GAME GO VIRAL?!?!?!
Awesome and epic moment hit the game last week. It went viral! Again!
Thanks to this one tweet, the game gained a lot of visibility over this past week, it's really awesome! Thank you so much for the positive feedback and enthusiasm. I do feel that the game doesn't quite meet the expectations some people have for it, but at least most people seem to be having fun with it, which is great!
To answer some questions, yes, this game is our first commercial project, we did it part-time over the course of a year (which unfortunately shows in some parts). Regardless, we're very happy with the reception and please look forward to our future games!
That said onto the bug fixes!
Bug Fix
You no longer unlock Bell when entering Foundry
This is actually a leftover from when Bell was supposed be unlocked in the foundry. Fixed now
Vamp now no longer shows up as a boss fight on stage 2 and 3 upon saving and continuing.
Very surprised nobody encountered this much earlier, but tis has been fixed!
Saving too early doesn't cause the save file to get corrupted and just straight up prevent you from selecting anything on the map
Again, nobody encountered this?!?!! It's fixed now, but really made me wonder how often the save and continue feature gets used. Maybe it's because the game crashes less now :O ?!?!?
Known Issue
Due to changes in the save system, 1.41 save files are not compatible with 1.42 and may cause the map to disable all rooms. This is a known issue and unfortunately the easiest fix atm is to reset your run. Sorry!
Graphical issues on Intel integrated and some AMD GPUs, aka the Grey screen
Sooooo, I think this problem is caused by my specific version of Godot and is pretty well documented. Unfortunately, I can't really upgrade my version of Godot due to some issue with Jolt among other things.
If you encounter this issue, there are two paths you can take, either
Refund the game
Look, it sucks that the game doesn't work properly on your machine, I want everybody to play the game and have a great time, but at some point the problem is so hard to fix that the best course of action is unfortunately to give your money back.
Downgrade the Game's rendering into compatibility mode
BUT, if you still want to play the game Reeeaalll badly and don't care too much about how it looks I do have a solution for you.
Go into your game properties and under launch options add --rendering-driver opengl3
The game will look a bit weird (especially on the splash screen) but turn on the 'reduced filter effect' under options and the game should look pretty decent!
It's still missing some effects that are not available on compatibility mode but at least it is now playable!
Message to the community
I'd also like to take a moment to make some clarifications about the game's future
There is currently not a plan to add any further content to the game
I know I know, not very contemporary indie game dev of me to stop updating the game. especially when the base game doesn't have a lot in it and after it went viral like twice
I do have some reason for this though.
First, as previously mentioned, This current version of Godot I'm working on is not the most stable. For the nerds out there I'm using Godot v4.3_Beta2 with Jolt as an add on. Transitioning this into 4.6 is very hard :( I tried twice and it broke everything both times.
Game's code sucks. MY CODE QUALITY IS NOT USUALLY THIS BAD, FUTURE HIRER PLEASE DON'T DISQUALIFY ME JUST FOR THIS. In short, the project was rushed and the timeline was all over the place, so I duct tape a lot of things and things are just simply not built to scale. Many lessons have been learned and I won't repeat the same mistakes again, but tis a wound this game cannot heal from, am afraid
It's like 4 bucks and I do in fact have to make good financial decisions. while one of the game's selling point is that it's so cheap it's basically free, it also make it hard to scale for financial success without other ways the game can earn. It's very hard to continue putting effort into a project knowing that I'll be draining myself financially (again). Future historians will use this passage to confirm my capitalist tendency, which I concede is in fact true, I need money :(
I just don't want to work on it. Look, I got burned out working on this project like 3 times. People who have been on a creative journey might relate better to this experience, at some point you've associated so much negative emotion to a project no amount of enthusiasm and audience can bring back that energy that you have when you started it. I know 1 year is actually a very short time frame for game dev and I can probably deal with all the problems I've been mentioning by just toughing it out, but my heart's just not really in it anymore frankly.
All that said, while I don't want to work on FTP anymore than I need to, it doesn't mean I don't want to work on games ever again. I really like doing what I'm doing here and if this project shows me anything, it is that I'm actually pretty good at it and can probably make a decent living out of it! Matter of fact, we're currently working on something I think is pretty awesome, so stay tuned ;D
What is planned for the future of the game
Language updates
I'm a bit unconvinced that there's any significant audience interested in the game outside of English speakers but there's a lot of effort being put in by the Latin audience for the game, so I figured I might as well throw them a bone.
Godot is actually pretty good at localisation, so I'm very excited about learning how to do it here so that I can use what I learn here on future games.
First Language that will be added is probably gonna be Indonesia (that's the other language I'm fluent in) and with that future language support can be added via mods or official translation!
Android Build
Did you know, the game was originally planned to be released on Android shortly after its Steam Release???
Tis in fact true! I got the idea from my dad! My Parents are big supporters of this project but they only play games on their phones, so I figured this is good enough reason to add mobile support into the game.
Also also, the game accidentally has good touch screen support thanks to it being fully playable using only a mouse!
Also also also, I already tried it before on my phone and like 80% of the game's feature is already working!
Also also also also, I have no idea how to do this on apple, so wish me luck!
Steam Cloud sync
Just like language, it was pushed to backlog under the assumption not many will use this feature.
But, I figured if I want to make this into a career, this is probably pretty important to figure out
It's really just more about figuring out how to do it using the steamworks plugins I'm using, so this shouldn't be too hard!