Brief Update (Patreon)

It’s been a while since I’ve done a straightforward update post and I think now’s a good time so here’s how things are going. There’s a summary at the bottom with the most important parts, if you’re a patron you should read that bit at least.

We’re continuing to collaborate on enemies for Mushido. Since this is design work, there’s been less consistent progress than with programming. Some days are very good, some days are not. Naturally there are a lot of factors which go into our day-to-day decisions but if I had to sum up the difficulty here it would be like so: I want enemies which are non-redundant, nuanced and keep players on their toes. So far we have 5 enemy prototypes which make the cut and a handful more which seem promising. I’m guessing we’d need somewhere north of 15 enemy types to keep things varied across a full playthrough but it’s hard to say right now. The more the merrier.

Anyway, there’s still not a lot of sprites since we’re focusing on concepts first. We’re using temp stuff to get them into the game for now. As any artist will attest, it’s time consuming work, especially when you’ve been asked to draw nothing but non-human anatomy. This leaves me with time to work on other things which is the main reason I wanted to make this post.

It finally feels like I’m working on content rather than system/tool creation and I’m happy with what we’ve put together so far. In the beginning, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to design enemies since whenever I daydream about making a game, I’m usually thinking of what the player character would be like. Thankfully, it’s been fine. I don’t want to overhype you but I think we’re building a nice little roster of enemies which are interesting and challenging. I wouldn’t say they’re groundbreaking but I wouldn’t call them derivative either. That feels like a win.

It’s been enjoyable to use the action editor while coming up with ideas and I’m eager to continue doing so but Mushido will still take a lot of work. On top of my responsibilities, we’re looking at backgrounds for about 8 stages and sprites for more than 15 enemies, almost all of which will have multiple actions. Everything is possible with just the two of us but it’s going to take a long time that way. Of course the simplest answer is to hire more artists but I’m not going to ask anyone to work for free and I can’t afford to pay anyone. Even if we raised more pledges to hire another person, the bureaucracy of that (how the money gets from here to there, whether we need to be a company, whether we need a contract, etc.) is not something I want to deal with right now.

As such, I want to release the smallest possible game. Something that could be done by one or two people in the span of a few months. With any luck, it’ll sell enough that I don’t need to take your pledges anymore. If not, maybe I keep making smaller games until I earn enough to start a company and finish Mushido, Procyon, Sirius, etc. That seems like the best path to success and if nothing else it would be nice to have a game released.

Unfortunately, Proxima hasn’t been going very well. I’ve revisited it several times but nothing I’ve tried has satisfied me. At this point I need to come up with some other ideas for totally different games that might be more fruitful. I don’t want to over-intellectualize a process I’m still in the middle of understanding so the best thing I can do here is give you a glimpse of my current mentality.

When I say small, I mean something about the size of Downwell. I have a lot of respect for that game and while I had some quibbles in my review, overall it’s a game that I would’ve been happy to release myself. Lately though I’ve been thinking, if I had the idea for Downwell would I actually have made it? I can’t help but feel the answer is no because I would’ve prematurely dismissed it as being too similar to the machine gun from Cave Story. I don’t know whether my stint as a critic is to blame but whatever the cause, it’s not a good mentality to have and I’m trying to shake it. I need to become less judgmental of my ideas while they’re still forming. In order to do so, I want to spend some time playing with the framework and tools that I’ve built so far.

To that end, I currently have a stripped down version of Mushido with all the actual Mushido content removed. What’s left are the systems such as collision/action/animation/motion which have been built up so far. If I want to try making a different game, it’s easy to create a copy of that project and start making new actors with new behaviors. For example, the other day I made an extremely rudimentary but functional shmup in the span of an hour. I don’t have an idea for a shmup game and it’s not always as simple as filling in the blanks (projectiles would need to be reworked somewhat for a shmup since they currently value precision over speed too much to have tons of them on screen at once) but it’s easy enough to prototype ideas this way. The systems I’ve made are flexible and could be applied to many genres.

Yesterday I made a prototype resembling Lunar Lander. It’s probably not worth turning into a game but the result was unexpected, it wasn’t something I set out to create, just something that happened. I want to try this kind of improvisation a lot more so that’s the current plan. Every day I’m going to wake up, sit down, start writing something new and let my subconscious do the heavy lifting for a change. Since there’s no guarantee this will go anywhere, I feel like I can’t really embark on this process until patrons know about it, hence this update. Consider yourself informed and as always if this is a direction you don’t like, then make that clear by deactivating your pledge. It’s the only way I can know for sure whether you really support the decisions I’m taking or not.

Hope this all makes sense and I’ll be sure to let you know how things develop.

Summary: Mushido is progressing but will still take a lot of work. I want to make a smaller game but need time to experiment in order to find one that’s worth making. I’m doing this post to let you know that most of my effort over the coming months might amount to nothing as I follow whatever random idea happens to occur to me for a while. My partner will continue to work on Mushido and I will return to it from time to time as we flesh out the enemy roster.