The past few weeks has been a lot of work for Bloodmoon Survivors.  It really is true what they say about needing to put arbitrary deadlines into your game otherwise it'll never get done.  Once I set my sights on the expo, I pumped out the evolution system and cleaned up so many bugs that I had bugs coming out of my ears.  This past week, I sort of unofficially decided to take a second and recenter my efforts.  This is an important part of the design process and one that I love because it let's me evaluate the project as a whole and plan my next moves.  Let's get into it.

Art

From an art perspective, Ref has still been going strong making more enemies for level 3.  Last week I decided to take the time to do some concepting for the remaining enemies in the game, and now we have a whole board of pinned ideas, complete with reference images, animation requirements, and attack patterns.  This is has been very helpful way to keep everything moving while I take a breather to reorder my work.  Here's some more of the level 3 artwork

Like I said, it's been a pretty light week, but things are still moving along and that's the best possible situation.

Capsule Art

Capsule art is still rocking and a rolling.  Daniel sent me some recolored art which I think looks awesome, and I believe his is detailing the art work and designing the logo now.  This is another good situation because I'm just happy it's all happening in the background without requiring much input.  It also makes me very excited to see what he returns with because it's always a pleasant surprise to see how much the artwork has progressed. Can't wait!

Music

Now that we're pretty far into the creation of the last 3 levels, I've reached out to Juan again to help me out with the completion of the final three tracks! Another exciting thing is that we'll need the music for the trailer soon! It's hard to believe we're getting to the final stretch, I feel like when you start asking for music again you know you're pretty deep into development.

Programming

No programming this week! Like I said, I'm taking an unofficial break although there is still plenty of other stuff to do in it's stead.  For one thing, my design doc has slowly been disintegrating into a nothing burger, and I've completely started losing track of what I had to do.  After the expo, I spent a couple of days literally just organizing my todo list and figuring out what the top priority bugs are.  There's a rule in development that only the highest priority thing is ever worth doing.  This is because it delivers the most value and everything else consumes your time and energy that could be spent on the thing with the most impact.  Time and energy is not unlimited!  Needless to say, the other side of the axiom is that FIGURING OUT what the most important things are is the second most pressing activity. 

I also spent this week building out more reference art and concepting the final enemies.  My goal is to have a continuous feed of enemies that ref can take and simply work on without having to ask me what's next.  This is important because once I start thinking of them it forces me to evaluate the design, it's combat mechanics, and how hard it would be to implement.  Having all of this thought through in advance is invaluable even though I feel like I physically didn't do any real implementing.

Next Week

Next week I'm back on track.  I feel refreshed, and seeing my design doc all cleaned up has revitalized my sense of purpose.  I think I really was panicking inside when I saw that I had 27 pages of things that needed doing.  Taking the time to redrafting my document and reprioritize has really helped calm me down.  It's actually only like 5 pages of bugs and 2 pages of implementation :D which may sound like a lot but relatively speaking it's totally doable in my time frame.  Anyway till next time!