How the game was born.

Hello everyone, first time posting a devlog!

With this first post, I'd like to tell you about the reasons this game was born.

In the past years, my main focus in videogames shifted from JRPGs and some action games, almost entirely to roguelites, with the main culprit being The Binding of Isaac.
There is something addicting to them, and the way one can just start and finish a run, feel a lot of satisfaction when winning, or on the other hand losing, and feeling that need to start *just* one more run. They just appeal to me, and they're now the only type of game I feel like playing for hours at a time without feeling bored.

I have played many of them, and another notable one is Slay the Spire.
Compared to Isaac, it's slow paced, gives you time to think, in some aspects it is even better for the type of person I am.
I really loved the game, and got back to it many times through the years. But I felt something was missing, a reason why I spent more than 1000 hours in Isaac, and just 250 in Slay the Spire, despite liking it so much.

I tried to look for more roguelites, and especially deck building ones. It's a genre that has grown in popularity in the past years, but in my opinion there are *some* gems, in a sea of mediocre or bad ones, especially when it comes to deck builders.
After playing many, I came up with some reasons why I liked some more than others, why I could spend hundred of hours on some, while others lost my interest after 20.

Overall, I think these are the points that make a roguelike a GOOD one to me:

• Variety, in every aspect of the game.
  The amount of playable characters, the amount of items/tools/etc, the amount of different things that can randomly happen in a run, the amount of different enemies/bosses and paths you can choose in a single run.
  Isaac excels in all these aspects (while also having an issue with having TOO MANY items, many of them being useless or just weaker versions of others).
  On the other hand this is something that lacks in Slay the Spire. There have been 3 characters for a long time, a fourth one was added, but that alone never felt enough. Also, the game is linear, it's 3 levels plus a fourth, special one. Each level has only 2 possible bosses, and only 3 possible elites. To make it simple, while deck and relics wise each run felt different, everything else always feels the same.
• Unlockables.
  Very important for that dopamine effect. While a game can be fun to play, to many people, including me, the lack of a goal to play a run can make you lose interest. In Isaac you have a ton of characters, with many things to unlock with each one, by completing a specific part of the game. Or also specific things to do in the game to unlock new items or enemies or areas. This offers a lot of replayability.
  Also, I noticed that I don't like an "exp bar" type of unlockables. Like in Slay the Spire or Dead Cells. While this type can be OK as a secondary goal in a game, it shouldn't be the biggest, or only way to unlock stuff.
• Lack of easy to obtain game breaking combos.
  This one is also very big.
  This is what ruined Hades for me. After enjoying its story and gameplay for a while, I ended up quitting before hitting 40 hours. The reason is that I just found a combination of weapon and obtainable ability (considering that you could force one god for the run) that meant you could win any run just bashing buttons (I don't remember exactly, but I think I would be using punches combined with a skill that made you deflect enemies attacks).
  To sum it up, no way to FORCE a certain build reliably in every run. Cool combos are what make these game fun, but they shouldn't be too easy to obtain.
• Secrets and being not too open about contents, while also being not to cryptic.
  Again, Isaac excels in this. Of course you can spoil the game's contents going to the wiki, but at the same time you can just play the game and have a lot of secret, fun and unexpected stuff happen. I think this doesn't apply as well to a deckbuilder where there is not action, no freedom of movement, but I think I'm starting to find ways to insert unexpected stuff in my game already :)
  On the other hand, another roguelite I've really enjoyed is Noita. But it suffers, in my eyes, from the fact that most of the game is hidden behind stuff that is simply not findable by the average person. While I think this is probably what its developers wanted (some kind of online community gathering to discover the game's secrets), for my game I'd like everything to be discoverable, some things by chance, some things by using a little of brain. I don't want my game to hide stuff so much that people need to data mine it to find everything.

There are of course more things I considered, but I'll leave them for future posts.

And, since I couldn't find another game that would hook me for hundred of hours, I decided...I'll make one myself! I'll make the game I feel is good, for myself.
Whether I'll actually be able to make it as amazing as I want, that's another story :P

It all started like that, with basically zero experience in programming (I did some in high school, but let's say I basically just knew what a loop and an "if" mean).
I have a dear friend who's been working in the videogame industry for years, and he suggested me to go with Unity. And, since I was having "trouble" starting to learn C#, he advised me to try Visual Scripting.
I have to say that I don't regret the choice for now. I know it has its limitations, and that I will need to learn some C# to support my Visual Scripting coding, but at the same time I find it a very nice approach to programming, and I think it also has some upsides to Visual Studio and C#.

As for why I went with pixel art: I've always liked drawing, but I never got great at it, and especially in the past years that's been a skill I haven't practiced much. I tried drawing environments and sprites by hand first, but especially the environments didn't convince me much. Another option I had was to go low poly 3D, modelling in Blender (which I've been using as a hobby for a few years). While this was viable, I soon realized that it would take TOO MUCH time for a single person to model each entity, pose and animate them.
On the other hand the SINGLE style I didn't want to touch is 2D drawn, animated with bones. I simply HATE it, in my opinion 90% of games made in this style look like garbage flash games.
And so I moved to pixel art. While it was a style I wanted to avoid in the beginning, especially because it's been overused in recent years, as soon as I started, it clicked with me, and I noticed I could convey my usual drawing style nicely with it.

I still have a lot to improve in both coding and pixel art, but all things considered, I don't think I'm doing too bad.