Games Roguelike Devlog | Saikyou

Devlog #1 | The Beginning of Saikyou​

The Start
This is the first Devlog for the game "Saikyou". Saikyou is a fast paced 2D roguelike. You play as a samurai fighting robots in a futuristic arena.

I have been working on this for over a year now. With the little time I had at start, I worked on short Protoypes which focused on the concept of "having many enemies surround you". Those enemies could attack you any time, theoretically all at the same time. First I thought you should be able to control their behaviour. But with 20 to 30 enemies planned for endgame fights, that is not a manageable task for the player. I made enemies more counterable. They got long windup animations for their attacks which you can react to. The player would therefore be able to react to their attacks BUT this also meant I needed to give the player a lot of control over their character. (edit 2021 April, in Hindsight that was a smart move. Especially that endgame fights now have 50+ enemies on screen at the same time I back then didn't expect that many enemies on screen at the same time)


The Last 6 Months
In January I started to work on this full time. The player now has a lot of abilities to express themselves with. They can 3 hit attack combo, triple dash, shield with which they block enemy attacks, parry, counter, roll, heal, IAI draw and more abilities are planned for the future. I made the player as expressive as I could. I want a lot more but I also have to be realistic and work on more important things.
I created a lot of code and it works really well. I can now create enemies and give the player new abilities really fast. Also a lot of groundwork has been dealt with, so future updates will be a lot about design instead of coding.


The Last Month
A month ago I finished the first playtest and got a lot of really helpful feedback! Here is what I worked on since then.

The Trello Board I use is now public, I also update it constantly while trying to keep it readable.

Art updated. New shader is used which allows us to draw over the spritesheet in values. The brighter the value the more that pixel will
glow with the HDR using shader. Also everyone has their own material now. TLDR Everything looks a lot cleaner and more appealing now.

Movement felt weird in specific situations so I worked over it.

Added "Energy" as a Ressource.
Over time it empties while your shield is active otherwise it fills up over time.
The counter and the roll have energy costs.
When the energy is below 0 the shield breaks and you can no longer shield.
The shield is no longer broken once your energy is full again.

New Abilities
Dash
already existed and I really liked it. So I made it into a triple dash like marios triple jump.
With the right timing after dash 1 you can do dash 2.
Dash 2 has more range and is a little bit faster.
Dash 2 can do the same and go into dash 3 with the right timing for a really long dash

Roll
is a movement ability similar to dash. It covers the same distance in about the same time.
To do it you need to shield and then press the dash button.
It costs energy.
You can go in any direction though! Also you will face the direction your going now.

IAI Draw
While holding down the Y button you can aim in any direction.
When you release the button you fastly move in the direction you are looking at.
During this quick movement you are invincible and damage anything that you touch.
Costs Mana

Abilities Overworked
Healing
was possible at any time and everywhere. This lead to a behaviour of "running and healing". I really disliked this as it wasn't fun.
Now healing is only possible inside of the red circle in the center of the map.
Healing costs mana

Old Ability Removed
360 Attack
This attack is possible when countering an enemy attack. You do that when blocking an attack, and after it quickly press the x button.
But you were also able to do this by holding down the x button for long enough. Once you released it, the 360 attack would come up.
This existed before the counter move, but the counter is almost the same and just better in any way. Apart from having energy costs. Therefore I removed it.

Mana
is a new ressource I addded.
Mana is gained when killing enemies.
It is used for healing and strong abilities like the IAI draw. I will create more of them in the future.

Wave / Spawning Sysyem
I never intended to make healing free. This game will become a roguelike so healing being a free thing doesn't make any sense to me. I do want healing to be a constant possibility which is hard to pull off. At the same time I want to give time in which healing is possible. Because of that I added breaks after a wave ends.
I wanted it to be possible to heal in these breaks because there are no enemies which would stop you from healing.

The problem is that I never intended to show the player when a wave "ends". I made them end while enemies are still alive, with that I was able to give them a nice pacing. For instance I could say "End this wave when 15 enemies are still alive and spawn another 15 in -> The intensity never goes down and never allows the player to calm and instantly gives him another big amount of enemies. I really like this pacing but for this to be possible and the waves to have breaks, I will need to recode the Wave system in the future a little. I wanted to do this anyways as I now clearly know what I want from the spawning system and how I want to structure the waves.

Waves will have x amount of enemies in them. They will not spawn them all at once, they will have certain conditions "strong enemies are all dead -> Spawn y more enemies". " only y enemies alive -> spawn z more" "keep y enemies alive, as soon as one enemy dies, spawn another one" ... and so on. This way I can give waves different paces and give my best at structuring this game in a way that it keeps being engaging, while not just getting you out of breath with nonstop action, followed by you killing the remainder of the enemies. I think that is boring and I can do better. (edit 2021 April, Wow I can't believe I back then knew exactly what I wanted from the wavesystem and that it now works exactly like that!)

For now a six seconds long break when a wave ends is a thing. The enemies that are still alive get "deactivated". This means you can kill them. I like the choice I give you here. Either kill someone strong, or heal up. But in the future there will be no enemies in this and I will play around with healing and make this break a pure "breathing" time after a lot of action.

Particle Systems
Shield breaking is an important thing and we created multiple particle systems that make sure that you know what just happened.
I also added a particle system for healing.

Reflecting Bullets is now a thing. Hit them or block them to do so.

Enemy Design
I thought a lot about the current and future design of enemies. What makes the game what it is and what I want it to be. After doing all this I came up with some rules for enemy design. The most important ones are:

Simplicity
At first enemies had been really complicated with lots of different behaviours and left players confused. I now limit each enemy to one type of behaviour. Either they run away from you, chase you, wait for you to come to them or something else. They have one behaviour and not even one more! On the other hand bosses ... we talk about that in some months!

Annoying Enemies
They are annoying but still important. Enemies that you want to focus and feel good to kill. But to many of them and its just frustating! So I learned to not have to many of them in the scene at the same time. They should be powerful and a threat to you. But if you play it well or at least decently, you can always kill them really fast.
The rule is essentially, the more enemies are alive at the same time, the less enemies can be alive that are annoying

Counter mechanics
Every enemy should be countered by a specific ability of the player.
You can also beat them with other abilities as well BUT there should be one ability enemies get beaten by the fastest. That way might be easier or harder than others but it should always be the fastest or most convenient.
This way I can backwards engineer enemies. I can first think of an ability they should be countered by and then what they therefore should be able to do.

Enemy Changes
Ranger
has his kamikaze attack removed. He now sticks to one behaviour! Run away and shoot.
Now that bullets can be reflected he is countered by it. So hitting his bullets or reflecting it with your shield is the fastest way to kill him.

Guardian
is removed for now. To complicated and weird!
Might come back in the future but would be completly different

Wolfs
are now more coherent. They stick to the sides more and wait for you to come close. I will add some more to this as it is weird by itself. They currently just wait for you no matter what. So if you never get close to them, they never attack you, ever.
Best countered by the counter attack.

New Enemy
Rapier
Has a long ranged weapon and uses it in a lunge attack in which he has his long weapon in front of him
His attack has more range than yours. You need to sidestep him which is the best counter mechanic against him.
In the future I will make his windup longer -> You can also dash into him really fast and punish / kill him when he starts his windup
If you block his attack or get hit by it, you will be knocked back far. It is a safe way to kill him, but consumes more time.

New Sounds
have been added. They are mainly there to test the waters. We see what works and which direction we should take.
Any thoughts on the sounds? Let us know!
The Story will be a long work in progress, in this update we did another starting story / cutscene. Let us know what you think about it!


Thats it folks!
Thank you so much for reading this to the end it really means a lot to me! I put so much time into this so you guys know what is going on. I hope you find this informative and interesting. We will do more devlogs in the future to keep you updated! If you don't like text, we also make videos and put them on



There are a lot of the things we did. Of course we did a lot more but mentioning them all ... this already has become really long. But if you want more you watch me make the game live on twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/missingthemoon)
There you can also ask me anything about the game. give me feedback, tipps or suggestions. Anything that is on your mind!

