A long overdue update!
I typically post frequent updates on the Discord, but realized that it's been a long time since I updated any info on steam. I figure that the game is at a substantial enough point that a news update on Steam is important. I also realize that Steam has the "to be released out of Early Access" for this game as Summer 2024 (which is about to end) - and I can guarantee that that will not happen... but for good reason!
I've spent the past year working a LOT on building a comprehensive suite of mod tools to be able to add content to the game. I wrote about it in the last post, and the tools have come a long way since then. Early this year I decided that I had a couple options: I could rush towards release this summer and build a Classic Mode world with the mod tools and call it a release. This seemed pretty attainable, but wouldn't really allow people to modify the core game experience, it would just allow them to create new classic mode worlds. I wanted to allow people to modify the core aspects of the game as well, including the content on story mode. So I decided early in the year to basically re-program all of the enemies and background using the Mod Tools. It would be a massive effort to basically rebuild the entire game using the mod tools, but when done it would give people the option to modify almost anything they see in the game and build off of that. This way the game isn't really a mish mosh of hardcoded objects and moddable objects - if you see an enemy in the game, it should be relatively easy to modify it to build a different type of enemy for a custom classic world you could build. This would allow people to modify bosses to have extra attacks, or update biomes to have tilesets or parallax layers that the game never originally had.
(the parallax / biome editor tool which allows you to preview what the parallax will look like in any room)
(the animator which makes it much easier to animate pixel art sprites like traditional bone animation software. It also allows point cloud depth mapped pseudo 3d rotation)
It's a pretty massive undertaking to rebuild the whole game using these tools, but it's helping me make the tools more robust and it's also really helping me streamline my creation process. With a lot of the hassles of the normal dev cycle using Unity out of the way (import new sprite, set to point render, set to 1.6x ppi, click multiple, split into grid... add to animator... etc) I find myself much more enabled to create new content then ever before. So as I've been going through and redoing all the content in the game, I'm also adding new content to make the game more full and vibrant as well. Over the winter this year I was playing Circle of the Moon and I was grinding to get a drop from an enemy. I remembered as a kid how I hoped there'd be a way to get drops from enemies by killing them on a certain frame or something. I always wanted to add a system like that to a game and realized with the mod tools it would be the perfect way to do so!
Since the mod tools are all interconnected, all the details are present in all the menus and there's little to no redundant work for adding new content. I also added "hints" which hint at the way you need to destroy an enemy to get the drop since every enemy has their own drop and their own unique way to get a drop from an enemy. By doing it this way I hope that the drops still feel random for someone unaware of the system - but also for a completionist makes the world feel more engaging and puzzling.
Though every enemy having a drop is a lot of additional content, and how would those drops be used? I did think about doing a 'vania style inventory, but over the past few years I have been playing a lot of Battle Network. I always wanted to add a system similar to those games into a game I was building so I decided to see what it would feel like if I just used that system, where the drops of enemies are similar to a soul from the sorrow 'vania games, and every 8 seconds you can choose from a hand of the drops you added to your deck based on their code.
So far it feels like it's been adding a lot to the game! It feels like it fills the role of subweapons or souls in a 'vania style game, but the deckbuilding and collecting aspect of it adds another layer onto the game.
I've also built a "prologue / journal" editor to make creating new journal entries or prologue sequences easy.
In the 2023 version of the game, the journals were walls of text filled with abstract lore for the game detailing the protagonists internal struggle. While I enjoyed them, I don't think they were really that accessible and felt like a big pace breaker. I decided for the 2024 revision of the game I'd turn every journal entry into a "prologue" style sequence where the text is shown on top of a background image. I've also redone the journal entries to tell the story in a different way and hopefully be much more "show not tell." I've gotten a little over-inspired at points and the latest 2 journals have gotten actually quite long including over 20 image/text pairs each... While maybe that might be a little pace breaking too - it's all optional content. The journal entries are not required for playing through the game it'll just add some extra lore and context to the game and environment.
At the current state in the BETA branch, the game has the first 4 stages in Aion Station, the Homeworld, and the first stage in the Mountain completed. There's still a lot left to go, but it's exciting to add so much content to the game and I'm glad I put all those extra hours into building the mod tools since it's making the game so much more fun to expand on in my free time. Of course this is not my full time job and just a passion project, so it'll take some time to get through the rest of the game. I'm probably about 20% through the game at this point, so I'm thinking unless I get a crazy burst of energy as just start busting out content that it'll take until sometime next year to be 100%.
As I've said a couple times, adding new content is getting easier and easier, so if you have any ideas that you'd want to see added, please join the Discord (https://discord.gg/wADK7bTTZZ) and let me know!
I'm looking forward to re-building and re-imagining the rest of the game and I hope that the mod tools get to a good place where others will eventually be able to feel enabled to quickly build metroidvanias in the same way.