10/4 Status Update

It's October! Man, months don't last very long, do they? They need to be like 35 days long, why are they 30-ish anyway? The moon? I already have to deal with the moon deciding when stuff like Rosh Hashanah is (right now, apparently). Months don't need to involve it too. Anyway, let's talk about what people are really here for, sexy games. Although maybe you're here for rants about astronomy and calendars too, if so then man is today the week for you. It's been a long wait but it paid off.

Next week I'm going to be gone on a short trip. So less will get done than usual. It's actually what was supposed to be two separate trips that got smushed together because of timing. One with my Mom, and another to visit a friend of mine who lives in Seattle and see a football game with them. (Go Niners, btw) The Mom trip had to be after Rosh Hashanah because she cares about stuff like that, and the friend trip had to involve being in Seattle when the game happened. They wouldn't move it for me. So now I fly direct from the end of one trip to the other without even going home first.

Oh yeah, video game development., lots of tangents today. Mainly what happened this week was various small changes based on feedback I've gotten from demo 2. For example, I'm changing how you get new skills. Instead of just getting them at the end of levels, there's now what's basically a shop. You get what for now is being called a shard, and you can then use that in camp to manifest a skill or piece of equipment from the same alternate lives the armlets let them draw from. Which Is basically just buying stuff from a shop only re-contextualized.

This also helps solve another problem in level design which was I didn't know what to put in chests and such. It could be a predetermined skill, but then if it's not unique you'll get duplicate skills and if it is unique that's a lot more pressure to open every chest. Now I can just put a shard in them. You get a nice reward that let's you power up your characters, but missing it isn't that big a deal.

Now in Checkpoint Chokepoint there's a reason to go up the little ramps behind the ballistas and not just sleep them or ignore them. Also, the transparent ones are for the hard difficulty version for the level. I forgot to make those before the demo release. For most levels hard mode means more enemies or more challenging enemies. You can see the where the villains and the assassin spawn here as well.

I also started working on levels 7-9. This is part of a route split, you can either do 7a, 8a, 9a or 7b, 8b, 9b. One has you go over a mountain with snowy levels and a gimmick I haven't quite figured out yet, and one has you go under through some caves. In 7a I've been trying out this thing where some deer are being hunted by predators and if you get too close to them they aggro onto you too. But it hasn't really been working. I'll keep trying before scrapping it though, I think it's a fun concept.

For today's art preview, here's a window into the character design process. This is the villain for Vashti's POV. And he has a mustache, maybe. The artist provided a bunch of different options. Let me know if one of them particularly speaks to you. I'm thinking bushy is good, so maybe 2. 7 seems a bit much. 4 is also cool too, gives kind of a musketeer vibe. This character is supposed to be a famous hero/mercenary who's actually kind of a scumbag. So musketeer kind of fits. But then again, big bushy mustache. That just speaks for itself.

That's all for this week. As always, thank you for your continues support.