This week has been all about polishing the art and sound effects for the game and that has been keeping me plenty busy.  It's amazing how true it is what they say about game development - Double every time estimate.  I really thought that we'd be knocking this week's worth of work out in a day, but it ended up taking a full week to implement everything.  Let's get into it.

I started up this week by drafting up all of the remaining items in the game that are placeholder content.  This isn't new levels, mind you, but just random things in the environment that were stock assets before.  Ref's output is insane so I really thought it would be a matter of just providing a list and replacing sprites.  I was oh so wrong.

Art

Things started off well enough.  True to his output, I supplied Ref a list of things and he came back to me with this handy little diagram of everything made in his own fashion and style

Now looking at this list, you'd thing we're basically done with everything! All the things I needed were accounted for and I just had to replace them in the game.  However that's when I realized all of the bad code in my project that had been lying around since the dawn of Bloodmoon Survivors.

The problem with game development is you that you get better as you go.  This is an issue because when  I revisited the glue and toothpicks holding my core loop logic together I was astounded to see how much basic repair I needed to reimplement all of these items.  My swing animations and shooting animations are all done programmatically, and being the genius that I am, I never serialized any of the values (letting me change them on the fly), so I lost a tone of  time replacing all of the weapons and updating the code to make sure the player held, shot and swung them the right way.  That was a lesson i'd rather not have to learn again, so I also took the time to update the code so that all weapons have a single re-usable component with a bunch of little widgets so that I could create new weapons and update their animations without having to dive back into that garbage heap.

On top of that and a hand full of other one off issues like with re-coding the prisoner quest objective, it took me most of the week, but on the flip side I now did take the chance to add a bunch of new particle effects that just make everything feel better to break.  I think this week came out a net positive, even though it was really redrafting rather than making new content

Music

On the music side, Juan and I finally nailed down a pipeline! It took about 8 attempts to make the sound effects we were looking for but I was finally able to explain what I wanted.  The secret, it turned out, was to send video clips of me playing similar games with similar sounds without any music and only SFX turned on.  This helped him be able to convert "Make good swing sound please" into technical terms, and even add some general recommendations (Such as dynamically adjusting the pitch with each swing to avoid audio fatigue - a comment my play tester made the previous week as well) and even helping me update some of the sfx we had.

Moving forward I think it will take less time to nail down the rest of the sound scape, and I'm excited to see how quickly we can get it done.  It's a little pain staking to capture all of the footage but I think it's really worth it.  The money sound in particular came out particularly crisp. and I like what it adds to the game.  

Side note: I've been playing some path of exile 2 this week and it's really inspired me to put more effort into audio, that game sounds so crisp, I want to strive for the same level of impact from our sound effects.

Programming

On the programming side, I've just been cleaning up code as I fixed all the art, but I've also taken the time to implement some suggested fixes from my play tester.  With the next coming patch, quests will keep track of how many you need to complete to get the full rewards for the level, and upgrades will have multiple currencies.  This will ensure that you can't just dump all of your money into health upgrades until you've played higher difficulties of the game where the rarer currencies are available.  Hopefully this will add some replayability to game and help set a clearer goal for players to repeat missions.

Next week

The last thing I did this week is reevaluate again what are the most important steps to getting this demo out the door.  I've boiled them down to the following:

• Create a Mascot
• Prettify main menu
• New capsule art
• Tune bosses
• Add some sort of synergy system
• Add secrets
• Get demo on steam and have achievements transfer to real game
• Localization
• Game testing

Some of these may be confusing so let me just quickly explain my reasoning.  

Creating a Mascot - this is important because having a figure for your game simply increases its popularity.  if you don't believe me look at every game ever made and check the steam capsules.  it's a bad ass dude or dudette staring at a battlefield or something.  The mascot shepherds the game.  Even Balatro has one - Jimbo, and that's literally a game about poker.

Prettify Main Menu - I watched a very eye opening video about user retention on youtube.  Turns out the menu is the first thing people see in a playthrough when we start a video.  That means it's the most important artwork in your entire game in terms of viewership.  It doesn't have to be gorgeous but I think improving it will help keep up retention if the game in being streamed.

New Capsule art - simple, new mascot needs new art

Tuning bosses - this was another interesting revelation I had.  People watch videos where there is conflict.  Sustained conflict is the most effective form.  Bosses are miniprogress bars crossed with conflict.  These are very important to the game's popularity.  I happen to have 30 bosses in my game.  I need to tune them so that they live longer and make the game more exciting for the player

Synergy System - this is something I've been thinking about for a long time. Runs need to be replayable and as it stands Bloodmoon survivors has nothing new from run to run.  Vampire Survivors had weapon Evolutions.  I need something like this to make each run more unique.

Secrets - same logic, this is engaging to players and I love secrets in games!

Localization - this is a virality multiplier.  Steam has players all over the world.  I may try to localize closer to demo

Finally Game Testing - as grateful as I am for the players I've had, I need truly anonymous people telling me what they think.  I think I'm going to try using these guys as a service to get some feedback and get a rating for the game, this should help me better understand what else needs to be done https://gametester.gg/developer