Greeting fellas

Supposedly you're gamers, here's your good news.

The game project which I started since previous post is getting near finish for the prototype.

You can check out my previous protype which was the foundation for my current project HERE

Though it's the same idea of being "prototype", but this is different.

The previous prototype was something that we could called "tech demo". They're serving the purpose of implementing new systems or ideas.

As for the current prototype I'm working on, it's called "conceptual build". This build is the real "game prototype". The purpose is to show how the game works and essentially the foundation to build vertical slice version of them game or we could call it "pre-alpha" or even alpha itself depending on the scale of the game. As for mine, the vertical slice is "alpha".

I'm currently working on basic sound effects for the player character. I'll make generic taking hit sounds for minions and bosses afterward which will end this part of work.

Once I finished, there would be the creation of real first minion and boss in order to prove the foundation that I made so far. Then I still have to work on the  UI for enemies(To show enemy's HP and debuff level when selected). And the environmental hazards, which right now I only have the vacuum hazard which could annoy the player or disrupt the enemies for a bit.

Yeah that's right, I'm making environmental hazards to work on both sides so the game is more interesting than just plainly disrupt the player.

Overall the game is rather easy because right now the enemies only deal like 1% of the player's base HP and the boss is doing nothing. Not to mention the player has active barrier to help absorbing some incoming damage, though the goal here is to use it to protect against boss's big hit that hard to evade. I also need to work on the indicator for barrier, so it's able to show how much barrier the player still has. I'll make it in the vertical slice version instead since I have to make all the visual stuffs there.

My current project is called "Arcane Horde". The idea is to have waves of enemies and finally the boss. At first I was thinking about just have a few waves would be fine. But maybe I should have 10 waves and change the number of enemies for the harder difficulties. The number of waves will be fixed.

Of course the player is a mage, though the game is rather limited to the preset spells(normal attack, heavy attack, dash, barrier, ultimate). The theme of each spells will be arcane. Well the original concept was lightning mage, but I realized that I lacked the understanding of lightning so I decided to step back and make the mana-based skills instead.

There is also upgrades which will enhance the player stats. I still need to consider how the player will get upgrade points, right now I'm thinking about giving 1 point for each difficulty beaten for each levels. The upgrades can be reset or spend points anytime at the main menu, so it should be good enough system to help the player trying out something different.

Oh right, I have a stat called "spell potency" which is essentially doing nothing right now. So I'll have to adjusting some parts of the skills to include this. Well I'm thinking about using this stat as the exponent for things like damage multiplier, duration, and AoE.

Once I finished all of these, I'll start working on the vertical slice which is to fill up a level, change UI appearance, and make various visual stuffs like skill's VFX and on hit VFX to make it feels better and more obvious what kind of skills the player use and when someone got hit including the player.

Afterward, I have to make the tutorial to make sure that the player understood the basic control of the game. Well the only real different would be the requirement of having target lock in order to deal damage with normal attack. But there need to be proper tutorials because I'll be honest here, I don't trust gamers enough to have them tinkering the game themselves. At least having separated tutorial is enough to say that I already did something to address the complicated part of the game....well they're not complicated for me but it's not orthodox third person action game either.

After I finished the tutorial, I could publish the demo version. I could already see that I'd spend the entire month to make the tutorial alone lol.

I'm not even sure how long would it take from here to the demo release. The conceptual build is already over the planned schedule, though it's still better than not working at all.

Right I still didn't design the player character yet, I intentionally left them for the last thing in vertical slice plan. So it's likely take at least a week or 2 to finish the player character. Other stuffs could be around a month. Essentially it'll be at least 2 months before the demo.

No, I'm not miscalculating. I'm just under-expressing my thought process so you couldn't see all the variables. Ideally I wanted to finish the game within the next 3 months or maybe 5 months at most. I wanted to have a finished game published on steam before I hit 32 in November 23.

The full version will have at least 5 unique levels with 3 difficulties. Each unique levels will have unique boss and 3 unique minions for the theme.  The demo will only have the tutorial and 1 unique level with 3 difficulties to show the game.

I think it's fair enough to ask for $4.99 so you can get 4 more unique levels. If that's not enough, I could do endless mode as a bonus.

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Well this project is to build up my confidence and allowed me to learn the entire process of the game development by myself and to have a published game. It doesn't matter if the game will sell a lot. The important thing is I have the foundation to build upon which will make my next games better.

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I'm still thinking if I want to publish the game on itch. It'll be DRM-free and there will be no steam key for you. So if you want to have the game on steam, you'll have to pay for it.

Well I'll have to publish on steam because I can then brag to fellow gamedevs that I have my steam page lol.