Progoster Devlog - Week 5

Sunday

On Sunday, I added my first non-level-specific enemy!

The spirit drifts in a random direction, and changes their direction every second or whenever they hit the wall. They're pretty annoying to attack honestly, always dodging out of the way of your shots.

I haven't fully implemented them (sounds, effects when hit, etc.) so I can't quite judge how fun these guys are to fight yet. 

I also added an object which will spawn a random enemy. Before I talk about that, I need to go on a bit of a tangent.

As I'm sure you're well aware by now, this game has a lot in common with The Binding of Isaac. This raises the question: "Why should people play my game when they could just play The Binding of Isaac?"

I believe that my game will have to strengths over Isaac:

1. My levels will be hand designed. While Isaac will absolutely have more content and replayabillity, my levels will have good level design backing them up.

2. My core gameplay will be satisfying. I love Isaac, but the game is flat out not fun when you don't have any items. None of your shots feel impactful, and attacking enemies while you have low damage is a chore. In The Progoster, I will take special care to make sure that shooting enemies is satisfying. 

Anyways, back to the new object. I brought up all of that Isaac stuff to say that I'm not planning on using this random enemy level generation in the final game. At least, not for the level design. Perhaps it can be useful in certain boss battles if they can summon enemies. Maybe I can add a post-game endless mode with randomly generated levels. But for the most part, this is only  for testing purposes. By using the R key to restart, I have functionally created an infinitely replayable game. Here's a sample of what it looks like right now.  https://streamable.com/p9vba

On top of these bigger changes, I made a few tweaks. The enemy layer is now above the wall layer. This shouldn't come into play too often, as most enemies shouldn't be in the same position as the walls, but it does help sometimes. For example, the coffee cup bobs up and down, so even though the hit boxes are fine, the sprite is going underneath the wall. This is no longer a problem.

I also tweaked how the exploding cake explodes. There were a surprising amount of problems that I wasn't even aware of until today. 

• The cake was still moving as it exploded.
• The bullet wouldn't be destroyed if you shot an exploding cake.
• The explosion animation wouldn't always start at the first frame, so the explosion could last for three frames or one frame.

All of these problems are now fixed!

Monday

On Monday, I woke up in a room that was not my bedroom. Don't worry, I remember falling asleep there. I also couldn't immediately find my clothes, so tiredness overtook me and I fell back asleep. I never realized how much I let my productivity be determined by my morning. This one little hiccup made me think that for whatever reason, I couldn't do anything as productive as work on the game. The two solutions are:

• Train myself to be productive regardless of how bad my morning is.
• Just put my clothes in an obvious spot so that I don't fall asleep again.

The second option sounds a bit easier.

Tuesday

A wonderful gamedev YouTuber by the name of Jonas Tyroller posted a video called What If You Improved Your Indie Game 3 Steps / Day? Where he says that, during a rut, just making three changes per day can improve the game a lot. I've decided to run with that strategy for this week. Here are today's three changes:

• I added a sound effect for when the spirit gets hit. They are much more satisfying to fight now.
• There was a bug the bothered me on Sunday where the spirits would sometimes go through the walls. This is pretty fitting for a spirit, but it's not what I was going for. I finally discovered that I still had it so that bombs would destroy walls. This isn't really something I want in the game right now, and the tiles make it so that you can't tell that you destroyed the wall. So what I thought was a collision bug was really a vestigial feature.
• I found an amusing (if rather startling) bug where if two cake enemies explode right next to each other, they will constantly reset each other's animations and create an infinitely lasting explosion. I went through every event that causes the cake to explode and made it so that the cake doesn't explode if it's already exploding. I feel like I should have done that from the start.

Wednesday

No way I'm working on Christmas.

Thursday

I have once again added a few changes!

• The spirit enemy now has a death animation where it where it kind of gets wiped out of existence. 
• I added a sound effect for when the doors open.
• While doing this, I realized that some enemies would cause the door to open before their sound effect could end, which was very jarring. After looking at all of them, I realized that only the spirit had this problem. So instead of making a new object for when the spirit fades out, I just changed the sprite. I didn't really realize that every single enemy had a unique death animation until now, which is very cool!

Side note, I just got a standing desk! While, in the long run, this will lead to me being happier and healthier, right now it just means that I can't be at my computer for too long or my feet will start to hurt. I hope that this doesn't mess up progress too much.

Friday

This day was nice because every change flowed into the next.

• I created a blast mark for whenever an explosion happens.

To add these, I made a layer between the floor layer and the coffee stain layer.  While testing out if everything was leaving a mark like it was supposed to, I found a glitch.

• Apparently, running into the cake would cause it to enter its infinite explosion glitch. I don't know how long this has been a problem for, but I'm shocked that I'm only now finding it. At least it's fixed now!
• I decided that it looked weird when an explosion went off under a coffee stain, as the mark would appear underneath it. Now, coffee stains can be removed with explosions!

So that's it for this week! I have:

• Added a new enemy.
• Fixed the exploding cake in multiple ways.
• Fixed a "bug" that allowed stuff to go through the walls. The real problem was that the bombs were destroying the walls, but not the tile graphic that signified to the player that there were walls.
• Added sound effects for when the doors open.
• Added blast marks.
• Made it so that stains are destroyed by explosions.

 I think that I've finally started to leave that slump I was in for about two weeks. While I did make a lot of improvements this week, I feel somewhat dissatisfied with the game. Most of my changes throughout the week were fixing bugs with the cake enemy and adding content for the spirit enemy.  I understand that this may be a pretty good amount of progress to be making, but I feel like I'm not making enough. I want to make a game that lasts for at least a couple of hours, but if I'm adding one simple enemy a week, this game will take much longer to finish than I'm hoping for.

I really don't know where to go from here. Do I keep adding new enemies and making tweaks to the core gameplay, or do I sit myself down and finish an actual level with every mechanic, no matter how buggy, present? 

Reasons to keep working on the game like I am right now:

• It's important that the core gameplay is honed in any project.
• Having all of the enemies ready will give me more options when I get around to designing the first level.
• I'm honestly just really scared of taking the next big step in this project.

Reasons to make an unpolished but complete demo:

• I will have done everything that I will ever need to do for this project.  Undoubtedly, I will have to spend weeks getting everything functioning perfectly, but I will have done everything and each following level will take less effort than the last.
• The faster I have a demo up, the faster I can get some feedback.
• Making a very polished but short game would definitely bolster my confidence in the project.
• If I'm scared, that's probably a sign that I should do it.

Both options are very appealing. So I ask you, what do you think I should do? Which would be better for the project in the long run?

As always, thanks for reading, I'll see you next week.