If you feel so inclined please play the game (https://missingthemoon.itch.io/saikyou) and share it with your friends. It means the world to us!
Have a good day! (Moon)

 

Devlog #11 | Obstacles 0.9.2​

Welcome everyone, we are working on a fast paced 2D roguelike. You fight in a futuristic colosseum as a samurai while hyping up the crowd to get more gold.

If you prefer a youtube video, oh boi we have something for you

This update was focused on adding more content. I created static (non moving) obstacles that fill the paths between rooms with a lot of challenges.



Fighting Rooms
There are electric traps in the fighting rooms. These activate when you step on them. After a little delay they will damage you if you are still in them. This Update added that they also damage enemies so you can enjoy some Schadenfreude.

The new obstacle I added to the fighting rooms is the shooting trap. Everytime you step on it, the closest wall will shoot projectiles at you. This trap does not disappear like the electric trap though!



Whats up with those other Obstacles?
To get from one room to another you need to go through a path (long corridor). Meanwhile you have a hype resource that fills up when you fight enemies but depletes over time. The more hype you have the more gold you make! Meaning you want to get from one room to another as fast as possible to make more gold. But the paths are filled with obstacles and make moving fast risky!

The mechanics the new obstacles in this update use are highly inspired by platformers. First because I love platformers and second because I believe the mechanics synergies well. Platformer mechanics make it hard to just rush through the paths between rooms. Nonetheless they allow it if you are skilled enough.



So what are those obstacles?

• Holes
  We had holes in the last Update. You can dash over them. But walking into them would make you “fall” and your position was reset to infront of the hole. That took continuity out of these parts and was therefore changed. Now they are electric holes. So if you dont dash over them, you get damaged every second while your inside of the hole. You can just walk or dash out of them. And most importantly, your position is not reset!
• Electic gates
  They have two parts. One is on each side of the wall. Every 1.5s the two parts connect to each other with an electric shock. If you stand between them you get damaged. Its easy to walk past this, but it synergises well with other obstacles and makes them harder.
• Jump Pads
  When standing on top of it for 0.5s, it moves you forward super fast for a short time. This can be used to make huge holes that can be crossed with this. Or to make a faster way that is also hard though. For instance place the jump pad just infront of an electric gate. Boom you need to time it correctly or you get zapped.
• Button Ground
  When you step on the button it will activate ground in front of you. But after two seconds the ground disappears. So you need to hurry to get over.
• Flipping Ground
  There is a red and blue ground. While red is active, blue is not and vice versa. Everytime you dash they flip. So if red was active then blue is active now. Yes. I hope this will break your brain!
• Statue
  Its hidden until you pass by it, then it reveals itself. It now shoots at you every 0.8s. I love the suprise this trap gives and how crazy it makes even a otherwise simple path.

Thats all folks!
Next update will focus on iterating over the obstacles we created this update. Maybe I will add more, but I think we have enough for now! I will try to make them better in any way possible. Also I will fix some things that do work, but not yet as intended.

If you feel so inclined the game is online on itch! You can play it and share it with your roguelike loving friends https://missingthemoon.itch.io/the-colosseum

Thank you for your time and have a good day everyone!

 

Devlog #12 | Randomized Platformer Levels Update 0.9.3
​

Welcome everyone, we are working on a fast paced 2D roguelike. You fight in a futuristic colosseum as a samurai while hyping up the crowd to get more gold.
Last update added platforming elements to the paths and it worked out really well! So this update I focused on it more.

We also make video versions of this if you prefer that!

Why Randomize Paths?
The problem with the platforming elements is that people die often in roguelikes and ours is no exception. So even if we create a lot of paths, at one point, people will recognize every path. Than the paths feel boring and stale. And I dont want that! So this updated we focused on randomizing paths.
So whats the pros and cons?

• Mediocre paths are better than stale paths that everyone remembers. Also the challenge in roguelikes should never become less just because you remember the layout. They should become easier because you become better at them.
• The randomness changes the difficulty. The difficulty therefore is never exactly above or below you. Its usually around your skill level.
• The problem is that these paths take way longer to build and I talk about that in a bit.
• But the biggest problem is, even though the randomization makes it that people take longer to get accustomed to the same path. The path still uses the same mechanic. And the mechanic in itself will become stale at one point.

So we want to walk a tight rope between building enough levels with the same mechanics so people dont recognize the same paths. That way paths have longevity. MEANWHILE we want enough mechanics in these paths so people dont become bored of the mechanics. BUT lets also not forget that this is a roguelike about fighting and not about platforming. Its a secondary part of it. So we don't want to many mechanics with it and make this part harder to master than the primary part of the game.
So how do we randomize?
Whoever knows me, knows that I hate randomizing in games. At least fully randomizing things. I love platformer games. Handcrafted levels. Perfectly positioned traps with thoughts put behind every single element and decision. The level is as good as it can be. When randomizing, the level is sometimes good and sometimes bad. I hate that. So we don't fully randmize the paths!
We use several techniques and steps:

1. First I pick a mechanic / trap to use in this path and make a simple half of the path. This should stand on its own and be fun by itself.
2. Now I test it. Is it fun? Is it hard? Impossible? Different from already created paths?
3. Now we randomize the S*** out of this!
   1. Randomize the size of holes and platforms.
   2. Add extra elements / obstacles. When the path is picked, each element has a 50% chance of actually being there. So sometimes there will be no extra elements, sometimes eight. This creates a range of difficulty and makes recognizing the path way harder.
   3. Randomize the position of traps between two points.
   4. Switch around the position of traps to another position. Again this has a 50% chance to happen for each.
4. Repeat step 2 (testing)
5. Now I create the second part of the path the same way WHILE keeping in mind that the first and second part have a 50% chance to be switched around. This again helps to make the path different and less recognizable

All this randmizing takes a long time, but it makes it really hard to get used to any path. After all they are different each time. Its a lot of small differences but together they make a big difference.
That's all folks!
This week I came up with this algorithm and used it to create paths. This was a lot harder and more time intensive then expected! Next update I will focus on iterating over the obstacles more. You will be able to destroy some traps to make the path easier but you will get less rewards that way!
Thank you for your time and have a good day everyone!

 

Devlog #13 | Trap Update 0.10.0​

Welcome everyone, we are working on a fast paced 2D roguelike. You fight in a futuristic colosseum as a samurai while hyping up the crowd to get more gold.



We finally finished this update and now move on to 0.10.0! We added a lot of traps and obstacles to bring live into the paths between the rooms.
These traps and obstacles are inspired by platformer and add a brand new layer of skill to the game.
Last update a lot of you been worried that the paths became harder than the rooms. I heard you!



So whats new?
This update I changed the difficulty by finishing the traps. They used to just damage you but now you can destroy electric gates and the statue. You can also reflects it projectiles back at it.

Now it is a lot easier to traverse safely and slow through paths. But if you want to make sure you keep the hype alive, you better go fast!

But even more than just destroying them, you can now block their damage! The collision System was overworked for that! With that you are now invincible during your power moves (Dragon Strike, Roll and Tatsumaki) inside the paths. This was supposed to be like this from the start, just took some time to do everything.





Whats going to happen?
This week was filled with me doing lots of small improvements, finishing this and doing more with the team! Nothing comes out of it yet, but its stuff to be excited about, because we have some cool people working on this!

The next updates up to 0.11.0 will focus on the enemies! We will add two new enemies and a miniboss. Also we will overwork the current boss. Nothing wrong with the boss, I just want more from him!

Thank you for reading!

