On break (and some other things)
It's been a while - more than a month - since my last blog post! I didn't expect it, but I'm still on a hiatus from Project Mirabelle - this should last a few more weeks. In the meantime, I'm actually doing some other projects and things (and also resting a bit)!
First, some news about the BONDAGE Game Jam, Volume 2. We did have a submission, Double Archeologists. I'm not personally happy with the result, it is wayyyy too short and could have had a lot more things, but development during the jam itself was what it was. We still got 6th place overall, and a 1st place for "player experience", which is a good result given what the game was!
I won't be continuing the Double Archeologists project beyond the jam - I am not actually interested in the core "puzzle" concept it was going for, even if the theme and animations were nice to work on. However, I'm still very much interested in participating in future BONDAGE Game Jams, assuming they happen, and I'll try to make something I can be more proud of next time :)
One big impact of the jam was to inspire me for another project. One old attempt of mine is Adventurer's Journey, a prototype about a small team of characters fighting their way into a dungeon (and then losing in various ways before being drained of their experience). As a prototype, it of course used very crude art (I don't think I spent even 30 minutes on any of the 2D assets). It did have some interesting ideas though, mostly centered about a "backstory generator" integrated into the game that takes the various things happening to the characters, and mix them together into a backstory, keeping track of their relationships with the other adventurers.
My idea was simple. With the jam's experience, which was mostly about low-poly, low-resolution 3D assets, I decided to try to remake the project as a real game, but in low-poly 3D!
First step was simply to "clean up" the original Adventurer's Journey project. After the prototype, the game moved on to become Project Lychee, exactly the same idea but with a way better artstyle courtesy of NightingaleTide and different combat gameplay - focused more on the actual exploration and random encounters. However, during this transition, I did have some "intermediate" states that were closer to the final vision of Adventurer's Journey. So, I started by reintegrating all of that into the Adventurer's Journey project, including some nice ideas that weren't in the original project such as the "trapped in a mirror" status effect.
(I said this was a prototype with very crude art, now hopefully you get what I mean by that!)
Then, I started the process of remaking the assets in 3D. Overall, it took me about two days to remake them all - which was way shorter than I expected! It did take me more time to actually use it all in a project, given that I had to rewrite basically everything to be rendered in 3D and use proper animations, pushing the full budget to about five days of work (and a week and a half of real time, given that I was not working on this every day).
Still, going back to the "trapped in a mirror" effect, the result is pretty nice!
Once the full loop (combat, upgrade, and so on) was done, I decided to move on to actually add more things. My idea was to add item quality and upgrades, inspired by... Just about every game with rare, epic, and mythic equipment qualities.
Finally, I'm still working on the next step for this idea, which is a cult-of-the-lamb inspired "town building" system.
My plan for the next week (or few weeks) is to keep resting and to try to get the remake of Adventurer's Journey into something polished enough to be enjoyable to play - there's still quite a few steps left to have that ready, to be honest. Still, the progress on it has been steady (if slow), so I think it should be over fairly quickly.
Then, I'm planning to come back to Mirabelle, finish the next few levels for the upcoming update, and then start working on my original idea which was the struggle system. See you then!