What are you up to this weekend?

Hey no problem! I have a backlog of comments to respond to also haha! Revita is a lot of fun! Make sure you opt into its beta, it's the last official update for a while and changes the game relatively drastically. And that great to hear it went well! I've heard about them a number of times (moreso as I got involved in this), so it's always cool seeing people work on their projects!

I'm using Godot since it seems pretty straightforward, although I am wondering if I should look into a node style one instead, since I'm not a programmer lol. So far with Godot everything has been fine except the scripting, cause I have very little idea what I'm doing lmao, definitely going to have to put in some work to learn. When I was working on it, I did end up with a serviceable main menu, although it needed some work to actually move between scenes still, not sure why it wasn't working. But I got the music, the icons, and the exit game to work lol, just the scene transitions are left.

Unfortunately I haven't made much progress since the original post. I worked on some assets around the time of this original post, but I've been so busy since that I haven't gotten to do much else. I'm not great with characters, so I'm having a friend work on those but it's also been slow going (which is fine, I can't even really use the character assets for a while anyway). Mostly, I just got a new job and have been training and had all that crunch with the audiobook and the game testing that I do, so hopefully in a couple weeks I'll be more settled, as it's 3 days a week on site. It's just the training has me in during the week making time short for me, along with the other 2 jobs.

But I do have achievable goals I feel like, and the game itself I feel is fairly fleshed out, it just needs to be put together piece by piece.

In terms of level design, I want it to progress like Revita does, where the player goes through arenas that are procedurally generated, or probably seeded levels is a better phrase. (Or hand crafted is what it's looking like right now, since I can't actually find a lot of details on what I want to accomplish). So at the time I played around with creating one level, putting up the collision boxes to walk on then adding the assets in a canvas of -3 to 3, to create the Hollow Knight styled parallax. Since the assets weren't scaled right, it came out silly but not bad for a first attempt I'd say. So for that I just need to rescale my assets and I'll be able to start making levels. But I really don't want to hand craft most of these stages, I will if I have to, but if I could figure out how to get a good seed system in place that would be ideal. And I have plans for hidden/unlockable rooms written out as well, this should be pretty easy from what I've seen. And finally on this aspect, I've been thinking about each stage having a gimmick. The snowly level would have sliding physics, the sewer level would have poison, the underground would have pratfalls, that sort of stuff. Nothing too complicated, just a bit of variety for each stage.

In terms of character physics, this is really the one I want to focus on, since that's really the core gameplay. The thing about Smash Melee is its movement is so fluid and strong that you can play it by yourself just interacting with the stages. This is also the combat gameplay, so it's a bit of a mix of hollow knight and revita. So I really want to get something like that working well. Currently I'm planning on trying to recreate Melee's aspects of movements (walk, run, dash, eventually aeriel attacks). It has been difficult, mostly because it's physics programming which are two things that are just pretty far beyond me. I get the feeling that I'll need to play around with other game projects in order to get mine the way I want it. For that, I may go with Super Mario World, since there seems to be some overlap. Anyway, the most important one has the biggest hurdle lol. I have ideas for 3 characters though, a bit standard overall but should still be fun. A pretty typical melee/sword fighter, a typical ranged/bow fighter, and an in-between that I want to be boomerangs. It's going to be difficult getting it to work as I want it, but if I can get it it will be very worth it.

In terms of enemies, I don't have a lot set in stone design wise, but I do have a solid plan for how they work in game. Each stage has 2 bosses, a regular boss and an afflicted boss. The afflicted bosses of each stage have 3 enemies that they create. These enemies can appear randomly in any stage, and take on the properties of that stage. So, the Undergrounds Stage 1 Afflicted boss might have enemies appear in the stage 4 Snowy level, and they'd have some of those properties. The idea here is as you play the game normally, you come across a variety of afflicted enemies. As you defeat those, a counter grows (say 100 defeated for now) and you unlock the afflicted boss for the stage.

Basically, each stage has a regular boss and an unlockable boss! And each stage has its cast of enemies (about 7 probably), along with the %chance to spawn an afflicted one, so there should be a good amount of variation.

And this leads to the goal of the game, which would be to defeat all the afflicted bosses, wiping out the affliction!

Other than all that, the SFX and music will be done by me since music and audio is really one of my main hobbies, so this week I've been getting my music space set back up, in part for that and in part for myself!

Finally, that seems to just leave the items and synergies. This is probably my least planned one at the moment, as coming up with a variety of stat altering items and ability altering items will be pretty dependent on these characters existing for something to alter. I have some ideas and goals for these, but I don't really want to start working on items to place around chests/rooms when I don't even have a player character yet lol. So I'll probably have this around the same time/after I get the enemy AI sorted out, as those two seem pretty related in gameplay. Typically defeating enemies has a chance to give you something, so I'll play around with that at that point. But I know that at least as a base I can have a set of items that change stats, that affect abilities, and then standard currency/HP/shield drops.

And well off the top of my head I think that's mostly everything! There's definitely a lot that I have to do to make progress, but I feel it's a super solid concept with a lot of manageable goals, without too much potential for feature creep. I initially came up with 9 kingdoms/biomes, which seems like a lot but I think it's not so bad. For one, I have the concepts already drawn out, so it's just translating the assets. For two, I'm going for the progression style that Revita has, so a few arenas within a biome. That would just be the (hopefully seeded) levels, which doesn't seem so bad. With that many stages it's mostly just the enemies and bosses left, and I already have the enemies planned out for the most part. And for bosses, I have thematic elements of each stage that I'm going to incorporate into the afflicted bosses, so for example the industrial city level has greed and overconsumption as themes, so the city boss will have features that indicate that.

It's very much a fully fledged game, so I am getting to the point where I will probably want to work on other game projects to get a better familiarity. Then once I have that, I'd be able to better work on this project with confidence. My shortcomings here really are the physics for movement and the enemy AI though, everything else I've been able to get a cursory start on and it's been pretty good!