Notes from the demo & Current development state

Introduction

Hello to everyone reading this. It's been almost two weeks since the in-dev demo release of Mega Man Space 2. It was a much better than expected launch! A lot of people played the demo and some of them shared with me their experience. Thanks to everyone who spent some time playing the game. Today I'm sharing with you what I've learnt from your thoughts, comments and feedback, as well as the state of the development of the game.

What was learned

Overall, everyone said that they had a great experience playing the game. Besides, almost everyone had those few "I wish this was this way" or "it would be better like this".  Most of those were details, meaning that the core mechanics of the game are well defined. Also, almost every idea was said by more than one person, a clear indication that something has to be done in that aspect. These are the most common feedback ideas and the solution thought for them.

• Stage progress. The wave system and it's behaviours isn't explained at any moment. In reality, the stage consists in 8 enemy waves, each wave having different values (enemies, location, radius, frequencies, etc). The intended way of progressing through the stage is following the wave indicator (exclamation mark inside a circle), defeating every enemy there and repeating so until the boss wave. Playing the game without knowing this generates confusion. Is this the right way? Am I making progress? That's why  there is a need for a progress indicator.
• Searching for enemies usually ends in colliding with them. This is because enemies react instantly when close to the player, but the player first needs to see them and react to them. Human reaction time is far from instant. These unintended collisions can be fixed creating some delay to enemy's reaction time, making enemies emit sounds when noticing the player and some visual alerts.
• Changing movement direction. The movement is generally great, but there are some circumstances in which somebody expects it to behave in a more responsive manner. One of the most noticed ones is when you are going on way and want to move in the opposite way. The ship's direction takes so much time to change. Some value tweaking should fix this problem.
• Minor menu navigability problems.

Those are some of the planned changes for later versions of the game.

What will happen

Let's first see how this project started and how it's development went. I started Mega Man Space  more than three years ago so I could learn about programming and game development. When I knew about Godot a few months ago, I decided to start Mega Man Space 2 to learn the tool. This time I already knew programming and game development basics. My game idea with MMS2 was much more ambitious than with MMS as I knew much more at that moment. That lead to a lot more time spent in the game for less content. By the time I dedicated to MMS2 I already released MMS for PC and halfway the mobile release. In that time I only made one stage for MMS2. In conclusion, it turned to be much more time consuming than what I expected.

So, what will happen now? I'm sorry to say that I don't have it clear. For now, I will say that the development is paused indefinitely. The main reason being time. I would like to dedicate more time to other things, and now I have less free time than in the past months. This doesn't mean the project is abandoned or that there will be no more releases. It means that I am taking a break from it. Whenever I feel like continuing the work, I will do so. Until then, I will focus in my original projects (yes, it sounds like a lie but I have original projects), or experimenting new things. 

Conclusion

Thanks again for reading. Someday this game will be finished and everyone could play it in all its glory. Until then, I will be working in other things, but I won't forget about this game.