This has been a fun week for Bloodmoon Survivors, as I've gotten to experience playing my own game all the way through, outside of the editor.  It felt very weird to not be able to change things as I worked, but it was a fun experience none-the-less.

Art

As predicted, now that art is into boss and elite design, we are slowing down to make hand crafted enemies.  Bosses really are that cross section where game design and art need to be working simultaneously to produce things, so it's been a steady process.  But we have somethings to show!

Behold, the shredder.

This is the first elite in level 4.  He's a soft introduction into the level's combat niche as unlike the other enemies you've encountered so far, he's relentlessly aggressive with a bunch of melee attacks.  He doesn't really give you the space to pull out your projectile weapon and forces you into a knife fight.

To make matters worse, he also has an armada of deployable traps, which he drops all around the player to encircle him and keep them locked down in one place.  To take him down you need to meet him on his terms.

Programming

On the programming side of things, the last few weeks I've really stepped back to focus on marketing and promotional tasks.  However, I've been fixing the occasional bug here and there and this week I needed to finish all of the levels for the game.  This is because I've hired an editor to help me craft a trailer, so I needed some nice footage that showed 3+ biomes and a diversity of levels.  While I was at it, I took the opportunity to add a few fixes that were low handing fruit for a while now.  I juiced up the damage numbers in the game, made a couple powerups synched with the global color palette we use, and redid some UI elements of the game that players were saying needed improvement.  It was a minor patch to be sure, but I put them all together and pushed the update to steam.  So I guess this is the first official patch for Bloodmoon Survivors! :D 

It wasn't much, but it felt so good to be back in the drivers seat after weeks of just talking about the game.  I'm really motivated to get back to cleaning up the game and adding fun events and balancing for the demo!

Promotion

Taking my own evaluations of how Bloodmoon Survivors is doing, I've decided to focus on getting it to be as shiny as possible.  I spent the bulk of this week searching for a trailer editor, which I found! He asked for a bunch of footage so after launching the game's patch, I built a full - release version of the game and just started recording a bunch of raw footage.  It was actually a bunch of fun playing the game all the way through!  I was very happy with what Bloodmoon Survivors has evolved into, and I was amazed that the final levels didn't implode since I haven't had much time to polish them up.  But everything works! And it made me so excited to show all the new powerups and enemies that are hidden behind the 1.0 release of the game.  I think people will really like it.

I also took time to put together a press kit for the game.  It sounded really official but honestly it was mostly just the promotional material I already had + the original files to the logo and capsule art so streamers and whoever else could have an easier time making thumbnails.  I got the idea from a blog I've been reading, and realized it might be the single best way to short cut the competition vying for streamer attention.  Side note, if you don't have a press kit, make one! Apparently streamers will drop projects if its too difficult to make a good thumbnail from the tools your provide them.  

The last thing I did this week is enter Bloodmoon survivors into some festivals.  I feel like this is an important next step to gaining real traction, because as a general rule, the more wish lists you have going into next fest, the more you will leave with.  So I think I will be holding my opportunity to showcase Bloodmoon to the masses until I've really gotten the hype train going.  I'll let you know how these festivals go as they fire off!

Next Week

As excited as I am to get back into development, next week will be a difficult one.  I have some big life events that will keep me busy for the majority of the week, so we'll see what I can do.  If I do find time, I'll be excited to sneak away and make some fixes, but we'll see :)