What have I been up to?
Mass Optimisations & Refactoring
Before cracking on with the rest of the demo, I decided to take some time to get my house in order. It's been almost a 6 year sprint to even get to this point, and a lot of the code needed a make over. I've made massive changes to the way maps are loaded and rendered, the games' resource pipelines, things like that.
I also wanted to dedicate some attention and polish to areas of the game players would be engaged with the most, which in our case, is exploring the world, bashing mouldy monsters, and working their way through the calendar.
New Menu / UI System
Another big call I had to make was to scrap the home made menu system I made from scratch. There were far too many cases where I was constantly bogged down and wrestling with my own menus, which made creating and maintaining them very difficult. Going forward I am now using the Gum UI library which provides a visual layout editor. So far it's been very good, in fact I have already been able to recreate all of my Menus & UI in Gum within the space of two months.
Picking up and dropping items
As you can see we now have some fancy item icons! I recently revisited the item system and decided to make it so players can pick up and drop (most) items in the game.
Overhauling the combat
I went back to the drawing board with the combat, creating two brand new scary enemies, and focusing on fundamental survival horror interactions. In the space of a few months I have implemented attack variations, crits, dash attacks, knockback and even knock down states for both the player and enemies. With command grabs, escape mashes, screen shakes and visual low health feedback still to come.
Major Physics Rework
Another step to making the above combat features doable was to change how the physics of the game operate. This involved implementing some design pattern I have already forgotten the name of but essentially the idea is that you scale down your physics operations relative to the world (A 40x20 physics object becomes a 4x2 object in a smaller world) process all the physics stuff, then scale it back up. This allows for faster movements and more jump scary moments. Boo! Tee hee hee ho ho!
Also worth mentioning is that all of the characters now move on a momentum / acceleration basis, rather than a controller input 1 to 1. Adds to the game feel innit.
Going Forward & What lies ahead...
I have been toying with the idea of potentially opening up aspects of the games such as additional artwork to external artists. It would certainly speed up the process and I have the money from my full time job to do so. There will of course be much more music to come from commissioned musicians in the near future.
Q: "What sort of things will you be commissioning?"
A: Outside of music, I am considering looking into paying for the following:
CUTSCENES (Pixel Art)
DIALOGUE PORTRAITS (Pixel Art)
VOICE ACTING EFFORTS (Efforts are non-verbal vocalizations like grunts, gasps, screams, and shoves. These will be used for the main character Justine, as well as bosses and social contacts the player can befriend.)
PROMO ART (Full vector art for Steam & Social Media)
Q: "When can I expect the demo as well as the full game?"
A: Realistically we're now looking at a demo release some time in 2027, with the full game being in late 2028.
Thank you!
Once again thank you for the support so far its been great. I will be away briefly in September-October as I am visiting Vietnam and Japan. Other than that further updates are to come!
- AlexOD