#gamedevving

When you're stuck creating games for long enough as a hobby you develop this weird ass quirk where you look at any game you have the faintest interest in and imagine a million ways you could improve upon it, even in ways that most players wouldn't notice, care about or even appreciate.

In the case of M1K specifically i have a LOT to say about the story or the gameplay, but the number one thing i'd have done to make it better, if i had any say in it, would have been to ditch the big ass lame multiverse cinematic mode in favour of a bunch of minor non-canon storylines that just take the piss at pre-existing lore.

Exhibit 1: a storyline where Quan Chi remembers everything about the past timeline for no reason other than to lament that in the world Liu Kang created the cuisine sucks, so he's using his past memories to create the tastiest dish the new world has ever seen, and he's dragging a cranky Shang Tsung around to help him.

The gameplay would have been centered around picking up the ingredients from the other main character's bodies, like a scale from Reptile here, a horn from Motaru there, Tanya's lesbian leather jeans that she wears off of work... the usual.

With new fight Shang Tsung grows increasingly mad because Quan Chi keeps casually dropping lore about how cool and successfull MK11 Shang Tsung is and how if they just joined forces they could easily kill Liu Kang, which can't happen in the new timeline because Quan Chi doesn't give a shit.

Hello to all, my friends! What you're reading here is my very first weekly devlog. Every sunday i'm gonna write up a couple paragraphs about the state of Trauma Pets, and maybe the state of my own feelings too if that's relevant enough and a potential source of comedy.

This one wasn't my most productive week, i'll have to admit. I was very busy editing a video that was posted the other day on my Youtube channel, and work was slightly more tiring than on my body and my soul than usual, but i still managed to get enough things done to consider myself satisfied.

First thing first, i've added yet another layer of visual variety among the randomized Trauma Pets, creating new body parts for vertical, horizontal and back finns, plus a couple other minor technical improvements.

I've also created a new type of room with all sorts of neat nonsense inside. It's not directly accessible in the main Hub through normal means, but its location is also not meant to be too cryptic, so i'm sure if you're nosy enough you'll get there.

Last but not least, is a minigame that's been taking me a lot more effort to implement than initially anticipated. It's not fully implemented yet, i'd say i'm at around 80% of its completion, but like it's often the case for these kinda things, that remaining 20% takes up way more time than anything that came before.

Trauma Pets was originally slated to come out on Steam on april 17th, but i moved that date to july 1st.

This game has been increasing in scope by the day, and to make sure that everything works as intended, is fun to play AND is understandable for the average player, becomes a harder task with every little detail i add. On one hand i'm really happy with how things are shaping up, on the other hand... golly do i need a massage and a glass of wine.

After a LOT of fiddling, my platformer was OKAY ENOUGH for playtesting, but its also incredibly broken. My playtester consisted of pictrable ( my online friend ) and the shame alone made me not ask anyone else.

since I had walked my players through the game, they knew what the objective was, whichw as to turn on the light swithc (which would not work, unless I played the game for whatever reason, but we later figured out was that you needed to be at a specific spot for it to work) and the enemy I had sent out for, whatever reason that i could not fathom, would ahve its hand run off screen instead of towards the player. terrible news to me.

My playtester enjoyed mostly the visual animations (which I did, undoubtedly, spent more time on than the actual gameplay). I also discovered that the playtesters would mostly fall off the platformer into an endless void, which isn't fun, but was very fun to pictrable because he would fall and break my spritesheet by spamming buttons. The controls for the character worked and so did the animations, but other than that, the core gameplay itself was not fun to my players. Some of the mechanics just do not work, saddening.

Pictrable reccomended me to add a little candle, as I explainied to him I wanted the whole area to be dark but I could not do that on gdeveloper. It would also teach the player to use the E key to interact with items, he also just said it'd be cute or whatever.

Overall, the player experience was just not fun, which is reasonable as I did spend more of my time on the animation portion of the game.