#colorfall

Nature at its best at Vermont

Day twenty-nine! We’re almost done! Have a prince!! :D

Licett Morillo shot by Rémi Lamandé

Okay, I think it’s about time I give a small update on what I’ve been doing the past few weeks, what I’m doing now, and what I plan to do in the coming months. I said on Twitter I would make a post about it like a month ago and then of course I completely forgot to actually do it. Anyway, on to the important stuff:

What I’ve been doing:

After the second demo for Knight & Witch back in September I was feeling burned out and frustrated with the game and with myself. I rushed the demo out, in a very buggy and incomplete state, and had to go back to fix it many times before people could actually get to the end. I didn’t have enough time before the deadline, so I skipped playtesting almost completely, which led to a huge number of bugs and just things not working properly.

Even after fixing (almost) everything wrong with the demo from a technical standpoint, the feedback I received was very mixed, and worst of all, I agreed with it completely. Controlling the characters feels clunky and slow; attacks (especially the Witch’s spells) aren’t fun to perform; putting lots of enemies everywhere is not good; a certain puzzle can soft-lock the game if you leave the other character behind; ironically, leaving a character behind makes the game easier because you can stop worrying about them running into traps or getting killed; at the same time, the character you left behind might get attacked while off-screen... The list goes on (and on) but you get the idea.

So anyway, the rush for the demo didn’t pay off and I was feeling down. I needed a break, and I wanted to pursue other projects to kind of relax and take my mind off of it for a while. 

So I decided to pick and old project of mine back up: if you’ve been following me for a long time you might remember ColorFall, a mobile game I was working on around 2 years ago. Back then I was close to done but I stopped right before publishing (I’m not completely sure why, maybe I was just bored with it). Anyway, with the programming skills I acquired during this time, I managed to do some major upgrades to ColorFall, starting from refactoring the whole code base to be more efficient, performant and extensible. From there, I went ahead and added some new gameplay features such as special ball types, each with its own effect, implemented online leaderboards and greatly improved the UI design to feel more responsive and ‘juicy’. At this point the game was (and still is) ready to be published, both on PC and Android. The only thing still missing are the sound effects, which I’m waiting for from the same person who I commissioned for the music.

What I’m doing now:

As you can probably guess, working on ColorFall wasn’t really hard or taxing, and it was actually refreshing to get into a project where I could make quick and steady progress, something I had been missing for a while. So in the mean time, I also spent time thinking and thinking and thinking about how to fix the gameplay for Knight & Witch, how to make the combat deeper and more engaging, and just dumping every idea I had regarding the game on a paper notebook I have just for this purpose. Recently, after releasing a game for agdg’s Halloween Jam (SpooQuest), I finally decided to go back and resume work on K&W. Among my priorities, I wanted to finally let the Knight use his shield to guard himself and the Witch from enemy attacks. I don’t have much to show, and in the last few days I’ve been busy with other things so progress is slow, but I think I’m starting to see the path in front of me again.

Also in the last few months I’ve been coming back time and time again to the idea of asking for help to a programmer. But this time it’s different (sort of): now I’m not as non-confident in my coding skills as I used to be. I think I can code all the features I need for my game. However the thing is, I also want to work on the art. So like, I can, and want to, do both things, but obviously this means the game will take a long time to complete. Having a programmer by my side would mean that while he’s coding, I can make models, thus ‘doubling’ the pace of progress. 

Anyway you know how it goes, it’s not easy for me to just leave the code-side to somebody else so for now I’m just going to keep working by myself, asking for help only when I need.

What I plan to do next:

Now, what will I be doing in the future? Well, obviously I will keep working on Knight & Witch. I have quite a lot of features planned that I couldn’t implement in the past either due to time constraints or due to my lack of knowledge/skill. I’m feeling slightly more confident now, and the feedback I’ve received with the last demo put me in the right direction I think. As I said above, progress is going slow and the fact that I will be doing it alone, at least in the foreseeable future, means things will take time. A lot of it. 

I remember posting my New Year’s Resolutions around a year ago, and I planned to make a ‘real’ game by myself and publish it by the end of 2018. Well, I guess that’s not going to happen. But it’s for the best. A lot of things happened, the scope of the game grew a whole bunch while I was developing it, and for several weeks I had other matters keeping me away from gamedev.

Now with the wall of text out of the way, I will make a follow-up post with images and videos of ColorFall and Knight & Witch to kind of show what changed since my last post here.