 

Devlog #15 | Update Miniboss "Big Wolf" 0.10.2​

Yes! The name is super creative. I know. You're probably like "holy cow, how did you get to that name".
Anyways, big wolf is only appearing once in a run (if he appears, it's around a 50% chance). After spawning he will walk to the closest wall. There he will spawn wolves and wait for them to be ready to charge at you. Once they are, he howls. They are wolves. If one howls they all have to howl. Thats simple first grade astrophysics. After howling, the small ones charge at you, followed by the big wolf. Their velocity is buffed by him, so be careful. They fast as hell!
The big wolf is nothing huge (other than his size). Just a simple and cool miniboss. Easy to understand but still a big threat. Im excited to see how you guys do against him! I want the boss to be more complex as a contrasting piece.

Most stuff this week was "hidden" stuff.
Meaning I do it so the project can proceed. Future things will be easier to do and have a lower chance to cause bugs. But YOU will see no difference in the game at all. Let me mention them briefly.
First I updated the Knockback code. It was really old and bad. Data was scattered all over the place, removing or adding an enum value was catastrophic. The amount of work for that ... just terrible. We fixed it. So now we good. I also worked over collision code. Really happy to finally have done that. In the last months I stopped going over code. I accept that I can fix potential bugs, but don't need to double check for them before they appear anymore. We are just in that part of the development, in which the code is solid enough to no longer double check.
Next I created a system to spawn enemies in the middle of combat for the miniboss and the boss. Yes the boss will spawn S***! Spawned enemies can be marked as "hollow". Meaning they don't give gold. They do give you hype though. So you cant farm the miniboss wolves that he keeps spawning.

Next a bunch of small good stuff
Tatsumaki is a move that makes you invincible during it. It used to negate knockbacks. So you would just stand in place if you get attacked during it. That mechacic made miniboss a lot easier than intended. Same with the boss. So now you get knocked back during the tatsumaki. No more cheesing the boss!
Then some juice stuff. The projectiles of the shotgun enemy, which we added last week, are now slowing down over time. Looks cooler. Feels better. ALSO you can now reflect all his projectiles back at him! It used to be that the reflected projectile would get destroyed by his other projectiles, in the same frame it was created AND in the same frame the other projectiles would also be reflected. I think. Idk. To be honest I just fixed it, and didn't try to fully understand the problem. Less energy used, more more important stuff done.
Like working over the Hype. It goes down when being hit. That't nothing new. But now the amount it goes down, depends on the base damage the enemy deals. Meaning if the enemy deals 10 damage, it goes down by 10. If an item would decrease or increase the damage, the hype would still go down by 10. This way being attacked by 2 wolves and almost taking no damage, will not get your hype down all the way.
I almost forgot, I finally switched out the broken item. Items will be completly reworked in about 3 weeks. For now the broken one is switched with an item that gives you 50% more damage.

That's all folks!
This update focused on the miniboss. Next update will be all about the boss!!! Im super excited about that, and got a lot planned. Lets hope I can do all that in a week!
Thank you for your time and have a good day everyone!

 

Devlog #16 | Enemy Update 0.11.2​

Welcome everyone, we are working on a fast paced 2D roguelike. You fight robots in a futuristic arena as a samurai while hyping up the crowd by playing fast.

This update took quite a while. One reason was that it was christmas and new years and ... a lot of stuff was going on. I also took it easy to recharge some energy.

The other reason is that it actually took a lot more work to rework the boss than expected. But the time spend was definetly worth it! The next update aims to finish the boss and this enemy update all together. Now lets talk about how I reworked the boss


Inspiration
The boss fight lacked something and I couldn't tell what it was. I sat down and thought about boss fights I do like. What do I like about them and I can I add these things to my boss fight?

I loved playing splatoon 2. The boss fights been great! In it you dodge attacks by shooting yourself a path to fastly move in it and climbing the boss works the same way. You climb the boss to get to its weakpoint and damage it. That is only possible after the boss did it's attacks though. Essentially this is like a puzzle in which you need to find the path to dodge attacks and then the path to get up on the boss to finally damage him.



Putting it into work
I incorparated this by adding a generator. It's an enemy that teleports around every now and then. While the generator is alive, the boss has a shield. The shield damages you if you touch it and makes the boss invincible. So you destroy the generator to be able to damage the boss.

This way the boss fight has 2 parts.
Part 1: Generator is alive -> Boss invincible and attacks you with (mostly) ranged attacks
Part 2: Generator is dead-> Boss gets stunned and is no longer invincible -> Boss fights you with close combat attacks

After some time the boss creates a new generator and summons thunderstrikes. This restarts the cycle.

Once the boss takes enough damage he enters Stage 2 which is mostly the same with these differences:

• The generator now moves and teleports, making it harder to destroy.
• Boss Projectiles now reflect off the wall.
• When you destroy the generator the boss is not stunned. Instead he does his final and super flashy move. After it he is stunned.
• Almost all (working on it) of his attacks are stronger
• During thunderstorm the boss now also summons rapier eggs. After 12 seconds they become rapiers. Which is a rather strong enemy

No one sees it
If its bad, everyone notices. But when done well no one cares. With all the new attacks and more targets to follow, the camera became quite the challenge... until I remembered that I'm using cinemachine.

I switched from a normal virtual camera that tracks one object to one that tracks a group. Now I can just add a new target to the target group or take it out whenever I like. So it normally focuses on the player. When the boss spawns it focuses on both while the main focus is on the player. The generator can be added and taken out as well. When the boss does a big attack for which the whole fighting arena needs to be visible I can do that easily!

Camera is really hard to get right, so this is more like a first draft. It works and is effective, but I want it to also be pretty and smooth!



That's all folks!
This update focused on reworking the boss and as I said, this has been a lot of work. Next update will wrap this whole enemy update up by finishing the boss and doing some other cool stuff!

Thank you for reading and have a great day!

 

Devlog #17 | Enemy Update 0.11.0​

Welcome everyone,
we are working on a fast paced 2D roguelike. You fight robots in a futuristic arena as a samurai while hyping up the crowd.
Finally the enemy update is finished! This means the enemies of the first world and the boss are done! I might revisit the boss after getting feedback of course, but that won't take long! So the next weeks will be about creating the hubworld and progression systems so I can finally make the items!

The Boss Fight
This update finalizes the boss by giving him his final attack. He covers the whole ground of the arena with electricity, only leaving you a small box to hide in.
In stage 2 the boss now moves during his 360 attack.
Now there is more visual clarity for what is happening. For instance the generator now lights up before he teleports and the Rapier eggs also light up shortly before they turn into rapiers.
And last but not least a bunch of bugs got fixed. This took the longest but it's so many different small things that I will spare you the details.

After that
I worked on a lot of smaller things. For instance the screenshake beeing smoothed out on big screenshakes. When the boss dies for instance there is a huge screenshake. Now with it first being strong and then fading down it feels really good!
I also worked on something that is hidden for now. It's called "Enemy Introduction". Once you fight the boss or the miniboss they get introduced and once you beat them ... let me say it like this. The story isn't out there yet but here is a little teaser. You are a crazy psycho samurai girl that ... ehm likes heads. So when the boss dies you ...
Anyways in the future we want to expand this system for any enemy! So when you encounter an enemy for the first time, you will see some cool illustration or some gameplay footage. Below that there will be some text explaining the enemy and strategies to fight the enemy. The game shouldn't be hard because you don't know what to do, but because it is hard to do it.

That's all folks!
I mean there is a lot more but I don't want to bore anyone with all the tiny things I do. But if you want to see them or chat you can watch me make the game live on twitch, my name is MissingTheMoon.
If you have any suggestions please put them in the comments!
Thank you for reading and have a great day!

 

Devlog #18 | Hubworld / Progression System 0.11.1​

The last month was crazy. Ive finally done so many things that I wanted to do for so long but couldn't. Those things just have to wait for later. Now it feels like the game is so close to being finished, but there is still so much to do.


