I was hoping to have Atonal Dreams ready for some kind of alpha test by the end of this week, but frustratingly that's not happened yet because there's so much to do! Also, this week's Music Album contains music from Deliverance (and Fig Hunter and some old stuff)!!!1
Atonal Dreams Progress
I have a list of tasks like this in the daily routine tool thing I built for myself:
There are a ton of these tasks - that's only a portion of the list - and they eat up a ton of time, especially when they take much longer than expected. Here's a summary of what I managed to do this week:
Bug fixes
I fixed some bugs that I've been ignoring for a while where the game froze when converting an enemy to your team under certain elusive conditions.
The potions system had been broken somehow, so I fixed that.
Revised effect notifications
Previously, damage and effects showed as floaty words that consecutively appeared over the target, eg:
To accommodate that, I'd also added a second-long delay following action execution, to give the words time to show, though I felt it was bogging down battles. I removed it, which did make battles feel significantly less sluggish, but the camera typically switched too fast to really see the skill's effects like this. So I wanted to redesign how that works, with all the effects showing at once in some way.
Here are some of the iterations I went through while working out how that might look:
And here's what I ended up with:
I'm still getting used to it, and I might continue to tweak it, but I think it's okay. What do your favourite games do with regards to showing damage and effects like this?
Movement revisions
There's been a minor but noticeable issue I've been ignoring for months, where characters sometimes randomly got temporarily stuck while running up or down slopes. I'd been putting it off for ages because I thought it'd take a while to fix, and it did! I rewrote the movement code several times, and even considered returning to a tile-locked movement system like MARDEK's that I experimented with early last year... Then I changed one stupid little variable somewhere and it all just magically worked. Pfft! Hardly unusual for programming, but a frustrating time-eater anyway! At least it works okay now, which is a relief.
Loot
Instead of including a variety of potions and other expendable rubbish, the game mostly uses six reagents which can be combined into potions on the fly using a system I've written about before (but haven't touched in ages). Originally I wanted these reagents to each have their own harvestable field model, but that's quite a bit of effort for little gain. There's also not all that much to add to treasure chests... so I decided to just use (or rather keep using) chests to include those.
I've revised treasure chests so that they can now contain up to three different objects, with glitter (a currency you use to upgrade essence monsters) also counting as a separate object. I personally find treasure chests with multiple items particularly appealing!
I still need to add proper (probably silly) descriptions for most of the items!
Script
I wrote major revisions to a dialogue scene, and revised the quotes of all the monsters on the starting island.
Details
I had to code a way for player characters to move to waypoints during little cutscenes.
I revised the look of this bridge, which was previously made of tiles but which is now one big object:
I did that largely because of the movement issues, and it involved fiddling around with the map-drawing and -traversing code a bit. It wasn't really necessary in the end, but it's done now!
Swarm Bosses?
Here's something I've not yet added, but which I've been considering: Instead of big, solitary boss monsters, maybe bosses could be things called 'maelstroms', which are vortices of miasma that, when touched, trigger what are essentially several back-to-back battles? That is, once all monsters had been defeated, the next wave would spawn without the battle ending. Perhaps there'd be a bar showing how many of the total monsters were left to defeat.
This might work better than a single monster for a couple of reasons:
One is it's just faster from a development standpoint. I don't have to design a bunch of bosses or make and animate their models.
Another is that it'd work well with the taming mechanic. You could use the early wave to build up a little army, then use them to sweep through the rest. Might be more appealing than coming up with a bunch of bosses that summon minions or something to also encourage the player to make use of the system.
The monsters defeated during these wouldn't count towards that island's total (maybe?), and they could also maybe get some kind of buff as determined by that particular Maelstrom. Maybe.
I'll probably try adding this next week, and I'd like to compose some music for these kinds of battles. I also want to redo the casual battle music - since what I have now was meant for Divine Dreams, not Atonal Dreams - but I shouldn't make that too high a priority since it's not strictly necessary...
I could still add some big unique bosses as the plot demanded it - and I do have some planned - but this would be useful for plot-unrelated boss monsters at the end of areas to make finishing that area feel worthwhile.
I feel like I'm getting closer to an alpha test stage, like maybe I can get there by the end of next week, but I though that about this week, so we'll just have to see how it goes.
I am at least getting work done consistently. It just takes time!
Music Album of the Week
This album combines the soundtracks for my early Flash RPGs Deliverance, Fig Hunter, and some other versions of those that I worked on because I was just playing around aimlessly and kept changing my mind about what I was doing ('Proto-Deliverance'). They're all from essentially the same creative phase in my life, so I've just clumped them together despite them being different games.
