And on remaking a movement engine + art.
Hi, welcome to my blog! I've never done anything like this before, and I have no experience with web design, so I used Zonelets to build the basic blog page... (it's actually super helpful. If you want to try blogging, hook it up to Neocities, I'm having a great time) if anything isn't working, that's why. Whoops.
I've never really done any longform text posts like this before, but I'm really excited to give it a go because I’m actually really good at talking about myself for extended periods of time. I hope to keep updating this, although there likely won’t be any sort of schedule. I bounce between projects, so you can’t keep up with one specific game here, and might even give some comic updates in here too whenever I start working on something like that.
I don't have any development updates today, I'm just doing commission work these days, but I just wanted to give a breakdown of my current plans for one project.
So back in December 2019, I started working on recreating a proof-of-concept I’d done a year prior called Onion Dungeon into a Gameboy Color style. I was titling it “catGBC” or “onionClassic” at the time.
It had a top-down 2D style jump system ala Link’s Awakening, and a Celeste-like dash. I was in high school at the time and then after that spent a lot of time putting effort into other things, so this was mostly a side project I’d pop into and mess with in short bursts. Time was mostly put into getting rooms and the camera system working, along with some basic proof-of-concept mechanics, as well as making movement feel okay.
The project mostly served as a fun way for me to throw in random mechanics I was interested in. I still do this occasionally, like when I added kickable Italian shells in. I’m mostly giving this background because a lot of readers didn’t follow me when I’d randomly spend a month posting an insane amount of GIFs of this project.
By late 2021 I wanted to have a project to share/release, and got inspired to assemble a lot of the stuff I’d tested out in the project as demonstrations (this is why I made the Halloween Demo). I changed the spin/dash move into a roll and a dive, and quickly cobbled together a story and dialog and character art and locations. Unlike in the work-in-progress build I’d been messing with for a while, nothing got coded in that didn’t end up in the game. There isn’t really any “cut content” for the Halloween Demo. I only had about a month to do it, since I wanted it out for Halloween, I had to cut a lot of corners and I made a lot of blunders. I repurposed a lot of mechanics into repainted versions, like the lightbulbs originally being heavy weights that you could pick up and throw at destructible objects. Pumpkins were jars, ghosts were basically rewritten spikes that you couldn’t jump over, et cetera. I feel weird about the project because it really turned out weird. I didn’t have much experience with level design, and didn’t have the time (or confidence) to ask friends to test for me. It had crazy difficulty curves! It’s really funny looking back at it!
It was kind of comically difficult in the final level, and the second level was really janky. Reasonably the difficulty by the end of the first level was already pretty crazy.
(It’s still playable @ https://shockpine.itch.io/spin-crypt)
(it released Halloween 2021)
I plan on reworking the entire thing from the “ground up.” I think the knowledge from doing this once already will make it a lot easier. It’ll also be a lot easier to not be working with jerry rigged together code from 4 years ago.
I’ve had an idea bouncing around to work on a slightly different concept with similar movement but less focus on the stuff that kind of felt like weaknesses.
My first sets of goals are to first redo the player and camera objects.
(Camera includes the basic room system, with support for variable room sizes. The biggest problem with my last iteration was scrolling between differently sized rooms but I can probably fix that.)
Included in the first step are also things integral to player movement like walls, pits, and checkpoints.
I also want to figure out a more solid/unique visual identity for the game, but that’s likely going to be when I don’t feel like programming, or after I’ve figured things out. I don’t want to fall into the pitfall of needing finished art to work with for programming (I do this a lot).
For new concepts/designs, I mostly just want to try focusing less on stretching a long level out around one single mechanic, and instead throw lots of concepts around and try making them work together. I'm really trying to let myself take more inspiration from other games' level designs.
And that's it! I already feel like I'm rambling a little too much. I don't really remember if I've ever publicly talked about why the Halloween Demo was flawed and my plans to mess with it. Originally I just wanted to redo the levels but the more I spent preparing for that the more issues popped up that I just wanted to fix outside level design.
Thank you so much for reading this post! I hope to post more updates here eventually. Writing longform is fun. Have a good Halloween! (if it's still Halloween.. I'm fiddling with HTML stuff at, like, 6PM PST)
