Devlog - Development and Direction

Hey all! Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and happy new year!

No updates to release yet, but after 5 months of silence, I thought it might be good to talk about what I’ve been up to. If anything, this is just a ramble into the void, so feel free to not read it.

Upcoming Changes

Since my last release, here are a few things I’ve done:

• Refactored about 80% of the systems in the game for better consistency and more extensibility.
  • Player Movement
  • Radio Broadcasts
  • Plane AI
  • Island Navigation
  • Turrets
  • Settings Menu
• Developed new enemies and turrets
• Added a completely new Building mechanic
• Redone nearly all VFX
• Crafted and improved environment art
• Created more music (I uploaded some old versions of it to YouTube)
• Created even more graphics options for a wider range of hardware
• Vastly improved the Island Builder tool. This is now used for map-making instead of the traditional methods I used for Abandoned Fort.
• Created new tooling, such as StagTest for testing gameplay scenarios to prevent regressions

Upcoming visual state of game.

Life

I’ve had less time and motivation to work on Abyss thanks to getting a part-time Software Engineer job to help chip away at student loans. This means I spend most of my day programming, only to get home and…do more programming in my free time. That’s Not Very Healthy, so I’ve been trying to get better at pacing myself and going outside more since university isn’t forcing it upon me.

Additionally, there’s been a variety of family stuff going on that I’ve ended up taking responsibility of since I live at home again instead of on campus (I graduated in May). This is both a blessing and a curse.

Burnout and Direction

This is the longest duration of time I’ve focused on a single project since 2015 when I made games on Roblox. After about 16 months of development, Abyss is the most polished piece of work I have. This is awesome, but also unusual for me, as my brain prefers to change tasks and projects very frequently. Lately I’ve been getting more and more bored trying to work on things like programming or level design, so to avoid burnout, I’ve been either pivoting to tasks like art, or just not working altogether.

With that in mind, I’ve been staring at this game for so long I don’t know what to make of it anymore.

• Is the current Abyss what I originally had in mind? No.
• Is it good? Not a clue.
• What’s the most polished aspect? I think this is supposed be the gameplay, but I’ve spent so much time on tooling in the past year…
• What’s my intent with this project? To finish something?

In retrospect, those don’t feel like very passion-driven statements. I still intend to finish this game, but if I want to get there, I need to figure out how to rekindle that passion within this project.

Going Forward

Before the next update release, a few things have to happen:

• A few critical bugs need fixing
• Make some functional levels (see: critical bugs need fixing)
• Make tutorials for new mechanics
• Godot 4.4 may release soon, and has some awesome features that could greatly improve the game, including Jolt Physics

To help keep things on track, I’m trying to make lists of everything I need for the final game to be “done.” I just can’t seem to figure out the ordering of levels to create a contiguous experience that is easy to pick up and play.

I reckon it will be about 4 months before the next demo release.

Sneak peak of some early stages of a level prototype.

If you got this far, thanks for reading, and happy scrapping!