Hello everyone, we're finally here.
It is finally time to focus on the Early Access build. It took longer than I wanna admit but we did indeed manage to cross the milestone. The only thing I can guarantee is it's gonna be a long and bumpy ride full of unpredictabilities, but I've divided what needs to be done into 3 categories.
First thing first, the game needs to be in a state that is Early Access friendly, which means that every major update cannot constantly break your save file. That would suck, wouldn't it? So let's not do that...
Things needed to achieve this goal:
Rework the save system to have save slots and clean that up.
Every weapon needs to be in the game in, at the very least, a placeholder form.
Player journal system.
Cutscene system.
Difficulty options.
Implement the rest of the player upgrades and their pickups + lore in, at the very least, a placeholder form.
AI companions during key fights (they'll be invincible so get out with that escort mission nonsense).
Migrate the game to Godot 4.7. I will stick to this version of the engine for the entirety of development.
Note: I cannot guarantee 100% save file immunity but I'll do my damn best. There's some mechanics/features I'm still not sure if I wanna implement or not yet. We shall see and I will keep the EA description thing up to date.
My game is made for me first and foremost but it is in my interest to alleviate some friction, so here are some details about the difficulty options and such. I think I've narrowed down what people struggle with or how they want to be punished.
Options and features:
The game will ask you at the very start if you want Auto B-Hop on and hitmarkers on. I have a strong sense of suspicion that some people skipped the tutorial and got frustrated by how my game expects them to play vs how they attempted to play.
You'll be able to tune enemy movement speed and projectile speed (separate slider for each). Bring it all the way down and you might not even need to jump around very often (but at least jump away from danger, sheesh) or crank it all the way up if you need to test your reflexes.
You'll be able to change how much damage you can take if you want some extra punishment or mercy.
Most obvious is people getting lost. There will be a map. I will take this moment to draw a line in the sand that I will never add a quest marker aka "go there idiot" dot on said map. The map is gonna be plain and simple for... economical reasons, but it will display how much of the current area you got completed in item completion. You will never start any levels with their map unlocked, you'll need to go out of your way to find them. Oh and it will be a 3D map.
Of course, you'll be able to tweak these at any time during the course of the game. I know difficulty sliders like this are not everyone's cup of tea but for my game I just cannot simply make difficulty a binary thing. Way too specific with what certain people struggle with vs how they wanna be challenged.
Right so, the third checkpoint is content. I went through this earlier this year so I'll keep it brief.
Content I wanna do:
3 levels.
1 small level for the big bad boss at the end. I want the first EA build ending to have a narrative satisfaction.
More guns of course.
More bio augment nonsense of course.
More enemies of course.
Special lore terminals for the Kalems.
On the topic of enemies, I will be making new things for them to keep them more interesting. Things like a smoke bomb to disrupt your lock-on, a shield that can only be broken by melee attacks, hyper armor that can only be damaged by shooting specific weak points, more varied movement pattern configurations and then some more.
Naturally when the demo will no longer reflects the current state of the game, I'll unlist it on Steam.
Anyway, that's a lot to take in. My goal is to get the main features ready by the end of the summer. I will be uploading experimental builds on itch for people who wanna help out. Maybe I'll bite the bullet and make a Discord server despite stating that I wouldn't, I wanna centralize the community and I figure the more dedicated and passionate players would join it.
So much work ahead of me. Would it be worth it financially speaking? Probably not but I've made peace with that.
Goodbye for now.