The game was always overwhelming to new players.
There was only one difficulty that you get thrown in right at the start. You have around 15 abilities and as a new player you wont know about many. But the difficulty is for you utilizing all of them. Therefore new players never stood a chance and obviously were overwhelmed. This Update I worked on a saving system which allows me to track your progress in many ways.

So now you start with the ability to walk and a 2 hit swing combo. Thats it. Left joystick and X button is all you have. The game no longer starts with the run. Instead you have challenges which ramp up in difficulty. So you don't need more abilities than the ones you have at the time, but steadily unlock new ones. Essentially that's a hidden tutorial. Abilities that are unlocked are explained with a little video and the Input. Real fast real simple and straightforward. Once you unlock 4 new abilites you can jump over the gap that was keeping you apart from the run and more challenges. In those challenges you can get 1 more ability.


The run is the main mode but
the challenges also exist. They are fun and short levels that give you some reward. So if you ever struggle with the main mode, you can just do a challenge. Or if you just want a quick round for a minute. In the future I will add many more challenges and more rewards for them. Currently the game only has six items that are the leftovers from my first attempt at items. The code works and can be used but most of the items were bad and got therefore removed. Now I have a clearer view on them and they will be created in the next update!


The hubworld is huge
Well size wise not yet, BUT it is easily expandable! But the point is, the hubworld has so much to offer! More challenges will come with more platforming elements in them in the future. You can buy items in the hubworld which are added to your item pool. Those show up in the shop during your run so you can buy them. If you don't like an item you can just remove it from your pool or bring it back into the pool. The hubworld also lets you see how often you killed which enemy. Maybe in the future I will add more stats that people are interested in. For now Im really happy with the hubworld and the saving system that I worked on in the last month. Now the game is approachable for new players, so lets create some dope items for them next!


Thank you for reading all of this. If you have any thoughts to share please let me know!
Also the new version is out! Please play it if you feel so inclined <3
https://missingthemoon.itch.io/saikyou

 

Devlog #19 | Item Update 0.11.2​

Welcome everyone,
we are working on a fast paced 2D roguelike. You play as a samurai fighting robots in a futuristic arena.

The last update focused on creating a hubworld and a saving system which allowed this update to do its thing. Items! Finally. I wanted to do them for sooooooooo long ... well here we are so lets start!

Why Items?
Items are great this games pacing! Saikyou is a roguelike so you play over and over again. The only thing that improves is your skill level right? Well Saikyou is better than that! This game gives you more gold the better you play. Better meaning more aggresive and faster and therefore more risky. Risk and reward it is.
The starting items (12) are cheap. So every new player will be able to buy some at least. Once you become better you will unlock new items that are more expensive.

I don't want the bad starting items anymore! Help!
There is this thing I call "Item Pool". The items in that Item Pool can appear inside the shop when you do a Run. Outside of the Run, in the Hubworld, you can buy items into your Item Pool or out of it. You customize which items you want to have. Your super skilled and want the super expensive ones that fit your playstyle? Go for it! You suck? Tough luck.
Right now there are 35 items and next update will add 13 more. Next update will also create more challenges! Meaning there will be a lot of shorter fights you can play, to unlock new items and abilities. Right now there are five of them, but in the next update I will add the real deal! Some challenges will have extra rules "Only the marked enemy can take damage", "start with 1hp" and more!

That's all folks!
I did a lot more smaller things, like creating the "Action Guide". A menu always accesible which shows you all the abilities you've unlocked so far and how to use them. But talking about all the small stuff would take forever so lets leave it at this. If you want to see more, I stream the game making process on twitch and tweet about it. Links are in my profile
Thank you for reading and have a great day!

 

Devlog #20 | Items & Challenges 0.11.3​

More Items! More Challenges!
This update added 5+ epic items and 9 uncommon items. Making it 40 items in total. Next update will add the final 6 items!
There are 23 challenges now. Beating a challenge gives you xp, yen and either unlocks an Item or an Ability. The first five challenges are easy and simple.
The other ones after have one extra rule to them. There are five different rules for the 18 challenges, for example "The Root of all Evil: Only the marked enemy can be damaged", or "Darkness: visibility is decreased strongly". These additional rules will be added in the next update. I can't wait!!!! For now you can try yourself on the challenges, they do get really hard! Their difficulty will be adjusted once the rules are added.

I made a Excel Spreadsheet?
You have a level. The level influences the difficulty of the game in two ways. On one hand, leveling up means that new enemies and traps appear. This way the game becomes harder and stays novel. On the other hand, you get new abilities and unlock new Items. This way you have the tools to deal with the new obstacles. You become stronger BUT the game becomes more complicated this way while the difficulty overall stays the same. This way the game stays fresh.
XP is needed to level up, which is gained from doing challenges or runs. Therefore I needed to calculate at what point I want people to be at what level, for how long they need to play the game for and so forth.
Yen is a similar ressource. Gained the same way, but spent on items. You have an item pool. The items in it appear in your run. So when unlocking items, you can buy them into the pool. You can also remove items out of it. All this costs yen. So how much yen should you make? When should you make how much?
So I made a huge ass spreadsheet with all the data in it and played around with numbers until I liked it. Once I get more data from players I can put it into the spreadsheet and adjust the numbers once more. With it, adjusting the values is a piece of cake!

That's all folks!
There is so much more that I did in the last three weeks, but if I mention one then I why not the rest ... but then you're here until I finish the next update. Instead why not play it? If you want to see more, you can watch me on twitch or check out my twitter.
Im Missing The Moon, thank you for reading and have a great day!

 

Devlog #21 | Challenge Rules 0.11.4​

Rules?
Yes! Finally! I wanted to do this for sooooo long. And here we are Challenges now have "rules". Rules mean that the challenge is doing something special to make the game harder and different. They force you to strategize how to play the game with the.

1. Darkness
   • Your vision is reduced. This means ranged enemies often attack you from outside your vision and you need to react quick.
2. The Root of All Evil
   • Only marked enemies can be damaged. When a marked enemy dies, another enemy gets marked. First challenge only marks one enemy. Next one two. The last two mark three enemies.
3. Towers
   • I made three towers with their own behaviour. By themselves they are really simple. So first challenge only has one and last challenge has all three together!
     • Tower one shoots like a sprinkler back and forth and then pauses for around six seconds.
     • Tower two shoots a salve around itself every eight seconds
     • Tower three aims straight at you and predicts where you will be. After two seconds of shooting this tower stops for another around 12 seconds.
4. Burn
   • You constantly loose health BUT killing an enemy gives you back health! This one is really fun as it forces you to be on your toes. Fight constantly or die from hesitating.

These rules are easy to implement but make a huge difference!!! I had a blast making them and playing them over and over to test the difficulty. It just felt like a fresh experience or a new game. I hope you all enjoy the challenges as much as I do! But make no mistake, they are hard as hell! They are supposed to be!


That's all folks!
This been a quick update, a lot of changes with minimal effort. This is what I worked on and can share. I also worked over the save file. It now only deletes the challenges you've beaten and the things you got from that. As always if you want to know more check out my twitch or twitter and stay up to date! Next update will finally finish the 0.11 update with the more items and more hub world level design!

Im Missing The Moon, thank you for reading and have a great day!

 

Devlog #22 | Hubworld / Items / Progression 0.12.0​

Let me start of with a god daaaaaaaaaaamm! This update took long. Between 0.11.0 and 0.12.0 more than a hundred days have passed! Yes this update is huge and took a while. The good news: we are almost done with all the programming and design stuff.

After this I will spend about a month to go over the player, boss fight and the levels. Especially the paths between the fights. After that we "just" have to do art, sound design, music and polish. Simple.

I also make videos, so if you like them more, here you go!

So what took 100 days to do?
I didn't realize how much work I will put into the Hubworld. The plan was to "just make some menu that functions as a hubworld". Simple!