I've also tacked on the very first pieces of 'music' that I made when I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, since they're so horrendously bad that it's funny - and maybe inspiring for beginners?? - comparing them to what I'm capable of now. So apologies to your ears if you listen to those! (I wasn't sure whether to include them at all, but they are important to me since it's valuable to compare to them.)
Annoyingly, this took most of Saturday to put together due to various issues converting these ancient midis. For most of this old stuff, I'm having to play the midis and record the sound since there's no better way to do it if I want to get the correct result, but for some of the Deliverance music in particular, they used atypical midi instruments so the midis didn't sound right, and for the oldest Early Naivete stuff, I don't have the midis at all. Surprisingly though, I did have wav files for those Deliverance tracks and the few ancient ones, though they had mono channels and were at a lower bitrate... I didn't even know what bitrate was until I tried to upload them to Bandcamp and got errors. I'm no audiophile and I don't care about sound quality, but if you're the sort of person who can hear the difference between a 24-bit wav and a 32-bit one (which I suspect is not actually physically possible), maybe the poor quality of some of these will bother you. But that's hardly the most offensively crude part of some of these, so WHATEVER!
There are still a few old things to get through - like the SMECOF OST - but this feels like the biggest and oldest of the bunch, so I'm glad to finally get it out of the way.
I don't think these albums are generating sales or anything, but I'm grateful to the handful of you who are checking them out! I'm going to keep making them because it's personally satisfying to me and something I've been meaning to do for years.
Other Indie Games
I still haven't played any other indie games since Timelie! I did however finish Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity this week, which I'll write a post about soon, hopefully.
I've kept up with my observations though.
I'm bookmarking every Kickstarter that I see. Here are a few I saw devs mentioning or retweeting on Twitter:
∞ This one, for a game called Aveliana ∞, is asking for about £10k, and currently has £6.6k from 190 backers with 11 days left, despite looking quite amateur in some aspects. Promising, and I hope it meets its funding goal.
∞ This one, for a game called Ova Magica ∞, which looks like something that'd appeal to fans of Stardew Valley (which I just had to look up because I forgot its title; wow, a solo project that sold 10 million copies??). It's raised £89,906 of its £17,712 goal in 5 days. So that's impressive, and surprising considering how derivative it seems. But the more I look into all this, the more I see that people just want things that are like other things they already like... This game doesn't appeal to me at all, but that just sets me off worrying about how what I like isn't what other people like, so I'll never succeed, etc, etc.
∞ This one, for a game called Humans Took My Neighbours! ∞, which isn't even subtly based on a game called "Zombies ate my neighbours!" (which I've never played), has got £1,462 of its £9,886 goal in four days; I wonder if that's enough for it to succeed though. Maybe most of the funding comes right at the start? I don't know.
Not a Kickstarter, but there's also ∞ this recently-ish-released game called Monster Sanctuary ∞, which I think looks competent enough but sort of dated and overly complicated, but which has 2,465 Very Positive reviews currently (so probably earnings of at least 70k USD after Steam's cut etc). Interestingly, its ∞ release trailer on YouTube ∞ has 374,439 views.
I should really be looking into how each of these games has been handling marketing etc, but there are just so many of them, and I'm so busy with dev work and so put off by even thinking about that side of things, that I never actually do.
What I think I'm going to do is either during or directly after the alpha test, I'll devote a week or two just to doing marketing research and preparing to do some more promotion of my own... I'm not exactly looking forward to that, but I need to do something.
It doesn't seem to be too tough though to earn at least a little something on Kickstarter, so I think I probably should go down that path once I've got enough done to start it. I suppose that's the biggest thing I've got out of seeing other Kickstarters like these (though I still don't like all the crap you have to promise as rewards since it seems so time-consuming, plus I feel so uncomfortable about taking like $1000 from a single person, but those huge contributions seem like they might be crucially important... I'll talk about all that (again) some other time though).
Also...
Whoops, looks like I did absolutely nothing with Discord this week; I completely forgot about that (and was only reminded by checking last week's post just now).
I also want to make various tweaks to this site, but I'm so busy with other stuff that I haven't found the time or energy! I used to have an email mailing list, but removed it in favour of accounts with settings to receive email notifications, but I'm wondering whether adding that back might show any increase in the dwindling view counts on these posts.
Also, with the recent stuff with Reddit manipulating the stock market or whatever, I've been thinking about how little I know about money.
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