Posted April 22, 2024 by Jess
🦊Heyo, coming at you today with a post you wont like, but is very important to post. As you probably guessed from the title, Cosmogelica is postponed indefinitely. Unlike Shield Cat though, this is not a matter of finances or not having the resources to complete the project. Instead, it's a matter of the project having unforeseen complications that have arisen and can no longer be ignored.
The original concept for Cosmogelica was that you could use the gel as a barrier to protect against incoming enemy units. This, on the surface, seemed like a great idea! However, many problems have come up with it.
First and foremost, many players simply do not use the gel, and opt to just weave through bullets as they would in a traditional shmup. For those that *do* use the gel, they find it's not that effective, as the playfield is constantly scrolling, so it ends up with the gel not being viable to use anyways. Also, in the current version of the game we're working on, the playfield is constantly scrolling, further decreasing the viability of using the gel. There were also inconsistencies in like, the playfield scrolls so you can't really use the gel, until the boss phase when it doesn't scroll anymore?
We've been going back and forth on this for a while, trying to figure out ways to incentivize players using the gel, but all of the methods we came up with felt forced and arbitrary. Eventually, we decided to make a new little prototype that revisited the initial idea of the game, being like Space Invaders and, at the suggestion of a friend, possibly combining it with the mechanics of Missile Command. Our idea was simple: have some houses you have to protect, and some turrets you also have to protect, and use the gel to prevent enemy attacks from taking down your units. Essentially, it would be like a tower defense game.
Everything looked good with this little prototype, up until we added the gel. At that point it became clear that the player placing gel was too OP, so the two gameplay choices out of that were:
1. make it so you have some kind of "barrier juice" where you eventually can't use the barrier or it otherwise is not that good to use,
2. Add enough enemies to be able to overwhelm your barrier so it's not as OP, or
3. Add some kind of "setup" phase where you set up the barrier and then spend the round trying to defend against enemies and hoping your barrier lasts.
None of these possibilities sounded interesting or exciting. Overall, the prototype showed us that the whole mechanic of the player creating gel barriers is pretty much an unviable game mechanic and, since that's pretty much what we were going for, it means that the whole game is unviable... except, maybe not.
Now that we've abandoned the idea of the player dropping gel on the playfield, we've been thinking of new mechanics. Our ideas so far are as follows:
1. Gel becomes something the enemies use, and serve as a barrier/obstacle that you have to overcome. Enemy shots are no longer blocked by gel, allowing bosses (for example) to guard themselves with gel and then fire from behind it, making you have to clear the gel with your blaster. Enemies can use the gel as part of their attack patterns.
2. Give the player more traditional shmup actions. Allow the player to swap between Wave and Spread beams during gameplay instead of having to pick up weapon types. Give the player screen clearing bombs that not only destroy enemy shots and low-level enemies, but also clear the screen of enemy gel. Focus changes from "use gel to block enemy bullets" to "plow forward and shoot every guy while trying not to get hit by bullets."
We've realized that the whole "use gel strategically to block enemy bullets" thing doesn't really work, but we may still have a pretty good shmup idea on our hands here. It's possible to turn Cosmogelica into a traditional shmup, with the gel acting like walls in many side-scrolling shmups like R-Type. Bosses can protect themselves with gel, but you can use the bomb to get rid of it and then proceed to blast the boss away. There's many new and exciting gameplay elements that can come out of this. We can also reduce the overall amount of bullets on screen, which we started adding more and more of to try to balance out the gel barrier (again, this just sucks.)
We don't want to just jump into this, that's why. We want to take the time to really think out the idea, since the "using gel as a strategic barrier" game is dead. We *can* make a shmup out of this, but we have to think of all new game ideas and mechanics, and how they can all fit together, and in the meantime, we want to work on our other game Blobun more. That game has a solid game concept, and it's coming along really well. We want to make sure that our new ideas for Cosmogelica are as solid as that before we say "ok we're working on Cosmogelica again."
We realize that some people will be disappointed in the pivot away from the phase-based gameplay and gel usage that the original prototype and SAGE 2023 demo promised. However, this has just proven to be unviable. We believe, however, that "game that's not exactly what was originally shown, but is still a game that exists" is a lot better than "game was canceled and never came out" because yea, we've almost canceled this game 3 times now just because it wasn't shaping up.
We basically just want to take some time away and come back to it with fresh eyes. There's still the potential to make a really neat and interesting shmup, but we want to have a well thought out idea first.
We would love to get back to that game! If we won the lottery, and had the resources to hire other people to help us out, we'd be working on Shield Cat right away. However, the scope of that is too much to work on with our current resources, so we need to stick to smaller scale projects until such time that we can work something out. Trust me, we *really* want to make Shield Cat a full game, but it's just not viable with our current resources. Cosmogelica IS viable with our current resources, however, we don't want to put a game out there that's only half baked.
We've released a build you can check out that shows what we've been doing the past few months. Unfortunately, this build is only available for Windows, so if you're in Linux you'll have to run it in Proton or something.
If you want to understand the issues, please feel free to try out the game and see how much you use (or rather, dont use) the gel. You can also see the many graphical improvements we made. The game looks really nice! But the mechanics just are not sound, unfortunately.
Go to the itch main page and download "042124 Cosmogelica Windows (Final Gel Build)"
If you have access to the Steam build (via Patreon) you can switch to the "final_gel" branch if you really want to. Again, this is only for Windows, so you'll have to enable Proton Compatibility to play it.
There are bugs with this version of the game, but none of them should interfere with gameplay. Also, the game doesn't have a method of saying so, but a second player can now join at any time by pressing a button on the second gamepad. There are many more changes since the November build, but we'll detail those down below. You'll see, we've been working very, very hard to try to overhaul the game and test out a lot of different things to make it work! We haven't just been sitting around haha
We know this isn't what you wanted to read, and that people are excited for Cosmogelica. However, hopefully this is not the end of the road for the game! If we're able to figure out the gameplay issues and make something that plays solid, then we will resume development of the game as soon as possible and bring it to you. We hope for your understand and patience as we work to figure this out. Game development is tricky, and sometimes, things just don't pan out like you thought they would. However, at least this is better than what we originally were gonna post, which was that we were canceling it. *Something* is there though, and if we can find it, we will bring it to you.
Thank you for reading all this, and again, many apologies.
As always, here are the patch notes: