Looks like we have reached this project's due date! That felt a lot faster than it actually was... I was hoping to make extra progress reports in between, however, as the deadline closed in, I sort of began panicking and focusing my time onto getting everything done at once. This is sort of my fault, though. I had wanted to fix up my sort of time management issues this time around, but sadly, nothing really came of that...
As the title mentions, this progress report will include, well, pretty much everything. Gameplay footage, anything I've had to remove (which is a lot...) etc.
REMOVALS
Like I previously mentioned, as the deadline approached closer and closer, a LOT of the things originally planned for this project had to unfortunately be cut. It sort of reduced the game into a less complex more traditional-platformer version of what it was meant to be. My friend was also unable to compose any more tracks (or sounds) for the project, and so I ended up reusing sound effects that they had previously made for REPAINTED, and in one particular screen, I had reused this one track from Deltarune composed by Toby Fox. The list of everything I had to scrap is as follows:
- Enemies
- Punching/headbutting
- Taking any semblance of damage
- Beginning cutscene
- Ending cutscene
- Level end state
- Every (new) sound effect in the game
- Main Menu track, Pause Menu track, ending jingle, end state track, credits track
- Proper level background
- Fixing the spaceship cutscene
Though I am disappointed that this much was removed, most of it was fairly unimportant. The game still ended up being playable, though a lot shorter than I had wanted.
Most of everything that I had began work on when actually making the game ended up being finished, though. I had planned to implement a little feature where the player would be knocked back if they ran fast enough into a wall, but that was a little buggy and I decided to just leave it before it caused any more delays.
GAMEPLAY
Since last progress report, I have been focusing my efforts into making the actual game. Priorities had greatly shifted and if I had wasted any more time, I might have been unable to even get this into a playable state. Right now, the game is basically finished, obviously without the addition of everything listed in the removal section, but it is playable from start to finish. I had wanted to polish it a little bit more, however, I'd likely get carried away and doing so would put me way past the deadline...
Regardless, here's a quick video showcasing the gameplay.
As a whole, I'm pretty proud with how this came out. Programming it ended up being a lot simpler than I had imagined. Admittedly, I did end up reusing a lot of code from REPAINTED, and I ended up borrowing some from others (more specifically, the ground-pound and rubble/sparkle code). I think I've learned a lot from this.
Ironically, though it's sort of... less finished than REPAINTED, it kind of feels more finished in a way. I think with less procrastination and with some of the polish in REPAINTED, this would have turned out amazing. I'll be releasing this alongside the evaluation.
SPRITEWORK
Alongside gameplay, I've also been working on plenty of sprites, primarily during the time that I'm at college. I've found MS Paint is actually pretty good to use for spritework. I'm very proud of a lot of these, especially the tilesets and, err, not so much the logo.
In the end, I think the project turned out okay. It could have been better, but really, I think my procrastination really brought it down. Next time, I'm hoping to make a simpler project, and also to finally focus on improving my procrastination and time management issues.