Progress Update 11/1/2020

Happy November, everybody. Hope it’s going well for you all so far!

During the timespan of this update, we’ve once again made some pretty good progress, all things considered, and I’m happy to show it off for you all today!

For a while now, the AI in the game has been nothing more than a couple of cubes and a very simple attack/defend script to go along with it. This progress update has changed that with brand new enemy AI models and coding! Not only is the AI more flexible for the long run, but it’s also a lot more intelligent (in terms of programming. The in-game enemy character doesn’t actually have a brain)!

Not only have the AI functions been improved by an incredible amount, the combat system has also been slightly overhauled to make the experience a lot better and more balanced for the player.

To test out any further features that I need to tweak/add/remove for the combat, I’ve also released a playtesting build to our private alpha testing team so that we can get as much feedback on the small combat arena I built as we possibly can.

My next objective is to start adding small but very important details into the game such as death animations and pause menus, since most, if not all of the main game mechanics are in place. It is a very exciting time, and I’m glad I can share this moment with you all.

Hope you’re all enjoying these progress updates, and I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day!

Update on the game

Hello again. This isn’t going to be a normal progress update, but rest assured that will be coming this Sunday!

What I wanted to announce today is the fact that we now have itch.io and Game Jolt pages where you’ll be able to download the game from in the future, and why not check out our YouTube channel while you’re at it? I heard we just announced an exclusive video 😉

All of that aside, rest assured that progress on the game is still being made and, once again, will be announced this Sunday! Hope you all have a wonderful day and thank you for taking the time to read this little update announcement.

Progress Update: 9/12/20

Hello there! We’re back and have a little bit of explaining to do, yeah?

Before I give an explanation as to why we’ve been missing so long, I’d like to do what I usually do and type out the progress made to the game this week for those who don’t want to watch the video. I’m also doing this first in the even that you don’t care where we’ve been or why.

Anyway, there has been some great progress made! Earlier this week, we continued working on the player, re-implementing his previous attacks as well as adding an extra aerial attack as well as a few polishing effects. OH! And we also came up with the new name of our game! That name is…!

Apostid!

After this was finished, the first play tester debug build was released for our play testers to try out! Not only did they give incredibly useful feedback and good ideas, they also found an almost embarrassingly large amount of glitches and exploits. As the programmer, my next priority will be fixing up all of those bugs they found and seeing what makes the game the most fun to the play testers. This will give us a good idea on the direction we want to consider heading.

After sending the build to the play testers, we decided to start working on a new and improved title screen since the one that was in the game previously was barely functional. Although most of you probably haven’t seen the previous title screen, take my word that this new one is on the way to being so much better than the last.

Anyway, that’s all for the actual progress update of the game, now onto why we were gone and what is going to happen next with the schedule.

As you all may know pretty clearly by now, I am struggling immensely with posting a video every week. During the past couple of weeks where there were no updates to the game, school was starting for me and the others on the team, and we decided that our education was the top priority at the time.

This may come as bad news to a lot of you, and it definitely is a bit disheartening for me, but I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on the schedule, and I really want to find something consistent and doable. This means that doing a progress video every single week is no longer an option, especially with school well on its way into the year.

My solution to this is simple. I’ll just post a video every two weeks instead. This will give me a single week to work on the game and a single week to work on my education, so progress on the game will slow down just a tad bit, but it’s mainly for the health of everyone on the team.

I know I’ve said I’ve been trying to get on a schedule, I really have been. That’s why I’m going to start working double hard to keep on this new schedule instead. I’m a bit sick and tired of posting updates consistently late, y’know?

Anyway, the new schedule starts now, so next video will be posted two weeks from today. Hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day!

Progress Update: 8/22/20

Alright, here we go again.

Here’s the promised video. Hope you enjoy it.

Progress Update: 8/16/2020

Hello again! First of all, I would like to apologize for the day late upload. Further explanation below.

The first thing I would like to address is the late upload. Although I mentioned it in the video, I’d also like to mention it here. To be completely honest with myself and everybody else, the main reason it wasn’t uploaded on time is due to my horrendous time management. I am not going to try and make excuses or blame it on anybody else, but I am going to say that I will be working on bettering my time management for future uploads. The last thing I, or anybody else on the team wants, is a messy schedule and broken promises. To make up for this lackluster video (at least in my opinion), I am going to ensure that next week’s devlog is something big.

Moving onto the actual game progress itself, I would like to give a bit of a run down on what happened this week. During the beginning of the week, I took the time to find and squash as many bugs as I could find, both big and small, and double check all of the mechanics to make sure they are functional. After that, I took time implementing an updated sword model, a few new character animations, a new mechanic and a few polishing effects. At the beginning of next week, I’m going to be able to finish up everything that’s left to do with those mechanics and then move on to something new!

Thank you for taking the time to read/watch this devlog, and I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day!

Progress Update: 8/8/20

Hello again. We have a few things to talk about!

