Holy cow. I haven't made a single blog post for this game, but a lot has happened since I started this project around February of 2023.

Originally this idea was for a game my team, The Cool Cats. We wanted to make a metroidvania inspired by the at the time newly released Metroid Dread, and bring in some factory construction sim elements as well. I wanted the movement to have similarities to super smash bros melee. To me, that game has the bast 2d platform movement ever. It is so kinesthetically satisfying. Things like jump squats, wavedash, wave land, jump canceling, auto cancelling, I love all those deep mechanics to cheat ways of moving and acting faster. Though I've still got a long way to go before this game even begins to approach that level of finesse. The HVEP was my way of getting ready to eventually be able to have an air dodge and wave dash. As of now, it can only provide a second jump in air and stronger grounded dash. We came up with a lot of ideas for the story and world, but development quickly entered limbo as we got caught up in other things and couldn't find time to keep working on it.

That was 2021 I think. Flash forward to 2023, my gf and I started playing the original final fantasy 7. I had played through it a few times before, but she had never seen it. While we progressed through the game I was getting inspired thinking about how simple its structure was that allowed it to deliver so much content. As characters move from screen to screen, I tried to think about how I might go about creating something that would emulate the game's persistent state and screens. I felt like digging up this old project and breathing new life into it, this starting out from this idea of having a room be predominantly static and load the data in to configure it to make it look like the session is continuing, then saving that data when you exit, before moving to the next room. Each room can have an exit that just tells it which room to load next and everything can be connected really simply. 

After that it just kept getting more and more momentum. I always loved ff7's materia system for power ups and magic. I loved how the game barely explained how it works, so most likely people playing would only see the basics, but it had a lot of depth and complexity that I only uncovered by scouring walkthroughs and wikis. I wanted to bring that into my game via modules and power baubles. but going beyond just doing typed damage, power baubles can have lots different, interesting effects. I also wanted them to work like risk of rain 2, where items have certain conditions to trigger such as on hit, or on kill, to proc the stack of them, and the more you have the higher multiplied the effect becomes.

Resident Evil 4 remake dropped and blew me away. As a forever fan of the series I had to play through it. We had recently done a replay of the original resident evil (the 2002 remake on gamecube, that is) and my primordial obsession with survival horror was rekindled, so the game obviously then had to morph yet another facet. The tone became darker, and I began to stage the game to have more labyrinthine, backtracking and puzzles like I love in those types of games.

I still plan to reach the factory sim gameplay eventually, and this update has the very beginings of it already! Machines and mechanisms depend on up to 3 different types of power: energy pressure and fluid (fluid and pressure being closely related but not always used / consumed the same) and I plan to have a system for dynamically building and configuring tubes, wires and machines to connect power and have it flow through the game world and interact with things in real time. This can be seen through the newly added Recharging Station, which functions effectively the same like dark souls bonfires and estus. This game's estus is a Nano Repair Module. It starts out with only 1 charge, but heals you a certain amount. Its an item in the inventory, with your number of charges being how many of the item you have. When the last one is consumed, its removed from your inventory and replaced with an empty one. If you take an empty one to a recharging station, if the station has enough electricity and fluid connected, it will recharge your nano module back up to full.

Though the connections between power consumers and power sources on screen are pretty modular, they are not persistent yet. So simply exiting a room after consuming power and returning right now will reset everything to how it was by default. The challenge right now is to make it persistent, and save it to the games data so it can all be reconfigured

One thing that slowed down development was the redesign of the main character. This update shows the new model, fully animated and put into the game. I think this look is a lot more iconic and detailed, and makes the character feel much closer to complete. However, I think a lot of the attacks still need some tweaking to make combat feel better. For example, the dash attack swing comes out after charging up, and most people end up running right into an enemy and getting hurt. Similarly, the arial attack hitbox is only in front of the sprite, and at the end of the animation, so there are frames during the swing with no hitbox and its difficult to time. The tricky thing is that right now, I can't control the movement of the hitbox to fit the animations, and this is one area where just doing the game as a 3D game with a 2D perspective might have made more sense. Since I have the model, I could have just parented the hitbox to the skeleton of the Blastcaster and it would have all lined up better. I'll think of something though...

With that completed, I also finished the first boss! I've never done a boss fight before in a game, so this was my first one, and I am really happy with how it came out so far, but I don't think many people are making it to that point that have tried yet hahaha. [EDIT: Apparently... I forgot to add a way to get the key that unlocks the door leading into the first boss. So it is literally not possible in this build. oops.] Defeating the boss will drop a grappling hook attachment for the Blastcaster, allowing the player to scale walls and make their way back up out of the pit, so this is pretty big for progression. I am not sure how much of the current map layout and order of powerups will be in the final, but for now I think its working out well for the early development phase.

Thanks for playing, and I hope you enjoy the game. If you have any questions, ideas, complaints or suggestions, I would love to hear them!