Brief Update (Patreon)

Hello there, I’m probably going to go dark before that Tears of the Kingdom presentation happens tomorrow so I’m hastily writing this update a little earlier than usual.

Things are going well. Mushido’s pause has been upgraded to a hiatus and the prototype I mentioned - codename Regulus - is our main priority now. Regulus is unrelated to Proxima but is similarly small. It’s already in much better shape than Proxima ever was so it has about five minutes of gameplay and a handful of reasonably polished sprites, albeit with no animation.

Before I go any further, I’d like to address a concern you might have: switching projects. Even my own partner gave me some shit for this recently so I imagine you might be worried. My defense here is simple: I’m only distracted towards smaller projects. Remember, I had four initial ideas (Proxima, Betelgeuse, Procyon and Sirius) but Proxima never coalesced into something worthwhile which meant I had to take a step up to Betelgeuse. Mushido (Betelgeuse) was going well so I never set it aside for those latter two projects. Regulus has only become the priority because it’s also going well but is much smaller than Mushido. The enemy design alone reduces the art burden immensely compared to the multi-faceted and animation-heavy enemies of Mushido. There’s also fewer unique assets in general since the story/world is not a big concern. Even with the work we’ve already put into Mushido, Regulus stands a chance of releasing much more quickly, hence the switch.

Unless you count the Context Sensitivity video, I think the only real diversion so far has been the engine I showed recently. The knowledge I gained while making it actually hasn’t been useful yet but getting an engine off the ground was the last task I needed to accomplish before I could finally give myself “permission” to make a game. That might be a stupid notion but if you like how I approached game analysis on my channel, this mentality is part of that same package. Sometimes you have to take the good with the bad. Since I achieved my goal with the engine and uploaded that video, I haven’t done any more work on it, instead I’ve focused on Regulus.

You might be relieved to hear that the code behind Regulus is a mess. I’ve been cramming in features and making tweaks as quickly as possible just so I can focus on the design side of things. My perfectionism has been well and truly set aside. Of course in order to avoid bugs and make it reasonably efficient, I plan to clean it up later once the final feature set becomes clear but delaying a rewrite until then will streamline that process a lot.

In a prior post, I classified Mushido as a “safe bet” by which I meant there wasn’t any particularly unique features in it. The basic goal of Mushido is to make a bunch of small tweaks to the Ghosts ‘n Goblins format which hopefully combine to make it feel reasonably distinct from those games while still maintaining a similar appeal. As such, I was fairly open about its design right from the start. Regulus is different. There is a core idea I don’t want to disclose yet so you’ll have to wait a while before I can speak freely. That said, I don’t want to get anybody hyped as I wouldn’t classify this as a new idea or anything. When I reveal what it is, you might even be underwhelmed because it doesn’t sound like much on paper. In practice, I think it’s surprisingly impactful though and I’m doing my best to leverage that impact by designing everything around it. You’ll see what I mean sooner or later.

To help you set some reasonable expectations now, I’ll share some other stuff: It’s a run-and-gun style game which is much faster paced than Mushido. The enemies are also totally different from Mushido since they tend to have much more simplified behaviours. While we’re still using pixel art, the style and setting of the visuals is also completely different from Mushido. Basically, some of you will like this project more than Mushdio and some less, that’s just the way it goes. The length of Regulus depends on how much mileage I can get out of the core concept. On the low end, I’m hoping that equates to at least 30 minutes of gameplay, anything past that would be a bonus right now. On a first playthrough that “30 minutes” could take a few hours of attempts to achieve. I don’t expect the game will be as hard as Mushido but I’d like a certain level of difficulty to boost the replay value and encourage mastery.

We’re aiming to show you something by the end of April. What that something is, I don’t know. I’m hoping for a couple of screenshots but it might have to be concept art or something else entirely. I suppose it all depends on how April goes. It seems too soon to reveal the premise and I don’t think there’s any point showing gameplay until then so don’t expect that for a while yet.

Despite some gripes about changing project, we both feel good about Regulus and seem to be making progress faster than ever. I’m looking forward to sharing more as soon as it makes sense. As always, I’ll keep you informed about how things are going so I’ll see you again in April whatever happens. Until then, thanks for the support and thanks for reading.