Hey everyone! Welcome to the official Planet Morph April devlog! Like I said, I hope to do these devlogs every couple months to keep you guys updated on the game’s development, so without further ado, let’s get right into it.
To start, I will show you the new creature I developed, the Tekmythian! While its core ability, it’s crystal laser blast, isn’t fully developed yet, the creature is fully modelled and playable! You would have seen this on my Twitter a while ago if you were following that, but here’s what the Tekmythian looks like!
While the creature is heavy and slow, the laser attack that emanates from the crystal in its center will have great range and will be used to solve puzzles in the future. So, look forward to seeing that when the feature is implemented!
And besides that, everything else these last couple months of development has focused on building the groundwork of the engine for the game. The work that has been done now will make developing the game much easier and more efficient in the future, but this kind of work just takes a lot of time. Here is a few things I’ve done to improve and/or build upon the Planet Morph engine:
For starters, I added a creature transformation HUD, which of course, allows the player to select what creature they want to be playing as.
But, as you can see in the picture, I also added the ability to bind a key to a certain creature transformation, so you can simply press a button to transform into your favorite creatures without needing to access the menu.
The second thing I did, which you would’ve noticed on the Planet Morph Steam Page if you had a keen eye, is that I added controller support. This includes the ability to bind transformation keys to controller buttons. I also worked hard to make sure the game supports many types of controllers, not just mainline controllers like Xbox or Nintendo Switch Pro controllers. For example, the game works just fine with my off brand Rockcandy PS3 controller. As long as your controller has two analog sticks and a standard controller setup, you should be good to play with it.
The next thing I did was create a more efficient way of creating the multiple laboratory test chambers. Before, I was modelling each room from scratch, which took a while to do. But with my new method, I can create them much faster. In fact, I created seven new test chambers in the same amount of time I created one with the old method. So how did I do it? I modelled pieces and objects of test chambers separately, meaning I can now simply put those pieces together like a puzzle, work with them a tiny bit to make them fit, and then create the new chamber. Easy.
Striving to continue to make things more efficient to develop, I decided to tackle events. An event needs to be able to do a lot of things, like play voice clips and dialogue, activate an elevator, or trigger camera movement. Again, like with the test chambers, I was creating every event from scratch, coding every variable change, dialogue scene, and character animation. While that might not seem like much, if you are doing more than a few events, the time quickly adds up. Now, if I want to make an event, I simply select which actions in which order I want an event to carry out, and I’m basically done. No more hassle.
And lastly, I worked on multi-enemy combat situations. The game already handled multiple enemies pretty well, the only issue was the camera. In a single enemy battle, by right-clicking, you can lock the camera onto the enemy, making it easier to aim your attack. But, with multiple enemies to fight, the camera needed to be able to cycle through each enemy individually and lock onto the specific one you wanted to attack. There’s a lot of little things like this when you are creating a new game engine that ends up taking a lot of the initial development time.
And after all that, we are brought to the present day. As you can see, laying the engine groundwork has taken a whole lot of development time, which unfortunately means the demo will not be out this spring, as I had hoped. As of now, I am planning to finish the demo by the end of this summer. While in the end, development is taking longer than I initially guessed, it’s not something I want to rush. I want this demo to be polished, reflect what the final product will be, and of course, give players a great experience they will want to come back for. But, if you have read this far, I thank you for your support, and I hope you enjoy the demo whenever that comes out. Otherwise, thanks for reading, and God bless! See you with the next update in June!
Evan Streblow