Well it became a liiiiiittle bit more than that. The Hubworld consists of rooms or how I call them "bubbles". There are three shop bubbles. They let you put items in and out of your item pool. The items in the item pool appear in your run.

The Starting Item bubble lets you pick which item you start with. Starting items are money focused items.

The Head Collection bubbles shows you how many kills you got on any enemy that you've killed at least once.

I talk about Challenge bubbles later, but just know they are part of this hubworld too.


That't it? Tzz this isn't even my final paragraph yet!
There now is Progression! All the abilities people had were always meant to be given over time. It is overwhelming to start with every single ability and enemy the game has to offer. And that way you already have seen everything the game has to offer, which ... is boring as hell.

Items and Abilities are now unlocked for beating challenges and for leveling. Yes Another thing this update brings, "Player level".

You get xp for beating challenges and doing a run. With enough xp you level up. The levels unlock Items and Abilities. But there is more to this. The further your level goes the harder the game becomes. I just assume that at that certain level you are ready for this new enemy or new trap. This way the game stays fresh for longer and doesn't overwhelm you with all it's content.

In the future I want to add to this! I only thought of this yesterday so here is the idea. I want a skill tree. Meaning you level up like now but the reward would be a skill tree point instead. Same goes for challenges. Those points you can use to unlock items and abilities in the skill tree. Basically everything is the same BUT the skill tree subtracts me having to work on "what item do I give when" and adds YOU choosing "when to unlock what item". So my random guessing is gone and your interesting choice is added. That's the dream.


Save files are precious!
Now that there are all these items, abilites and achievements I need t save it all! I've never done this before so this was scary. I took the time I needed to do this properly and make sure your save files are never deleted unless you want that. I never heard of someone that went "oh this game deleted my save file, lets just start over". There is no room for messing up in this! Since it was my first time it was scary, but I believe I did a good job. Fingers crossed!


Soooo that's it?
Well ... as I started working on all this I remembered how I wanted to make Challenges. They are levels with one room. In it there are handcrafted waves which are strongly similar each time. That way you can plan and strategize how to beat each challenge. On the contrary the waves in runs are always different. In them you need to be flexible and react to the situation.

I realized that now, while I'm working on the hubworld, is the perfect time to work on this.

The challenges are interesting because they have special rules. I created 23 challenges. In those there are four types with unique rules. I talked in the last Devlog about them so go and check that out if you are interested and want to know more.

Between the challenges there are paths to get from one challenge to another. They have platforming in them. I also added platforming between the start and the first world. This way I teach the platforming mechanics of the game in an safe environment.


A relic of the past
This project has been going on for a year and a half. At this point I every now and then come across code I've made back then. Often I just think "I easily could do this better".

I came across one of those relics but this one was really bad. The shield had a cooldown. Because I thought thats a smart way to fix a problem. The problem being that after you stop shielding, you have a small time window in which you still block. Without a limitation you can just put the shield on and off and you will always parry any incoming attack.

Does a shield cooldown fix the problem? Yes. Is that they way you should do that? Absolutely freakin not ... AT ALL! It lead to people shielding and the shield didn't go off, they get hit, and then it goes on, they go "wtf I shielded! It's on too! I did shield!". Well they did, but it was on cooldown...

So I removed the cooldown. Instead there is a counter now. It's set to 0.3 when you stop shielding. It counts down while you are not shielding. If you block an attack while the counter is below 0.3 you parry, otherwise you block. This is to prevent spamming the button. The old parry logic "block in the last possible moment" is still a thing. Essentially parry now has a cooldown of 0.3, which starts when you stop blocking.


That's all folks!
This time there is so much I didn't talk about but this is already rather long. There is a lot of devlogs talking about some of the stuff and I stream the process, tweet about things. If you're interested make sure you follow me and stay up to date!See you guys in the next Devlog, have a great day!

 

Devlog #23 | Player Update 0.12.1​

This update is a quick one. I took a two week break. Now, refreshed as I am, I worked for the last seven days on this update. So what did I do?

Bugfixes
There were a lot of bugs with all the items. Sometimes an item works. And then I do stuff. And it no longer works.
I definetly didn't code stuff right but in this update I tried to fix all the bugs. There still are some in there! It will take a while to get them all out.

This update was about the player
At this point most abilities are set in stone. But not all of them! In this update we finished the stab attack. We iterated over this for a while now! Stab was always supposed to contrast the swing attack, which is a fast attack.
I just couldn't imagine imagine what a heavy attack would look like in such a fast paced game. Well you charge up the stab with energy for as long as you want. The longer you charge it up, the more damage it deals. So the attack is as heavy as you want it to be. It can 1 hit most enemies even without items but costs a lot of energy!
Stab Lunge is still there as a quick attack. It uses the same button as stab. Stab lunge happens when you release the button quickly. If you hold the button for longer than 0.25 seconds, it becomes the stab lunge instead.
Next up was Dash. It is now like a super mario jump. If you hold down the button you dash for longer. Now the platforming parts might be a bit harder, but the controls feels better since you have more control over them! In a future update I will make the platforming parts a lot easier for early levels. And raise their difficulty over the levels. But the difficulty they have now is the hardest they will be, if not easier. I already decreased the difficulty of the third arcs platforming parts in the hubworld.
Dragon Strike now starting instantly when you press the button down. To be honest I don't even remember why it used to be on button up but now it is no longer! And it makes a lot of sense while it makes no sense that I didn't notice. Welp thats one and a half year of developing the same game for ya.

That's all folks!
Next update will be about the boss fight! There is a lot to get excited about in that Update! I will talk about it in the next Devlog, until then take care, have a great day and I see you in it!

 

Devlog #24 | Content Update 0.12.3​

In the last month
I did quite a lot of work in the last month and I skipped the devlog for the last update. The small things I won't mention as they are numerous! So let's get to the juicy big things instead!

Boss Fight
People didn't understand what to do in the boss fight. That is part of the fun, figuring out what to do. But ... there were not enough clues at all. Especially in a roguelike a boss should be understood fast. At least the basic rules to the fight.
The boss and generator now have a line that connects them visually indicating that the boss is invincible because of the generator. To help this, the boss is no longer invincible at the start of the fight. This way people can see the difference between damageable and not damageable. He gets his shield now when he spawns the generator.
The generator now stands still and only teleports when you damage it enough. It will explode instead of teleporting at one point. Meaning now people have it easy to get to it. At one point in the fight they will just try that out. In stage two the generator still walks around.
I hope in playtesting we can see how people have less problems with the boss fight. We will probably have to change more for the clarity of the fight. We also updated some attacks of the boss and changed the fight slightly. The boss fight is really cool though and I am really happy with what it is.

Skill Tree
I deleted the old unlocking system. Instead of me giving you an item or ability for leveling up or beating a challenge, I instead give you a skill tree point. You can then unlock whatever you like in the skill tree. This way I no longer need to guess which item or ability you probably want now, instead I let you make the decision. There are 3 skill trees and a tiny one. The starting one only has 1 element in it. It is there to show you that there are more skill trees to unlock in the future. You got around 50 things to unlock overall in the skill trees. They are paced in a way that you should enjoy them throughout the game.
Because of this, it is easier for us to make sure your save file doesn't corrupt. Meaning even if we change things in the future, your save file should stay the same! If you unlocked something in the past that no longer exists, you just get your skill tree point back. Simple.

The Paths between fights
The original reason for us to add platforming elements between the fights, was to give the game more variety AND most importantly to slow down the game between the fights. The old paths were badly designed though. Each path was highly randomized which was cool but they lacked an identity. They all been kind of the same but unrecognizable. Also they've been way to hard and fast paced, meaning they've been the opposite of what we wanted them to be.
The new paths are way better! First of all there is almost 60 of them now. Yes freaking 60. More is totally better. There is that many because there is easy, medium and hard paths but each level has it's own paths! So there is about 20 paths per level and about 7 per category. Each level uses specific traps, theming the paths of the level. That way you feel more progression between the levels. And the traps become harder and harder each level.
The paths for level one are simple and have more randomization in them. You will see those paths often so they should be hard to recognize. This is possible since they need to be easy. So we just randomly take optional elements away or we don't.
The paths of level two and three are more recognizable as they are less randomized. BUT they all have their own mechanic that they use. That way they are more interesting and you don't see them that often after all.

