Video: A full level of my new game! Also it's the Steam sale!
Hello! Lots has happened to my new game in the past couple of weeks.
Enemy Balance
First off, I finished adjusting the last few enemies so they're all fun to play against. Slimes move much faster than they used to, and mice can flank up and down instead of all clumping together in the middle of the screen:
But more importantly than that, my prototype can now handle levels with multiple rooms full of enemies!
Levels
The full game is probably going to have two main modes: an adventure mode where you explore an overworld full of single-screen dungeons in a similar manner to the first The Legend of Zelda game, and an arcade mode where you fight your way through linear levels. But for the prototype, I'm just making some quick linear levels made up of single-screen rooms like Chessplosion's Gauntlet mode. Here's the first level I made:
I'm happy with how this game is turning out. I hope it's as fun to watch as it is to play!
I'm still planning on making multiple difficulty modes, and the default difficulty mode will be a lot easier than what you see in the video. I'm trying to make sure that the game is fun for myself first, and then I'll tune down the other difficulty modes to make sure that it's fun for people who haven't already been playing the game for months on end. So if the video makes the game look too difficult, don't worry!
I've started to make some other levels but they're not quite ready to show off yet. But if you want a quick preview, here's my favorite room in the entire protoype so far:
I was worried that I wouldn't be able to put any cliffs in rooms that contained penguins, because surely it would be too easy to bait them into sliding to their doom. So I figured I'd just keep adding more penguins until it became challenging again, and that room is what I ended up with! It seems like every game design problem can be solved by spawning more enemies.
That's everything I've done so far! I'm going to make a few more levels, add some different difficulty modes by modifying the individual enemies' behaviors (e.g. making them move and attack slower), and then I'll send the prototype build out to Ducky-tier patrons on Patreon and Ko-fi! I'm one step closer to turning this thing into a real game...
Steam sale! Steam Next Fest too!
My games are simultaneously in two different Steam sales! It's the Steam Remote Play Together Fest, a sale for games with local multiplayer, and the Guildford Games Festival, a sale for games made in Guildford, UK (the town where I live). So until February 22, you can save 50% on Chessplosion on Steam and itch and save 25% on Ducky's Delivery Service on Steam and itch! Enjoy!
Steam Next Fest just happened too, with lots of free demos available to try. I mostly just played lots of 2D shmups, and my favorite demos were Redneg Allstars and Shikhondo: Youkai Rampage. I recommend checking them out! But the latter is meant to be played on a vertical widescreen 9:16 monitor, so you should really rotate your screen 90 degrees if you have the option of doing so. You can play it letterboxed if you have to, but you have to play it in a teeny tiny thin little vertical window in the middle of your monitor. It feels much worse than playing a "normal" vertical 3:4 shmup on a horizontal monitor to me. But the game looks very pretty in fullscreen if you have the means of playing it properly!
In completely unrelated news: Boghog, the designer of Gunvein, just finished writing a document on how enemy AI works in arcade beat em ups. It's really interesting! Beat em up enemies usually move very quickly and have unpredictable random AI, so I had always found it hard to understand what they're actually doing under the hood. If you felt the same way about beat em up AI, maybe you'll find this document as interesting as I did!
Anyway, that's pretty much all I've been up to recently. I got some new glasses right before I started writing this newsletter, so now I'm going to go stare at a bunch of objects in the distance and marvel at how detailed they are. I hope you have a great couple of weeks, and I'll see you next time with some more news on my game!