First, however, I’d like to once again thank our lead modeler and animator, Syndikit (Formerly known as Empty Space Studios) for the beautiful concept artwork.

Going back to the main topic at hand, I would like to clear up a few questions and concerns about our seemingly non-existent schedule. To be frank, the past few days have not been enough time to make any significant progress on any of the features of the game, hence why there is no video devlog this Saturday, however, there have been a few bug fixes here and there with both new and old features such as player movement and enemy AI. Starting next Saturday, however, our normal schedule will be able to continue forward and video develogs will be release as originally planned every week.

The plan for next week, once everything is polished and bug tested, is to start working on blocking out the first official tutorial level for our game! This is a huge step forward for us and I am super excited to start.

Thank you for being patient with us, I for one appreciate it.

Progress Update: 8/6/2020

After a long wait, the video update for the game is finally here!

This update is going to be a quick one, since there’s not much else to talk about yet that hasn’t either been discussed in the video, or discussed in previous blog posts.

After many delays, the video is finally out, and we have made a lot of progress on the player controller and anything involved with it. During the next few days, I am going to continue working on bug fixing and polishing so that I can release a quick dev log on Saturday, then the Saturday after that will return to weekly video uploads. Thank you for holding on with us while we go through this ever so slightly bumpy part of the game’s development!

Progress Update: 8/1/2020

New month, new us! Today we have some very interesting things to talk about.

Shown above is the incredible teaser artwork that our modeler/animator, Empty Space Studios, has made for the game. Looks pretty great, don’t you think?

If you have been a weekly follower on this game’s progress, you may notice the distinct lack of a promised video update. If I’m going to be completely honest here, this past week has been incredibly rough on the members on the team on both personal levels and team work levels, so development temporarily slowed during that time. The video progress, as it currently stands, does not yet meet our current expectations of what we think an entertaining, well thought out video should be, and our mission is to provide a quality experience, not a rushed one.

On the other side of the coin, please note that progress on all things promised last week are coming along nicely, but due to reasons stated above, they are not yet finished. This includes things like player model finalization and general visual/game play polish. Everything on our list at the moment is very very close to being complete, which brings me to my next point.

After discussing everything with our team members, we did not want to leave you all empty handed this week, so we have decided that we are going to release the update video on Thursday this week after everything else has been finished.

Thank you all for being patient during this time, and I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day!

Progress Update: 7/25/20

Hello once again! Back with another progress update!

This week has been a bit different than previous ones for development. This week, we’ve been taking the time to plan out and start work on all the visual aspects of the game including models, animations, effects and over all style. Because of this, there hasn’t been much time for technical development, and we’d like to keep our entire visual plan under wraps until next week, but for now, I’ll show to you and talk about what I can.

The above image is a teaser for the new character model, kindly put together by Upside Films, our lead creative director. Next week, we will be able to reveal both the full image and full, in-game 3D model, provided by Empty Space Studios, so stay tuned!

As for video dev logs, I would like to personally thank you all for being supportive about the idea and I will be sure to continue making them as long as you all find them entertaining. As for the reason there is no video dev log this week however, is due to the fact that, as the programmer, there really hasn’t been much for me to do while we work on the visual aspects of the game. Starting next week though, weekly videos should become more of a regular occurrence along side these blog posts.

Our plan for right now is to finish up these last few character models and animations and implement them into the game so that we can finally say that our character is complete. After that, some visual effects and enemy AI tweaking is all that’s really left before we can start play testing the game. We are super close to being finished with these few foundation pieces, and soon we will be able to start working on things like actual levels, bosses, npcs and the like!

Thank you all for tuning in, and I hope every single person reading this has a wonderful rest of their day!

Progress Update: 7/18/20

Hey there! This dev log is a little bit of an experimental one!

For the past few months, I’ve been going back and fourth on whether or not I should start making dev logs in video format or not. Earlier this week I finally decided, “Why not give it a shot?” This video is an experiment to see if you would like to see how the game is developed on YouTube as well as in a blog post and constructive criticism is both welcomed and encouraged. If you do decide to watch the video, contributing to the poll in the comments would be very appreciated!

In the event that you don’t want to watch the video, or are unable to, I’ll summarize what happened during this week:

This week was completely focused on the Enemy AI and how it functions (other than a new health system for the player). Over the week, we were able to implement many different aspects of the AI system including about 90% of all of its features and mechanics. Other than some mechanics that we are unable to implement until a new character model is complete, the only other thing the AI needs is an official model and some animations to go along with it! If everything goes well, a lot of that might be implemented in the coming week!

Currently, the plan for next week is, like previously mentioned, to start implementing the new character model and animations, and if we have time, implement the AI system’s models and animations. Another goal for next week is to try and make combat as fun, satisfying and as polished as possible. If you’ve played a game with nice combat, you’ll know what I mean.

Anyway, thanks again for taking the time to watch/read this dev log, and I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day!