Devlog #22 | Hubworld / Items / Progression

Let me start of with a god daaaaaaaaaaamm! This update took long. Between 0.11.0 and 0.12.0 more than a hundred days have passed! Yes this update is huge and took a while. The good news: we are almost done with all the programming and design stuff.

After this I will spend about a month to go over the player, boss fight and the levels. Especially the paths between the fights. After that we "just" have to do art, sound design, music and polish. Simple.

So what took 100 days to do?

I didn't realize how much work I will put into the Hubworld. The plan was to "just make some menu that functions as a hubworld". Simple!

Well it became a liiiiiittle bit more than that. The Hubworld consists of rooms or how I call them "bubbles". There are three shop bubbles. They let you put items in and out of your item pool. The items in the item pool appear in your run.

The Starting Item bubble lets you pick which item you start with. Starting items are money focused items.

The Head Collection bubbles shows you how many kills you got on any enemy that you've killed at least once.

I talk about Challenge bubbles later, but just know they are part of this hubworld too.

That't it? Tzz this isn't even my final paragraph yet!

There now is Progression! All the abilities people had were always meant to be given over time. It is overwhelming to start with every single ability and enemy the game has to offer. And that way you already have seen everything the game has to offer, which ... is boring as hell.

Items and Abilities are now unlocked for beating challenges and for leveling. Yes Another thing this update brings, "Player level".

You get xp for beating challenges and doing a run. With enough xp you level up. The levels unlock Items and Abilities. But there is more to this. The further your level goes the harder the game becomes. I just assume that at that certain level you are ready for this new enemy or new trap. This way the game stays fresh for longer and doesn't overwhelm you with all it's content.

In the future I want to add to this! I only thought of this yesterday so here is the idea. I want a skill tree. Meaning you level up like now but the reward would be a skill tree point instead. Same goes for challenges. Those points you can use to unlock items and abilities in the skill tree. Basically everything is the same BUT the skill tree subtracts me having to work on "what item do I give when" and adds YOU choosing "when to unlock what item". So my random guessing is gone and your interesting choice is added. That's the dream.

Save files are precious!

Now that there are all these items, abilites and achievements I need t save it all! I've never done this before so this was scary. I took the time I needed to do this properly and make sure your save files are never deleted unless you want that. I never heard of someone that went "oh this game deleted my save file, lets just start over". There is no room for messing up in this! Since it was my first time it was scary, but I believe I did a good job. Fingers crossed!

Soooo that's it?

Well ... as I started working on all this I remembered how I wanted to make Challenges. They are levels with one room. In it there are handcrafted waves which are strongly similar each time. That way you can plan and strategize how to beat each challenge. On the contrary the waves in runs are always different. In them you need to be flexible and react to the situation.

I realized that now, while I'm working on the hubworld, is the perfect time to work on this.

The challenges are interesting because they have special rules. I created 23 challenges. In those there are four types with unique rules. I talked in the last Devlog about them so go and check that out if you are interested and want to know more.

Between the challenges there are paths to get from one challenge to another. They have platforming in them. I also added platforming between the start and the first world. This way I teach the platforming mechanics of the game in an safe environment.

A relic of the past

This project has been going on for a year and a half. At this point I every now and then come across code I've made back then. Often I just think "I easily could do this better".

I came across one of those relics but this one was really bad. The shield had a cooldown. Because I thought thats a smart way to fix a problem. The problem being that after you stop shielding, you have a small time window in which you still block. Without a limitation you can just put the shield on and off and you will always parry any incoming attack.

Does a shield cooldown fix the problem? Yes. Is that they way you should do that? Absolutely freakin not ... AT ALL! It lead to people shielding and the shield didn't go off, they get hit, and then it goes on, they go "wtf I shielded! It's on too! I did shield!". Well they did, but it was on cooldown...

So I removed the cooldown. Instead there is a counter now. It's set to 0.3 when you stop shielding. It counts down while you are not shielding. If you block an attack while the counter is below 0.3 you parry, otherwise you block. This is to prevent spamming the button. The old parry logic "block in the last possible moment" is still a thing. Essentially parry now has a cooldown of 0.3, which starts when you stop blocking.

That's all folks!

This time there is so much I didn't talk about but this is already rather long. There is a lot of devlogs talking about some of the stuff and I stream the process, tweet about things. If you're interested make sure you follow me and stay up to date!See you guys in the next Devlog, have a great day!