Necromancy RTS Devlog - 0

Hello and welcome to the devlog! I probably should've started this around two months ago, but I just kept saying well one more feature and now it's been two and a half months. This is for my RTS Tower Defense game where you play a necromancer and use your powers to protect your crypt from angels trying to destroy it. I want to show the timeline of the game so far and tell you what is planned for the future.  

This game was started sort of by accident all the way back in July. I was originally just playing around in Aseprite just drawing some skeletons and angels using the NES color pallet with no real plan.  I was just having fun and trying to get more familiar with the tool. I unfortunately don't have those original sprites and have no idea what I did with them so what you are seeing are screenshots I had sent my other team members on discord while I was drawing. I even did this mockup of what a game with these sprites could look like. Keep in mind there still wasn't a game at this point and this was all just me dragging sprites onto an image to make something that looked kind of like a game from that time

Fast forward a couple of days and I wanted to try and animate something so I created these Brute frames and the wizard and knight frames. It's crazy looking at how little things have really changed even though I redrew these from scratch they really don't look all that different from what's in the game right now. Event the cards, this was the original card design and this is what is in the game right now. Like they're different, but not too much.

On the 21st we started streaming on Twitch and most of my focus was moved to an SCP resource management sim we were working on. So with my focus and time elsewhere I stopped working on these assets. At the end of July we started working on a game for the GMTK Game Jam. We finished and didn't do great, but it was an amazing learning experience for myself and the other team members. The game is on our itch page if you want to play a kind of infuriatingly difficult platformer.

At the start of August I was getting a little burnt out, and needed to make some changes to my schedule to avoid that, so I started playing with those assets I made in July again. I unfortunately only really have stills from this time where I started off by making an angel and getting it to move and shoot on its own. I still was just playing at this point not really planning on releasing something, but was just having fun and avoiding burnout. By the 15th I had some angels that could move, shoot, and target specific locations. You can also see in the tabs I had started on creating nodes for other stuff. At this point we have a toy that almost resembles a game and looks pretty close to those mockups I had drawn in July. 

Moving to September I started really picking up steam on this and had decided it would be a game that I wanted to finish and release. By the second week of September we had the ability to spawn different NPCs and they would run around and attack the angels and the Crypt. There was no real game over or currency, but it started feeling like a game and I was starting to see more and more potential in it with each passing day. We also got health implemented on the NPCs that way they could actually die and you had a reason to summon more. Kind of important that things could actually die. By the end of September I had state machine systems, multiple enemy types, currency, you could drag your summons around the screen to sort of strategize, and we added lighting with some fog. 

Adding lighting really did change how the game looked and brought it to the next level. Seriously look at these screenshots next to one another. The only difference is adding lighting Another big thing in September was that thanks to one of my viewers and a fellow game dev I finally took the time to learn and write shaders. It really wasn't that difficult, but it was one of those things that I for some reason found intimidating, and now I can sit down and write my own shaders and not think about it. I'm really glad I took the time to learn, because it has led to some serious improvements in what the game looks like and how it behaves. It was also around this time we extended streaming to Youtube and Kick on top of Twitch! 

That brings us to this month! So far this month has been really productive. I actually started doing social media outreach and increasing our follower numbers on other platforms and that has led to me meeting a bunch of really cool artist, musicians, and devs! I also started implementing the waves for the game so it actually had something resembling a gameplay loop, at this point it was time to start thinking about expanding beyond the 5 starter cards and I had the idea to add spells. So I had built the ability for NPCs to be healed into the game from the start and decided spells where a good chance to do something with that. I ended up building this healing spell that animates in and heals any summons in its area. This was actually way easier than I thought it was going to be so I guess it really did pay to invest in the architecture of the game early on. By now I had played this game for 100s of hours and noticed that the gameplay felt off, and I don't mean balancing. I expect balancing to be off since I hadn't really balanced anything. Eventually I narrowed this down to being an issue with spellbook causing a break in the flow of the game. I was missing the R in RTS! So yesterday I sat down and rewrote that entire system including implementing a much needed card cooldown based on the card price. Now the game plays completely in real time and feels soooooo much better! 

This month was also when we finally implemented the wave balancing formula. That was a partnership between myself and Samantha Pilgrim (@the_witch_of_ryloth).  She came up with this great self balancing equation that I was able to implement into the enemy spawn manager. That gave us an increasing spawn limit as the waves went on that felt really nice in practice once we played with the numbers a bit. She also helped with coming up with some of the spell and summon mechanics.

Now lets talk about the future! There is still a lot left to do. I want to implement a trap system into the game and have already written a lot of the code to do so. I want to update all of the art in the game, even though I am happy with what I have I am approaching a point in which I can't create what I want. I have ideas for some rougelike or skill tree mechanics that might increase some spell effects, decrease cooldowns on specific types, or increase health and damage of summons. I've been playing a lot of diablo 4 and that has been giving me a lot of ideas. I need to update the lighting to bypass godots 16 light restriction, there are so many more summons to make, and sounds to add, but I'm excited for what's to come!

If you have suggestions feel free to drop them in the comments or stop by one of the streams you can get notified by following us on instagram where I post an alert before every stream. On top of helping me with brainstorming and math stuff Samantha writes books and short stories and I highly recommend checking them out!