>> Damsel <<

> Overview <

Story: A bullet-hell game where you play as the stereotypical "damsel in distress" except this princess is secretly the villain

Engine: Godot

Endings: 8

> So What Actually Is This Game? <

Back in September of last year, I was watching Disney's The Black Cauldron. I understand that many people don't like the movie because it doesn't really feel like a Disney movie but I love it for it's 80's dark fantasy. Anyways, it got me thinking of back when I use to play Paper Mario on the Nintendo 64. There's a part in the game where you can play as Princess Peach where you sneak around your own castle and try to help Mario the best way that you can given the circumstances.

Watching that movie and remembering playing that game started to get my gears turning and that's where I had this idea of a game where the Player tries to sneak out of their castle like Princess Peach but instead of helping the hero they are helping themselves. In short, the Princess wasn't stuck in the castle with the villain, the villain was stuck in the castle with the princess.

I made this prototype for this potential game where this Cat Wizard shoots bullets out in four directions and teleported randomly across the map. It wasn't much, just a simple prototype of some gameplay ideas I was cooking up. that's when I started thinking up more ideas for the game, including the story. I wrote about ten pages of character descriptions and story before finally deciding that it would be more interesting for the Player to be playing as the villain instead of as the hero. 

>> So, This Game Has Different Endings? <<

Yup. Despite being a bullet-hell type of game, this game has story elements that depending on your choices can lead to different endings. I currently have 8 planned endings for the game. I doubt I will add any more for several reasons. Mainly I if I have a small set of endings than it will actually be feasible to complete this game.

I don't know how long the game will be due to gameplay and level design still in development but I do have the entire story mapped out. Besides the "Damsel is Actually The Villain" story beat, I actually want to keep the rest of the story a secret. I don't want to spoil what happens in the game and what you may find along the way. There are many secrets in this land that only the brave and daring can find.

There's going to be four main characters, including the Damsel, the Cat Wizard, The Warrior, and the Evil Queen. Depending on development we should be able to see additional side characters here and there that pop up.

>> Cool, So What's The Gameplay Actually Look Like? <<

We're still in the prototyping phase but I think the best way to explain the gameplay would be the Deltarune Chapter 3 Secret Game Section. If you know what I'm talking about then that should give you a decent idea of what type of gameplay this game will look like. Action adventure top-down combat with bullet hell mechanics. There's more to it than that but I don't want to go too deep into yet just in case there's a mechanic or feature that we end up not using.

>> Where Can I Follow The Development Of This Game? <<

I'm glad you asked!

For most up-to-date info on the game, my Bluesky is the best one for this.

As for longer, more in-depth discussion about the game, this forum and my website are great places to keep an eye out.

I hope to post more things about this game in the coming months. I hope you guys are just as excited as I am for this! My goal is to get this thing done by the end of the year but I guess we'll see about that. I unfortunately cannot make any promises.

>> THE GREAT REFACTORING <<

Wow, it's been a while. A lot has happened since I lost updated this post. School got crazy and my job got crazier. There was a long stretch of time where I didn't even want to look at the game because I burnt myself out so bad. But I took a long break from game development before finally sitting down and re-planning out everything that I wanted to work on.

I believe I said this somewhere already but for a long time I only could work on my game for about two hours a day. This was true at the time but now I have reached a point where I can actually work on it for far longer than that. After taking care of myself, failing a couple times of porting to a different game engine (Godot, in case you were wondering), and finally finding the strength to open the project, I realized that I coded this thing like a maniac.

Nested if-statements were rampant, memory-leaks were abundant, and references to an object's code were referenced by another object's code that referenced the original object's code. As a programmer, I was a bit disappointed in myself that I would create such jarring code like that. As a game designer, however, I can safely say that it was necessary spaghetti code in order to just START something. I truly believe that every game ever developed started out code-wise looking utter garbage and later on during development cleaned up and refined. I believe the time is NOW for me to start refining all this code and actually making it look nicer and more efficient for future programming.