Whats Next?
It's been really hard to come up with this many different paths, but we made it! Next we will work over the fights. We did a lot of challenges in the past, that way I became a lot better at creating fun and different fight. I will try to do the same as we did with the paths. Every level has it's own thing to it. Well I won't make that many fights BUT I will make it that each level adds specific enemies. So level one uses the basic three enemies and one strong enemy. For level two we add another strong enemy to this enemy pool and in level 3 we add the final enemy. This way there is more sense of progression. Also I can make this change with code so no need to create different fights for each level. After that we will do some small things and be done! Yes we done after this, and we can finally work on the art!

See you guys in the next Devlog and have a great day!

 

Devlog #25 | Content Update 0.13.0​

We've been working hard to get here, but this is it. The content is done! Well until we start working on world two and three. If we do that that is. Anyways we've done a lot in the last two months and I made a youtube video to talk about all of it. Go and check it out!

I playtested a lot in the last week and made sure all bugs are fixed. I hope I found all but let's be realistic, I probably didn't. You guys will probably find more bugs, but there shouldn't be anything game breaking. Next up we will work on the art, music and sound! We will polish the S*** out of this game and make it as beautiful looking as it is fun to play. I hope you guys are excited as we are!

That's all folks!
See you guys in the next Devlog. Have a great day!

 

Devlog #26 | Feedback & Help Update 0.13.1​

Content done! What now?
Since we are done with all the content, this month was all about making things work as intended and making sure that people understand what is going on. So basically more feedback from the game. This can be a lot of things and we just got started with it. For instance when someone tries to heal but doesn't have the ressource a text now tells them why they can't. In the future we can add a sound to this as well. Otherwise people have no clue why they can't heal. We did this for a lot of things already and we will see how well this works.


I'm the developer, I have to play the game!
I spend most of my last month on testing the game by playing it. Not just to see whether everything works. Which it totally did and I totally didn't spend a S*** ton of time fixing bugs! But also to see if the design is as good as I can make it. For instance people always had too much gold in later levels. You get gold by killing enemies and later levels have more enemies so that was bound to happen. To balance this out I gave people starting gold. Sadly that wasn't enough. So now the shop raises it's prices every level. By playing the game I can see whether the prices are raised to much or not enough. I did a lot of this kind of stuff by playing the game. I also had others play the game to figure out how far they get and how long it takes them.


Super cool things I haven't talked about before
We are working hard on this thing and we got tons of things planned out for later that I believe I haven't talked about yet. So here we go!

The plan for the music is to have dynamic music. When the fight gets heated, the music will let you know by becoming more heated as well.

In the last month we finally finished the writing process for the story! I think we did a great job and people will like the story. Now we can get to putting the story into the game by drawing scenes, making fancy camera movements and even fancier visual effect.

The art of the game has been fill in for long enough! We finally are moving on to art as we finished figuring out the workflow. We make the animations in adobe animate, and export them into Unity almost fully automated. And to see if it works we worked on the real art for the Duelist. He now smooth as can be!


That's all folks!
Well I did tons of different things this month that are kind of hidden things. Kind of hard to show. Welp to talk about the hidden we have the devlogs! See you guys in the next one and have a great day!

 

Devlog #27 | Misc & Art Update 0.13.2​

We got the power now!
I finally got my adobe license! Meaning we can finally work on the art for real! In the last two weeks I was finishing up tons of small stuff. Mainly things that didn't work as intended and bugs. I also added the options Vsync and Target Frame Rate. Per default the game knows the refresh rate of your screen and should use that.

Gameplay wise I also did some work. There no longer is a gold reward for not taking damage. I like the aggresive and fast paced gameplay. With that gameplay you will take damage sooner or later. Meaning the way I want you to play is kind of punished by this reward. So it's gone now.

You can now get some extra heals during the boss fight! When killing the generator you get a heal. It's nothing big and mainly feels good. It should help people out a little bit, especially those that do not have a lot of damage to win the fight fast.

What else?
Enemies are being introduced when you haven't killed them yet. A picture of them and a little text is flying into the screen. Once you kill them for the first time, a beheading animation is played ... well will be! The code is in, the fill in art is in but there is no actual beheading animation or art of the enemies. So for now it's deactivated. Check out my twitter to see how weird it looks with fill in art!

Since I got my license I was working on the Ranger enemy. We put the real art in for him and gave him a cool animation for his attack.

That's all folks!
Next up we will work on the player which will be difficult! Animations make a big difference to how it feels to move and control the player. So I can't mess this up! Let's make the feeling even better than it already is!!! See you guys in the next Devlog and have a great day!

 

Devlog #28 | Animation Update 0.13.3​

Yo, it's been a long time! The last update has almost been two months ago?! I promise I was working hard though.

For the first three weeks I worked more with animate. Last week I continued with all the animations. Between this I needed to take care of something more important...


Starting a Company
Yes, I started a company. Well I'm in the middle of it. It's a complicated and weird process here in Japan but it's almost done.

I will give more information once the company is finally established. For so many reasons I can't wait!

One is I will have a company, which is kinda a big deal to me. The other more important reason is, I can finally start paying my team so that they can work hard. Also to sell the game we need a company right? I actually don't really know but I probably? Whatever, having a company is cool, that's the only reason we need.


Art / Animation
So what's new in this update? Actually despite me working mostly on establishing a company there is a lot of new stuff.

It's been two months after all but to be honest ... I lost track of all the things I did. So here is the list of the most important things.

Design
We are in the process of redesigning all the art for the game. Like all of it. For instance the background is now just a single color. Yep, we going with a very minimalistic style. The dust particles floating around are now a lot less visible. We did a lot of these things and will keep doing that. But mainly we redesigned the art of the enemies and the player.

Animations
We didn't yet animate all the new designs, so a lot of the enemies are still the old ones. We did manage to redo the Duelist and Ranger. They now have some smooth attack animations.

If I remember correctly the Duelist was already in last update and so was the Ranger. But this update we remade the Ranger as we felt that the shape language could be better. Circular things are safe things, like yourself. And things with edges are enemies. The stronger the enemy the weirder the shapes. Next update you will know what I mean

We also have been able to remake all the player animations. Yep the games heroine is now having smooth animations! I hope you like them because I put a lot of time and effort into them.

Other Stuff
All the new attacks have the attack colliders adjusted, the timing of the attacks adjusted and more. There is so much thought that I put into the design. I never intended on just mimicking the feeling of the old animations. Or to just one to one take over old colliders. I used them as guidelines but tried to make them better.

There is a story for the game. It's been through a lot of iterations but we got it. Now all that is left to do is to write it down well, and do create art for it. I am still on the fence how to present the story well. I mean I got a plan for it for now. But I am not sure if we can do that. It would be cool though!


Anyways, that's all folks!
The update is live so why not play it? Here is the link https://missingthemoon.itch.io/saikyou
Thank you for reading and I see you in the next Devlog. Have a great day!

​

 

Devlog #29 | Animations Update 0.13.4​

This update continues working where the last one left off. Here and there we worked on sound effects, bugs and other stuff but mostly we've been doing more art and animations. So what's new?

