This post was originally scheduled for June but I didn't get assets made in time, nor did I finish writing the devlog. In an effort to show that progress was made in May, I'm making it live in it's unfinished state.
As an addition to the June Devlog (I could not find a place to insert this "naturally"), I'll be releasing a story teaser every day until the July devlog on my Discord server. You can join my Discord here (It'll mostly be quotes from different characters, or "research notes" from Maria, the protagonist of the Prequels DLC)
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Hi all, it's officially June (Happy Pride month to my LGBTQIA+ Siblings), that means I have a new Dev Log for you!
For starters I wanted to mention that during the month of May, every year, I take a majority of the month off to celebrate a couple birthdays within my family (There are weirdly a LOT in May). This took me away from the games development for a while... However I have gotten some work done.
For example, Monsty Corps UI officially now works.
Achievements
Achievements are a very hard thing to get right, from making sure players consider them an actual achievement, to making sure there are enough for Achievement hunters for example (Literally one of the only things keeping my other game alive). So I have decided on a couple rules for achievements in Monsty Corp.
Visible Achievements
Visible achievements are the achievements you can see when interacting with the games Steam Page, or the "locked" ones visible in the games page in your Library. These can be anything from hard to complete achievements, to achievements for doing x thing y times. The rules are as follows
- MUST have some kinda of difficulty.
- CANNOT contain spoilers for the story.
- CANNOT contain anything that I don't want to represent the game.
- CAN be, do x thing y times achievement.
- CAN be a "collect all achievements" achievement (though I'll likely never add that one)
This means that For example Achievements pertaining to specific endings cannot be "visible", getting x achievement for completing y ending, should be a "secret" achievement, but an achievement for "getting all the endings" can be a visible achievement.
Secret Achievements
Secret Achievements are the ones that are "Hidden" when you view the games achievements in your Library. They CAN be clicked on and viewed in the Global Achievements tab in the achievements popup.
Due to being hidden unless outright clicked on, I'd rather these achievements be "easy" to obtain. Their rules are as follows
- CAN be achievements you MAY get through normal gameplay.
- MUST be easy to obtain.
- CAN contain story spoilers.
- CAN be "do x thing y times" achievements, however CANNOT be the initial tier
- CAN be for completing specific endings.
So an achievement for "killing 10 enemies" would not be allowed as a "secret" achievement, unless a "killing 5 enemies" achievement also exists as a visible achievement.
A "get x ending" achievement can be secret, but a "get y different endings" achievement might not.
It's important to remember that these are personal rules created to have some consistency between how achievements are done. This means you may see a few in the final release that do not follow these rules.
State of the Game
Where am I with the games development?
Well for starters, I have completely redesigned my dev level to make testing new features MUCH easier, I've also started work on Monsty Corps next "Big" Feature for our lovely alpha testers, the "Shop" system. Throughout the game you will encounter "shop bot" in a little room between levels, it will sell Robin different items to aid them in getting out of the facility alive, you'll be able to buy things such as Ammunition, powerups, and MORE in the final game.
The game now has a proper death system, the game will now check how much health the player has, and if the player has none left, the game will "pause" and trigger a Death screen. I'm surprised it has taken me so long to add this, especially since you can literally die in the first level.
I've gotten started on what I like to call "baby mode", the basic idea is that the game will check how many times the player has failed at a level, if the player fails enough times, the game will make it impossible to lose and the player will get a condescending remark from SAIC. At the moment, Baby Mode cannot be triggered through normal gameplay and only stops the player from receiving damage. I intend to allow the player to completely disable Baby Mode, effectively making it so that even if you hit the threshold for Baby Mode, the game will not trigger it.
What else has been done?
Well I have also redesigned the last room of Level 1, and just after it will be the introduction of Shop Bot, and then Level 2.
Unfortunately I haven't been able to add anything related to Alex yet, I'm still very much unhappy with his story portions and am making heavy changes to the script so that it works better.
Complications
Unfortunately, with all the good, must come the bad. Due to my limited experience with things like shaders/materials and lighting, there's quite a few visual issues within the game, I'm not sure how obvious it is, but if you look at the screenshots on the games store page, you may notice some artifacting on some assets, this is likely due to the assets not being made for Unreal Engine 5.3, or from them being free, Unreal Marketplace assets... I'm not talented enough in Blender to make my own assets just yet, I'm learning with Maya, but I cannot afford to buy a Maya license at this time, maybe one day... Anyway, I'll be working on figuring out how to deal with these visual issues as the assets I'm using are actually quite nice and I'd love to continue using them into the future.
What's Next?
After I finish working on a working prototype of the shop system, and get shop bot in the game, I'll continue working on the script and hopefully finish work on Chapter 1. I'll also be working on the Sequels DLC, and may finally get that store page live. I'll work on the Prequels DLC as well.
I'm HOPING to have some kind of Demo live once Chapter One is finished, and once I get enough feedback from that, I'll start considering the Early Access campaign, I want you guys to be able to experience as much of the game as possible in the Early Access, I'm using games such as Subnautica: Below Zeroes Early Access campaigns for inspiration on how much content to include at the start, and what sort of things I'll need to do to prepare (for example) my own Discord Server (which you should join BTW) for the eventual Early Access. I mean theoretically, I COULD just go live with the Early Access as soon as Chapter One is done, but I don't want people to pay for content that may not be up to par, I've never actually done an early access before, so I want to get this right!
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Anyway, that's it for me for this month. I hope to have more updated animated storyboards to include within the actual game soonish. Remember that you can apply for the PreAlpha [here](https://www.lockyzmedia.com/games/monsty-corp/)
Thanks for Reading,
Robin