>> WHERE DO I EVEN BEGIN? <<

The first thing that was on my radar was the combat system. I kept running into a memory leak that turned out to be a simple fix. Basically, I had a draw-call somewhere that was suppose to run only once but was accidentally left inside of a loop thus making calling the draw-call every frame. Super simple fix.

After fixing that, the entire battle system needed to be rewritten. I had a good chunk of code related to the battle system inside of the Player Object for some reason. For the battle system I am making, having the Player Object hold any of the code for it was ridiculous and definitely needed to be removed. Of course, moving code around also affected other areas of the project as they originally referenced the code in the Player Object. This probably took the most amount of time to fix due to going through and manually seeing what object's code was referencing what and changing them to reference the Battle Manager Object instead.

While controller support is still on the back-burner, I did have to create a Controller Object to handle all the input. Technically, I don't need to do this but I wanted to so I won't clog up the Player Object with input controls.

There's still so much I have to do and so much I have to both refactor and create from scratch. I actually started a Trello account just to keep track of everything I needed to do which was a first for me. I usually just have to-do lists on Google Docs or something. But getting back on track, due to the refactoring, now I have more bugs I have to fix.

For example: When the player wants to leave a fight, the game freezes. I have no idea why it does that but it does. The inventory system is completely broken due to data being moved around. All references to that data has been lost so now whenever the Player opens their inventory it just crashes. This is also a simple fix as I just have to re-reference where the data has been moved to but because I'm trying to fix so many other issues it has taken a backseat as I squash way more threatening bugs.

>> SO WHAT CAN WE EXPECT FROM YOU? <<

I'm planning on coming back with the monthly updates. I might post more than once a month depending on the kind of update it is. I also have been looking into maybe posting devlogs on Youtube Channel instead of just posting memes and mashups.

I will also be cross-posting these devlogs on more than one website, including itch.io and my website. Eventually I'll look into a mailing list system like Mailchimp or something so that way I don't have to keep copying and pasting the same thing everywhere.

My main goal, besides from developing this game, is to keep everyone updated on it. I want the word to get out there and the only way to do that is to actually talk about the game.

It's going to be an interesting journey and I hope you're excited as I am about what's to come.

Until next time, take care.

>> Bound To You <<

> A Space RPG <

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> ABOUT <

Bound To You (WIP Title) is a RPG about a young girl in the 1920s who accidentally gets sent into space and must find a way back home. Along the way, you will meet weird aliens, new friends and fight strange battles in order to get back home.

Inspired by games like the Mario & Luigi RPG series, Paper Mario and Undertale/Deltarune, Bound To You will be an RPG where the combat is more timed-based and wacky. 

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> FIRST LOOK <

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> HA HA, VERY FUNNY. WHY DON'T WE TAKE A LOOK AT SOME CONCEPT ART OR SOMETHING? <

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> WHAT CAN WE EXPECT FROM THIS DEVLOG? <

I'm planning on updating this devlog with random updates sporadically throughout the development cycle of this game. I'll make a new post that'll actually go over in more detail about what the game is going to look and feel like as well as my thoughts as I'm developing the game.

This devlog will probably be more similar to a live devlog. Whenever I start posting it will be whatever I'm currently thinking of at that moment and will probably be nonsensical in many ways. I will try to make it more coherent as I go along.

Some challenges I will experience from this is the fact that I work at a retail job that will randomly call me in on days I don't work and I am a full-time student. Finding time to work on this project will be tiresome and a little bit grueling but hopefully the journey will be worth it in the end.

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> WHAT ARE YOUR GOALS? <

My current goal is to work on a demo, which in this project will be the Prologue/Chapter 0. I have an idea of when the demo should be released but at this stage of development I figured that date will probably be pushed back which is why I will not be saying outloud what date I'm thinking of.

My secondary goal is to publish more information about this game. Besides from the roughly ~10 people who have seen it in person, there's barely any online presence of any kind. I do have a devlog over on Tigsource, which I will be updating as well. The point is that I need to get the word out there even if it annoys everyone.