New Animations
We worked on the Shotgun, Rapier, Moving Tower and the Wolf. With that all the basic enemies are done! Yayyy!
It was quite challenging to give these guys animations though! Like some of their fill in animations were only one frame. Just something that indicates that something is happening. So for some of them we needed to come up with new animations from scratch.
Shotgun and Rapier been quite simple. For the shotgun I copied the Ranger and for the Rapier I just made his weapon go long and shrink. Simple.
The Moving Tower though... it took multiple different times for me to stumble upon the right animation. I didn't want to frame by frame aninmate his weapon. But the way that the diamonds go over each other and grow was something I didn't know how to automate in adobe animate. At one point it worked out though!
The Wolf was weird as heck! I realized how many bugs there had been once he had animations. Like gameplay wise there was no issue at all. He just didn't always do the right animation. I had to fix that but the animation also was just boring. Our artist Liz gave me quite some criticsm on it. I hope she will like it now! Otherwise I will have to work over it again.

Other Stuff
One of the smaller things I like to mention is tweeking. I started to play the game more again. I want to start balancing things out a bit. After all we got all the content done, so I might as well. I realized that some items are to expensive or to weak. I also want to balance how fun abilities are and how strong they are. I buffed the player quite a bit by making power moves have a shorter recovery. That's a lot more fun but that makes them to strong. In the coming version I will probably give them higher energy costs! Right now it is way to easy to just use power moves all the time.

Thats's all folks!
This update almost finishes 0.13 which is about bringing art and animations to the game. This update might not look like a lot but it took a lot of time!
The next update will focus on the boss and miniboss. They will probably take quite some time! Especially the boss has tons of animations. I will give my best and hopefully finish this by the end of the month!
As always thank you for reading, I see you in the next Devlog!

 

Devlog #30 | An Update​

We've been awkwardly quiet for a long time and we dont have a new update this time! This is just an update because we got NEWS!


Big News
In the last month I've been to busy to work on the game. I've mostly been occupied with moving into a much bigger place, well compared to the tiny old one. My friend called it a closet :O But that's the old one. Im in the new one now and the new one is amazing!

That's not the big news though. The big news is that I finally finished establishing my company "Flying Koi"! Yep we finally legit. Well establishing a company in Japan is weird and difficult and getting a visa with it is as well. It's so weird to explain what games are like, to people who never played games. Or what steam is. Well that stuff took tons of time out of my shedule. Moving, company establishment and visa application. But I'm done now!


Thats's all folks!
I wanted to give a quick heads up why there has been no news. Now you know

I started to work on the final Animation Update though! I've also finished the storyboard. I hope we can find an artist that wants to work on the story with us. So if you one, or know one message me anytime!

As always thank you for reading, I see you in the next Devlog!

 

Devlog #31 | Final Animation Update 0.14.0​

Between update 0.13.0 and this update 0.14.0 more than half a year has passed! But we had multiple updates inbetween, so you might already know some of the things that we worked on. In this update our focus was the art of the game. Mainly the animations and the overall design of the art.
If you prefer a video version of this you should check out this youtube video.

Animation Workflows are hard
When I learned how importing 2D sprite animations in Unity works, I didn't understand. It is such a slow process in which people do everything manually. There is so much room for mistakes! I didn't want that so I created our own workflow. There is a Unity Editor extension for Aseprite files. The extension takes the file, and reads out of it. It automatically creates all the animation clips and puts them into an Animator which it creates as well. It's beautiful. It saves time. It ... didn't work for us since we use Adobe Animate. So I had to copy their homework real quick and rewrite some stuff. Since I've never done Unity Editor stuff I made tons of mistakes and it took quite some iterations to get it right.
But now the the workflow we created is done! We used it extensively. It still has some flaws which I want to fix for future projects, but for this project its working out well.

I love Animations
Like I really love them a lot. BUT they take a lot of time to make. Since we got tons of animations for this game to do, we needed a super simple design. Most things are geometric shapes with some simple weapon. No hands. No arms. With this simple design we get away with just rotating, moving and squash and stretching the shapes. Well ... mostly. Here and there we do more but that doesn't happen to often. This way we kept animation production times short and focused on making the animations good instead of complex.
This was also a gameplay design decision. There is so much going on on screen at the same time. We had to keep the art design simple or else it's to difficult to tell which enemy is which enemy and what enemy is doing what. That's the reason why no enemy has an idle animation. We tried it but it always took to much attention away. When an enemy is animated, it either is attacking or recovering from an attack. If an enemy is bright, it either is dangerous because it is or will attack. Simple.
If you want to see all the animations we made, you can check out the game or the video devlog. Meanwhile here is a list of all the things we designed and created their animations for:
The Player, All the Enemies (Swordsman, Sniper, Wolf, Spearmen, Knight, Shotgun, Loot Cockroach, Big Wolf, Spearmen Eggs, Boss Raijin and his Generator), Electric Gate and the Projectiles (Player, Enemies, Boss). Yeah that's more than 15 things we animated. Each having at least two animations. The boss and player have more than 10 each. So yeah, we made a S*** ton of animations! But with the right design decision we didn't take to long to make all this art.

The Design
Making all these enemies was difficult! They had to be designed in a way that makes them easy to distinguish and yet simple. We made everything that is safe round. The gold coins, shield, loot cockroach and you are all round. In contrast to that everything dangerous is not round. Enemies that attack in close combat are squares and green. Ranged enemies are pentagons and magenta. The Wolf and Big Wolf are triangles and blue. The Spearmen is a 45 degree rotated square with his weapon at it's front. Liz call's it Unicorn because ... because it kinda is one. All these enemies are also distinguished in size and their weapon. While the Swordsman has the same shape and color as the Knight, the knight is way bigger than the swordsman. Also the weapon of the knight is gigantic and looks different from the swordsmans sword.

Special Effects
We remade the explosion animation but realized that it just doesn't fit the style of the game anymore. So we made it into a particle Effect. We decided to always make things like this particle effects. Our animations are simple and clean while our particle effects are more complex. Since player's see the explosion so often, we felt that having it be the same everytime is boring.
We worked over the dust particle effect. It's subtle and gives the background something. It used to be simple grey circles which looked boring. We turned it into red squares shaped fireflies. They glow a bit here and there and look really pretty.
Also we made tons of particle effects for attacks. For instance some boss attacks have no animation and instead just some particle effects. The Electric gate also uses particle effects. We took most of them from an Asset I bought a while back and changed them until they fit our style more. In the future we will work over them with the "All in 1 VFX" Asset we just bought.

Glow
For effects like the glow we use the "All in 1 Shader" Asset. It's amazing and allows us to use tons of shader effects, quickly create new materials and more. It's super easy to use. On runtime we change the glow value of the boss and the player, depending on their state. If they are attacking they glow, if not they don't. Inbetween the two states we lerp the glow amount to slowly fade in and out. Simple. I only came up with this way recently though. Before I took their emission map and changed the glow amounts in it manually. Which took a lot of time. Changing the spritesheet meant I hade to redo the emission map as well. Enemies still use this since I won't change their sprite sheet.

Balancing
We haven't yet taken time to balance things out. Here and there we always wanted to tweek some things and make it all make sense. But I never took a deep dive into it. This update I took some time for the damage and health stats of everything. Overall they look fine, I tweeked some a little bit here and there. For instance the dragon strike attack gives the player huge mobility but it had the same damage as Tatsumaki, which doesn't give you mobility. That didn't really make sense anymore so I changed it.
The big problem I need to tackle in future updates are the items though. I gave to many of them a percentage buff. If you stack these the buff becomes gigantic. Which I thought might either be fun or broken. Well ... I now know it's broken. Items and the Head Collection buffs I will rework in the future but for now, most stuff is well balanced.

Next up
Balancing will be a lot of work but I won't dedicate a whole update for it. I will just sneak in changed here and there. We will dedicate a whole update to effects though as they will take a lot of time and doing them in a bulk seems the best to me. But before all that we will work more on art. The hubworld is still lifeless and boring. It's mostly static stuff so we will be able to go over all this fast. But look forward to the hubworld getting a new look and more clear level design!

