So, took a small break there from making games (i still try to put in like 30 minutes a day) and instead focused on playing some games. With the steam summer sale in full swing i’m also looking at other types of games to sample (and probably steal ideas from). I’ve been playing little big planet with my partner and it’s such a neat game. I’ve also been playing the Zenith MMO and for the most part liking the sensation of playing a wow-like mmo in vr for the first time.

keyart and some concepts

before going to bed, i was thinking up actual concepts like what the setting will actually be (so far all we have are rocks and bricks in the game) and at the same time I wanted to make something like keyart that I could creatively design so that all I would need to do is crop said keyart for images like thumbnails, backgrounds on websites and such.

I used sidequest’s listing guidelines because for this first game, I’ll probably just have it on sidequest and itch.io. Also that page just kinda gives me an idea of what to expect when I’ll be uploading a build so that I’m not just blindsided by all the assets I’ll be needing to make my game more appealing to gamers.

little big ideas

like mentioned, ive been playing Little Big Planet on the ps3 with my partner (she only had the demo growing up and so I bought her the game) and the more games I play nowadays and especially games from consoles and the like and I’m always surprised at how little content there kind of is. I get that the main draw of that game was for player-made content but only having a little more than 20 levels it kind of made me question why I feel like I need to make sure my game has a “good amount of content”.

Another game I played with my partner was Pikmin 3 for the switch and I was again surprised at how relatively few levels there were in total. I’m sure it’s just me being used to like the current state of affairs for games where they keep getting expansions/dlc or added content after release.

What I’m getting at is I don’t know why I’ve had these expectations of needing to have so much content for games I’m making. Perhaps it’s some kind of behavioral psychological type of thing where I’m trying to make things that are way beyond my own means, making for a pretty bad cycle for myself. That’s kind of why I took a little break from grinding gamedev hours to sample more of what is being offered by indies and unsurprisingly, most games don’t have like Terraria’s amount of content and I shouldn’t even really be comparing myself like this to other projects. I vaguely remember some kind of spiritual teachings warning about this kind of situation.

To sum up this part of the devlog, instead of focusing on checking off boxes for “amount of content”, I should focus more on making a well-made experience and if that experience ends up being 10 or 30 minutes then so be it.

navmeshes and agents

I changed the main overworld scene to be heightmap-terrain based that’s vertex colored to mask the various textures on it. Now that I’m more comfortable with making navmesh-based enemies, I tried a quick and dirty terrain to see if I would like it and it just makes more sense this way.

One reason it’s better this way, is there’s just way less gameobjects in the scene. Another is it kind of constrains the level design, in the same kind of way a painting’s direction is steered more in certain directions the more the painting unfolds. Instead of staring at a blank canvas for making levels, it’s more of a puzzle itself for me to figure out on how I can make an area that has the same adventurous feeling as NES zelda 1.

damage

so speaking of zelda 1, the combat in there is a pretty simple stab and run type of game and while I still plan on doing that, it’s a bit basic. I want to take a risk (at least for now, maybe I’ll hate it) by doing a combat system where button mashing is not the way to go about it.

The way I’m thinking of going about it is using the Secret of Mana type combat where your character will only do full damage if your “attack charge” is at 100%. So while a player might be able to spam the attack on lesser enemies, enemies who might have armor won’t get damaged at all if the attack was not a fully charged one and on the vulnerable side.

I’m hoping that this makes for an interesting way to make the player choose how they want to go about combat encounters instead of just going up to the enemy and hoping for the best. If I still feel like the combat is lacking or I’m having a real hard time designing enemies with this system in mind, I could add a roll with i-frames to then be able to add that kind of combat flow to everything.

So far, i have the basics of the system in place, the more charge you have the more damage you do. but I still need to add indicators that show that to the player, like damage numbers.

anyway, i’m gonna play some more zenith

anybut that’s it for this post, next steps is making a couple more enemies to add to this world and prettying up the textures and terrain a bit. at the end of that I will have a demo build to get some feedback

until next post!