This week we've been mocking up the tile sets for the next two levels.  As much as I hate building levels (from burning out by building 18 of them for Frisbros) it does feel good to be back in the saddle making actual content for the game!  I asked ref for us to work a little out of order and do a bulk order on all of the tile sets and first character mock ups of each enemy per level because I believe the longer I see and work with the art the more I'll form an opinion on how it needs to be tweaked as the levels evolve.

Art

For art this week we have been discussing the look and feel of the next two levels in depth.  I sort of had an idea of what I wanted: 

• Everything ravaged everything burned
• Worlds built for giants

But it took us a while to understand what these concepts meant.  With the first one, we decided to go with the burning farmland which turned out well last week.  This week I have been adding particle effects, smoke, and other post production effects to give it that feeling of chaos and destruction.  For this level and the next one, we tried prototyping the first enemies to see what would inhabit these chaotic worlds

For the second level, we settled on a snow level, taking heavy inspiration from Midgard in the latest god of war game.  I really like how large and bulky everything was in that level, as if it were built for beings that were giants compared to humans and how there are high contrast metalwork and forges strewn about.  Ref was quick to build an awesome tile set which embodies these qualities and create a bunch of obstacles to navigate

Note how everything is humongous.  This actually serves a double purpose because it fits thematically with what we are building, but also deals with the largest complaint people have about the early levels where they get stuck on little obstacles in the environment.  Hopefully with this level, you can't miss them.

On another note we've also continued building out events for players to engage with to inject some variability into the game.  Last week we built the Moonshards, powerful obelisks that the moon sheds for you to collect if it is pleased with your work.

And this week we finished adding the mysterious shrine which can now appear in any level

I don't want to spoil what it does, but I will say that my internal name for it is the double-up-i-cus. Derive from that what you will :)

Programming

On my end, I've been spending most of my time working with the new tile sets.  I've come to realize that this part of development requires iteration. You simply can't think through everything you want and have it play out.  So I've been trying to build iteration into my schedule.  This week I laid out level 4 and spent time running the character around it, getting used to the environment.  This in turn gave me a list of things I need to update and cool ideas for how to make the level unique.  I want to lean into the fire and brimstone of it, and I feel like we can make something cool happen with the active volcanoes and massive bear traps.

While this has been going on, I also finally, FINALLY redid my enemy manager! This is huge because up until now I could only spawn new enemy waves every minute.  This was okay for start up code, and no one ever complained about it, but it made it hard to add any dynamism to the level.  Vampire survivors has little random events, like a wave of enemies that just run across the screen, or enemies that spawn to trap the player in a ring.  With this new manager class, I can now add these random events, and even more importantly inject them at run time.  My goal is to keep the runs feeling fresh and interesting.  The goal is add a pool of dynamic events that get injected into the level based on difficulty and chance, to show the players things that keeps them on their toes.  The only other thing I'll say about this is that the "double-up-i-cus" is eager to toss in a couple secret enemies of its own!

Next Week

Next week I want to mock up the 3rd and final tileset.  It's a little counterintuitive to start work on stuff I may cut, but I really believe having it created and being able to look at it will give me more time to make decisions about it.  I've also noticed I work best when I batch my tasks together, so if I'm doing tilesets, that's all I do until I'm done.  We also want to have the first enemies spawning in each level to simulate what they could feel like as a finished product.

On my side, I'll be continuing to play with the enemy manager and refining new events for the players.  This was the biggest piece of feedback about the demo and I'm keen to address it and surprise people.  On top of this, I also have 1 KILLER bug that people found in the playtest that I need to fix.  I spent a couple hours on it this week to no avail.  I'm determined to fix it in the coming week.

Till next time!