Hot summer postponing demo entry Devlog #1

Demo is clearly coming, but it’s further than closer.

I spend 3/4 of my spared money on a new computer. This beast takes seconds to load and it has 2TB SSD disk to load everything immediately. Instead of big lag, my project also loads instantly. That comfort made me go back to doing let’s plays, since it doesn’t take eternity to load anything. Not gonna mention that with each windows update I had less and less space to the moment I occured 0mb on my system partition day after my new PC came. It’s heating my room badly on top of 30C outside. Good thing this summer was exceptionally cold. Mostly raining and it was only once that hot this year.

Postponing demo release

I was very close to releasing demo. I fixed bugs (most of them xD) and added missing features to the demo level just to let my friend play and to figure out that although main feature of the game was very entertaining and enjoyable, all the rest built around that concept was quirky and random at best.

From that moment I knew that I have to raise the bar and polish it before even first demo. I decided to finish 3 levels instead of 1 and let people play true game instead of carefully engineered show of everything, adding up to nothing. I already polished AI of axeman and designed 2 new „neutral” enemies, one of which you see on the upward gif. I also added new background type, inspired by new super mario wonder. I’m fully satisfied with that one.

I’m currently rewriting AI for necromancer and will update other AIs to the new format.

I’m still missing music, but I have LLMS installed and some knowledge and will to advance this skill as well. My already created music although not that bad, it is still in develop and it doesn’t fit the levels I’m working at. Some day, some day…

Last thing, you will have a hard time playing the game if you don’t focus on what you’re doing 🙂

@edit 1

One more thing I suppose is worth to mention. There is no shame in redoing something to achieve something. Although there might be shame to be locked in loop of endless perfecting. For my game it took me ~3 months to relearn basics and rewrite engine i wrote years ago in MMF2. Next it took me ~6 months to create various prototypes and discard mechanics such as impact damage. Yes! There was impact damage once. I also discarded box pushing from previously mentioned older engine since it would require to adjust strength dispersion among interacting blocks to avoid obscure ridiculousness. But even without that I found a way around. I added steel boxes, which you can’t blow up but instead they will fly away like everything else. Works the same and can be used as weapon.

After that 6 months of prototyping, time for a demo came. Joke is that after creating demo level and polishing major bugs and inconveniences I discarded it completely after I saw demo of some mario clone. It was so much superior I decided to raise the bar much much higher and instead of 1, leave 3 playable stages and rethink what this game is all about.

After that I posted question about code I wrote for saving game at checkpoint. Well, my colleagues were more concern about the way I was coding than anything else. I asked few questions about coding, my other colleague send me his code to study. Well, after that I went back and decided to rewrite some of my code. I rewrote all game basics and came with new clean way to assign actions for you opponents and my game was rewritten.

There is no shame in rewriting everything anew. It takes time to prototype and discard what doesn’t work. There is shame in leaving everything as is and ignoring obvious imperfection. Sometimes we are just afraid that all of our work is for nothing. That’s viable, but remember. After that it might be just your fear and everything is fine. And sometimes it’s just better to leave it as it is, even though we are not satisfied. It’s worth to consider compromise. We are better off endless wheel of perfecting. So as I did with some animations in my game and behaviors. But sometimes when we are not satisfied and we know it can be better and effect is worth the effort, it’s worth to try harder. But don’t worry. This type of calculation takes lot’s and lot’s of practice.

So yeah, thats my next day edit.