Devlog 01 - Rough Beginnings

For the longest time, I've wanted to make a game. I grew up surrounded by games and consoles, and have been playing for almost 15 years. However, it wasn't until very recently that I made the decision to make a game.

In fact, the thing that caused me to start making games wasn't really a game itself, but rather somewhat started about 4 years ago, when I decided I wanted to do something creative with my life, and put out something that says "I made this". I started with writing, mostly just fanfics of shows I enjoyed at the time (and some I still do), but it never felt quite right, even when writing more original stories. The passion was there, but I couldn't find a way to express it.

Around this time, DDLC had just released and begun to explode in popularity, and from there I thought about visual novels, and maybe putting my writing into that, but at that point, I thought about taking it a step further: why not make a more developed game?

I downloaded some game engines and played around with them for a while, trying Gamemaker, Unity, Unreal, and even building my own from scratch. It was mostly just this, starting and stopping projects, jumping engine to engine, for about a year. The passion never quite left me, but I could never get a project off the ground or make a decision. I was also dealing with a full time job in the process which made things even more difficult.

And then COVID struck. Suddenly, I had nothing else to do but stay home. I managed to procratinate for a good 3-4 days, but eventually, I decided that I had to start something now and stick with it. I booted up Unity, created a list of things to do, and started working.

I decided that this was going to be a 2D game, though it admittedly took a lot of thought, and wanted to design something that captured an RPG feel, but in the form of a 2D shooter. JRPG's have always been one of my most beloved genres, after all.

And then I quit for 3 days.

The reason is that I struggled with the idea of RPG's in a 2D sidescroller, couldn't draw top down, and didn't want to do a 3D shooter in really any capacity. I also can't really draw, which was another downside to going 2D, and aren't proficent in pixel art by any means.

In the end, I decided to stick with 2D, thinking I didn't give the project a truly fair shot to get off the ground. I still dance back and forth with "what ifs" from time to time, but I think I'm sticking with this, and also posting this is kind of a point of no return.

I coded the movement and some basic shooting, and created an environment that I could run around in. At the time, everything was just square sprites, and kind of boring to look at, but I decided it worked pretty well.

I then moved into making some basic enemy functionality and stuck it on another square. All it could do at this point was literally just die to my gunfire, but it functioned.

From there, I decided I was tired of looking at squares and created some basic sprites, and from there I dug up Yuni, a character I created way back in October/November of 2019 for one of my game projects that I never even opened Unity to make, but always had her on the back burner as a sort of "if I ever do make a real game, I want to use this" thought (fun fact: for those who know me through Smash, my tag was created in reference to her). Her design had been inspired mostly by Madoka's Tomoe Mami, and her rifle was even rotoscoped from her musket, and I decided to play with her color scheme after playing through P5. 

I gave Yuni some animations and brought her into the game, among some other assets I'd drawn out but are currently unused. I also started work on other pieces like creating a smooth camera and developing the player movement further with things like variable jump height.

Then came the elephant in the room that I knew had to be addressed at some point. That being, the little box "enemy" sitting in the corner, being useless.

I started work on making the box move towards me, which resulted in him pushing me around and damaging me once per frame, but like most things I procrastinated it and instead created a basic enemy sprite that could be put into the game. I also developed my enemy functionality so I could throw together new ones on the fly by creating a script that just held parameters for the enemies that I could plug into a "brain" script for the enemy, and depending on what I wanted that enemy to do, could turn on and off certain functionality pretty easily. Things were looking good, if a bit buggy due to the fact that it didn't really fall down for some reason, but I decided that I would just figure out the issue, finish some more bits of functionality, and put out a build.

Unfortunately, it wasn't that simple.

I could get the enemy to fall down or move towards me, but not both. As well, I quickly realized that I drew my enemy too small, to the point that it sat between Yuni's hurtbox and the firing point from the gun, meaning the shots would never hit him, and because it kept moving towards me constantly and pushing against me, this was a problem. I also wanted to create a sort of consistent outline size among all my assets, so I didn't want to scale it up either.

The reason I couldn't do this with the square was because I wanted to tie the attack to an animation rather than creating an arbitrary countdown between attacks in my code, and creating an animation with a basic square that provided adequite feedback was going to be a surprising challenge.

So I scrapped the enemy, and now I was left with 4 platforms and a buggy enemy system. At this point, it was 4am the day before I wanted to release this build, and I knew getting enemies fully working would take at least a few days, but I couldn't just release a build without anything to shoot at either. So, I went to sleep frustrated

About 10 hours later, I had an idea. I created a circle sprite, gave it the very, very most basic enemy functionality I could with my current enemy script, called it a "Target", and put 4 or 5 in the little starting space I made for myself.

And as it turned out, they were fun to shoot. Then, it was a matter of developing my starting area, placing some targets, developing some more, placing more targets, messing around with platforms and space, placing a few more, until I had about 25 targets scattered through a decently large map.

Finally, as both a basic quality of life thing and a way to cross one last thing off my list before putting out this build, I created a long "death plane" on the bottom of the map. All this does is is reset the scene when I touch it, and as well, I now know for sure the death functionality on the player actually works.

Now, building and publishing the project. This proved...surprisingly challenging for a simple reason: My computer doesn't currently have a network card, and with my router too far away to connect physically, I had to find a way to get the files to somehwere I could publish them.

My first plan was to just do the reverse process of how I got my sprites onto my computer: instead of transferring from my phone to the computer, I transfer from my computer to my phone.

Denied.

Okay...my next plan was to find a USB-A to USB-A cable to transfer between my computer and my really old laptop.

No cable.

Spent a good 45 minutes scouring the house at 3AM for one of these cables, even considered burning a disc at one point, and then it struck me: portable USB's exist.

Found one less than a minute later, transferred to my laptop, and set up the page.

So, what's next? After these 2 weeks, I've decided to continue with this project as long as I possibly can. I also see it shaping more to look like a metroidvania than a shooter RPG, which is funny because I've never actually played a metroidvania.

For the enemies, I'm going to completely rework them. Melee based enemies don't make a whole lot of sense in a game focused around ranged combat, and I should be able to more easily reuse code and save time.

For the style, I want to think more about this tricolor aesthetic. Outside of Yuni, her gun, and the sky, I can never seem to find a way to incorporate that purple into sprites and designs.

For the core of the game itself, I want to give Yuni more mechanics, maybe a slide for movement or an ammo counter on her gun, or maybe something else entirely, but I'll need to think it over.

I'd appreciate any suggestions or feedback you can give, as well as any bugs you find.