Let's get started!
Items
Now that the patron build of my game's prototype is out, I can start working on the rest of the game.
The game's main adventure mode will be an action-adventure game where you explore an overworld, fight your way through dungeons and discover upgrades. So I need to make those upgrades!
I tried making lots of manually-activated items, such as a dash, a projectile attack and an invincible spinning melee attack. But because enemies are really fast and aggressive and your melee attack is already extremely powerful and satisfying, it was almost impossible to make any items that were both strong enough and fun enough to be worth using.
The one big exception was bombs! They're sort of like the bombs that chickens throw at you, except they have a super short fuse, they don't deal any friendly fire damage, and their explosions will block enemy attacks and destroy enemy projectiles. You can even hit them at enemies like a projectile!
So other than bombs, the rest of the items aren't going to require a button press to activate. They'll be things like the ability to jump over single-tile gaps, the ability to smash different types of objects with your hammer or take out enemies in a single hit, or new types of objects in the overworld that you can step on and interact with. Here's a quick video showing off jumping (which doesn't have an an animation yet!), bombs and a temporary double damage upgrade:
Difficulty Modes
While I've been working on the prototype, I've been balancing the game around my own skill level. This is so I can make sure that all of the enemies are still fun and challenging for people who have played the game for a long time, and so I can have fun while I work on the game.
So before I released a build of the game to patrons, I had to add some easier difficulty modes. The game now has easy, normal, hard and very hard modes, where very hard is the old default difficulty.
Increasing the difficulty mode doesn't just add more enemies or increase their damage, it changes how they behave too. Enemies on harder difficulty modes will move faster, attack faster, chase you for longer, or even fire more projectiles at once. So people who want more of a challenge can fight against ultra-aggressive enemies, but newer players won't immediately get run down by angry penguins. Here's the first room of the prototype's penguin level on all four difficulty modes:
Challenge Rooms
I've been making some challenge rooms too! I don't know if they're going to be part of adventure mode or if they're going to be their own mode, but I'm having fun making them regardless. There are rooms where you have to defeat all the enemies, and rooms where you're not allowed to attack and you have to survive for 30 seconds, kind of like Chessplosion's survival mode. But I haven't made any sprites of the main character without a hammer yet, so you just have to imagine that they're not holding it in those survival rooms. Here are a few of the challenge rooms I've made so far:
Game Production
I've been spending too much time thinking about the process of making games, so I wrote a couple of blog posts about it. There's a post about people who stop prototyping their games too early, and a list of all the game design articles and resources that have helped me the most over the years. I hope you find these useful if you make games, or fun to read if you don't!
Hormones
I came out as trans just over two years ago, but it took a long time to get on hormone replacement therapy. I started it last summer, and after dealing with all sorts of healthcare system issues I finally managed to ramp up to a full dose last month.
When I talked to doctors about HRT, I wasn't told that much about its benefits. They explained a few physical changes (fat redistribution, softer skin, slowing down hair loss etc) but they mainly just talked about all of the potential negative side effects. Because of that, and because there are lots of people online love who to talk about being "too old" to transition, I wasn't expecting huge results. So most of the physical benefits and all of the mental ones have been a huge surprise!
I was going to list some of them out, but I recently read this article by Cassie LaBelle about how her life has changed after a year of hormone therapy and it completely matches my experience so far. So if you're at all curious about the effect that feminizing hormone replacement therapy has on people, I highly recommend giving it a read!
But if you want the short version: I finally feel like myself. I wish I could have done this earlier, but it's better now than never.
Anyway, that's how I spent the last couple of weeks. Lots of progress on my game, and lots of being shocked at how much of a positive difference HRT is making. I'm going to go get some rest and I'll see you all again in a couple of weeks!