This week is a bit thin on updates because I'm deep in to the development of the achievement system, and Ref is working more on the Elites for the game.  A couple or random life events have also managed to side track my normal flow because I managed to get Covid and also found out that the wedding venue I put down a deposit for burned down.  No one was hurt thankfully, and I almost get a bittersweet kick out of saying it because that sort of a double whammy that feels like something out of a movie.  Anyway on to the game development.

Art

From an art standpoint, there isn't any development on the capsule art.  Like the rest of us Bruno is deep into his portion of the work.  Last I checked he's deep into sketching and filling in the details for the artwork.  We had a little back and forth about the layout of the piece, revising the positioning of the main character to a more action oriented pose, but nothing to show off just yet.  More to come soon!

From Ref's side, I think I learned something important last week about art.  Last week we managed to get 2 Elites done for the main level, and while I'm happy with both, one of them took significantly longer.  This felt like it was ultimately due to me not knowing exactly what I wanted and both of us getting excited about adding more and more to the reference images.  Only when we paired everything back did a character finally emerge and that process took a full 3 days compared to the 1 it generally takes to make an elite start to finish.

This week I tried to pull myself back from his creation process.  Rule of thumb going forward, supply the reference material and pull back to let the artist fill in their image with their style.  I think I was spending too much time trying to emphasize the details I would love to see instead of letting the art get generated by the person making it.  This past week this seemed to work out a lot better!  Ref created 2 characters with very minimal revisions and a much faster pace.  All it took was me letting him fill in the design the way he felt was right from the beginning.  I think this is the power of stepping back!

(Completed design from last week.  You'll notice how much "stuff" it feels the design is bloated with even after trying to tone it down)

I'm glad we made some progress, and that officially wraps up the Elites for level one.  Next up is elites for level 2 which Ref has already started sketching.  I'm excited to share how they turn out because we both happen to like Warhammer and will be using that as inspiration for some of the designs.

Achievement System

For me this week has all about the achievement system.  From polishing the mechanics of it to developing a bunch of achievements for the player to unlock.  I'm excited to announce that this week alone I was able to build out 84 achievements with many more to come! The hardest part was organizing the achievements to make them exciting for the player to unlock.

The goal was thinking of achievements that reward the player at a steady pace and also incentivize them to play the game.  This meant unlocking things at a steady pace and earning the unlocks in a way that was guaranteed over the course of runs regardless of skill level.  This meant binding the achievements to things that a player could do even if they aren't sure they'll finish a run.

My two break through ideas were were achievements for unlocking weapons and powerups.  For weapons, I realized that I have 2 extra major bosses in every level that the player had to clear to reach the end level boss, who is significantly harder.  Most players reach the first boss on their first run and after a couple tried get to the second.  These are time stamped at minute 9 and 15 I believe which are great markers of progress through the level.  Finally it just so happens that there are 2 weapons to get per level so this felt natural to bind killing bosses and getting weapons together. 

My next break through was getting powerups to work.  The way powerups work is that there are 13 Trees in my game which have both a melee powerup and a projectile powerup.  These powers are foils as in if it's a poison status effect tree then both sides will disseminate poison in different ways.  What I realized though is that if a player wants to unlock these powerups there's no reason they can't get the melee piece FIRST then unlock the projectile piece of the powerup second.  I spent part of the weapon modularizing the trees so that the player can unlock pieces of either tree individually.

Lastly I wanted to make sure the player is rewarded powerups at a steady pace and can unlock them whenever.  I also wanted them to be rewarded for unlocking powerups by PLAYING with other powerups.  To make this work, I bound powerups achievements to the act of levelling other powerups to max level.  So for instance, in a run, if you upgrade your poison melee powerup to max level you'll unlock the fire melee skill.  I felt this does a good job of encouraging the player to try new skills while they play the game, and also gets them thinking of build DEPTH during a run which is great.  The game inherently rewards the player for getting deeper into a build faster, since the powerups get stronger at later levels.

Next week

This week I hope to get through making the elites from level 2 on an art stand point, then starting to circle back to work on the major bosses for level 1 and 2. Like I said, I'm pushing to make the demo for this game a full vertical slice at this point and I want all of the art to be as polished as possible. 

For capsule art I hope to see the next iteration of the illustration.  I'm excited to see what comes of these changes to action oriented poses

For development, I want to push to finish the achievement system.  This includes adding more fun challenges for the player that they can complete to get an influx of gold to use in the upgrade system.  This also includes building out a weapon Mastery system, where in they can get flat damage and attack speed upgrades to their weapons by playing them more, which will hopefully push struggling players past levels if they get stuck on a certain difficulty.