Thats's all folks!
As always thank you for reading, I see you in the next Devlog!

 

Devlog #32 | Early Alpha Update​

Art
We worked over the art and we did ... I forgot. But I remember we gave the background a pattern. After that, we worked on the UI! That one is more recent so I remember it a lot.

Liz created the layout and I put it into Unity. Here is a image of how it now looks



Anyways the hype is now on the side like a volume bar. Which it kinda will be since the audience will have sound effects. The volume of them will be influenced by the hype. So it fits perfectly.

Then we got the health, which we now use hearts for. The hearts fill up from down to the top. So basically it's the same but it looks a lot better. The blue box that the hearts are inside expands each time you get more hearts. At the top right is the gold you have also in a box.

And at the right side are all the items you bought, shown as icons. And you guessed it, also in a box. This way you have all the UI around you. The most important stuff is on the top left. While the less important stuff is on the right.

When a boss or miniboss appears the bottom shows their health as a bar. Kind of like before. Left from the bar is a little icon, showing the enemy that this health belongs to. Also around the icon is a hexagon. It looks cool but also serves the porpuse to show how many phases the boss has. So the first boss's second phase starts, when his hp drops to 0. It's refilled and phase 2 starts. The inner hexagon is now faded out to indicate phase 1 being done.


Music
The most recent thing we did was to work over the music. We have been experimenting with it for quite some time now to figure out how the music can be changed dynamically to reflect the intensity of the game. Mainly the hype ressource, as it represents how hyped up the crowd is. That is really important but also very difficult. But FMOD is great and has many features we can use to do the things we want to do.

The system we created looks like this: left to right we have different music parts. We have a traveling and combat part. When you enter a bubble with enemies in it, the combat music starts. When the fight is over, the traveling music starts. We just jump between the sections back and forth. For music progression porpuse we have multiple traveling and combat sections. The further in the level you get, the more the music progresses.



During the combat the hype can change up and down. Whenever it does that, new music parts come in or out. These are vertical. So the same music for traveling, has multiple tracks. Each track has some instruments in it.

Basically imagine some song you like. Now strip away some of the instruments and the vocals. Now imagine playing a game and when you do good, more and more instruments come in. The situtation gets really tense all of a sudden the vocals kick in. It's so good when done well!

Devil may cry does this with when you get high combos. They make the song more hyped up by changing the section in the song. In our case it needs to be more dynamic as this happens all the time. So we dont change sections, instead we put tracks in and out.

It took us some time to get to the current version we got, but we are still experimenting with some stuff. It's a really difficult thing to do.


Combos
I remade stab and stab lunge. Before this update stab was a chargeable attack. Really heavy hitting. If you only press the button for a little bit, you would do a quick stab lunge. This attack moves you forward quite a bit. Now you always do stab lunge the first time you press the button. That feels better as it is more responsive.

But I didn't end there. Oh no no no no. I created something like combos with minimal effort. Normally when you press the swing button you do swing one, then swing two and then swing three. Simple and mindless spamming. After swing one or swing two, you always been able to do a stab lunge. Now that wasn't really interesting until ...

Until I decided to do something funky. Now you can do stab lunge from idle, or after swing one or swing two. Swing three is the end of a combo. The game changer is that after stab lunge you can do swing one again. Meaning you can keep the combo going. Now on paper that doesnt sound like that much BUT ITS FREAKIGN HUGE. Why? Because swing 3 has a big recovery while Stab lunge's can be skipped.

So if you do this: swing 1 -> swing 2 -> stab lunge -> swing 1 -> swing 2 -> swing 3 then you have no recovery until swing 3. The damage you deal is so much more and it feels so satisfying to combo the S*** out of fat tanky enemies. It's so good.

"But but but ... what happened to Stab?", you might ask. Well well well, during a combo you can only do stab lunge once. Else you would spamm that harder than square when Kratos was punching Hercules. It would take the skills out of the combo.

So the second time you do stab lunge during a combo, it's a stab instead. Stab feels so much like a finisher ability and now I can make it really strong as it's a lot harder to pull off. Stab lunge always moves you forward so setting it up for a stab afterwards is super difficult but super satisfying. I wanna do more in the future with the combos but that's it for now.

It's really interesting how just changing the transitions a little bit made the fighting a lot more interesting, challenging and fun.


Thats all folks
Thank you all for reading! Let me know what you think about the new combos.

If you wanna give the game a try, here is a link: https://missingthemoon.itch.io/saikyou
See you guys around o/

 

Wrist pain and long breaks​

I've been making games for 8 years now and in the last 3 years, I finally could go full time. No more responsibilities. No university. Nothing. Just me, sitting in my room all day making video games. Perfect. Now we all need to take breaks at one point though. And I totally did take breaks! Like sometimes. A little bit. Un Unless I worked during my days off ... ehm the point is my body didnt like that.

I had some minor wrist injuries in the last 3 years every now and then but this time was different. My wrist hurt and lost a lot of its mobility. While I technically coulda still worked, even I had to admit that this is not good. So I took tons off days off to let my wrist rest. It healed. But as soon as I worked again the pain would come back. So I realized something fundamental had to change!


I started learning about all the causes of my problem. For instance my keyboard, like a lot of keyboards made my wrist rotate which strains it. To fix that and more I bought a super expensive keyboard that promises to fix all my problems. It keeps the wrist straight and lets the fingers sit on the keys in a relaxed position. The pinky doesnt do all the heavy lifting. Instead the thumbs push backspace, space, delete, enter and so on. The layout is customizable. I learned about ergonomic keyboards from a video from mayuko which you should definetly check out.
On top of that I bought this orbital that lets you put any shortcuts on it. These two definetly took me some time to get used to. But they are worth it and definetly fixed a lot of my problems. Here is a link to the keyboard and the orbital

Here is a link to the keyboard and to the orbital


But those alone didnt fix everything. I learned countless things that I should avoid like bending my wrist to type like the weirdo that I was, sleep posture, how to exercise my wrist to make it stronger (Play piano), how to stretch it out, how to rest it, when to cool it and how to just sleep in the middle of the day to let it rest as often and as much as possible. Essentially for 3 months I learned stuff about my wrist, applied it, sleept and repeated.

This was a long and painful time since I constantly wanted to work because I love my job, I also felt like I should work but I KNEW that I needed to rest. These conflicting feelings killed me and sleeping was the best cure somehow. That, time with my friends and sunshine.

I felt a lot better this month since I was finally able to work again. I started with an hour a day and gradually increased the time. Now I am at six hours a day, five days a week. I want to do more but I have to give it some time. The pain still comes back sometimes. Its less painful everytime and heals faster and faster though. So I am now all good as long as I keep up all the resting, cooling, stretching, training ... yeah its kinda like a second job.


I beat my wrist pain by detecting all the bad habits I had. Sleeping on my arm, typing weird, bad posture due to my keyboard, and tons tons more. Then I worked on changing them. This was insanely difficult but there was no other way.
The easy thing was to buy better equipment which is more ergonomic. For instance having lots of shortcuts on the orbital isn't necessary. It does speed up stuff a bit but mainly it changes my wrist position every now and then. Not letting your body be in the same position is key. No matter the position your body just cant stay in it forever.
Now if you take one thing away from this, change your posture often! Just stand up every 30m for 1 to 5 minutes. Go stretch a bit. Get some water. Do the dishes. It can be really easy to have an excuse for standing up and taking a break. That and rest when you need it. Its important!
Just think about it like this: a part of work is to rest so you can work again. If your body breaks from working to much, you didn't do your job right.

Did you ever struggle with an injury that took you away from work and if so, what did you do?


All this is the reason why I haven't uploaded anything recently and why there has been no updates on our game. After this much time away from making games I am highly motivation though! Thats another reason why we are making an entire game in September. If you want to know more about that project check out this video right here:

That's all, I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace