I am now a few weeks into the group project, and it is time for an update. Specifically, I will talk about news about the game, as well as the struggles of coordinating a team (even a team of just four people).
Devlog
Starting with updates about the game. Being about two weeks into development, I would say that progress is going about as expected. Learning a new game engine is of course a pretty big task, but with the help of Google this didn't turn out to be a big problem.
The game's main mechanic is the use of abilities. These are rather quick to implement, once the ground work has been laid. As of right now, there are 12 abilities, with hopefully more to come.
I also worked on resolution scaling, which turned out to be way easier than explexted. Just changing the window size and setting the scaling mode to 2D was all that was needed for it to work. I did also have to adjust the values of all abilities, but that didn't take longer than 10 minutes, either.
Lastly, I got the games health display working. It may look very similar to Minecraft, and that's because it is very much inspired by it. There are full, half, empty, and locked hearts (not visible in this picture). I might talk more about the locked hearts in the future, but for now this will have to suffice.
Teamwork is hard
But not everything has been going this well. Especially the first few days we're incredibly hard. I am a perfectionist, so I wanted to ask my team what they thought about every single detail. The problem is that my team isn't exactly as enthusiastic as I am, so I only got a response after sending an angry message (To be fair, they were ignoring me).
We never asigned a project manager, so that role fell onto me, as I was the only one willing to step up to it. I don't like being manager, but someone has to do it, and if it there was no manager, there probably wouldn't be a lot of work being done.
But by now, the teamwork has inproved massively, and I am positive that it won't be a problem further into production.
The P in planning stands for pain
We had everything planned out perfectly.
OR SO WE THOUGHT
Turns out that having the level designer start after the gameplay is done doesn't actually work, because without any levels, how do you do enemy spawning? We only realized this once it became a problem, so for now I will just have to use white boxes to simulate an actual level and wait for the artist and level designer until I can implement the actual levels.
This is far from great, but I am hopeful that one or two levels will be done quickly, so I can start work with just a few levels, and implement the rest later. It also lead to me already getting behind schedule within the first days, causing not only a provisional extension of one week, but also zero testing being done. My workflow these past days was something along the lines of
Start work on new feature -> Does the game crash on startup? -> No? Perfect, to main it goes. -> Yes? Whelp, better abandon the feature before it takes too long.
Obviously I exaggerated a bit, but it isn't as far from the truth as I would have liked. As of writing, there are only four more days of development time planned for the basic gameplay loop, with a possible extension of 7 days. I will most definitely need those extra days, but I remain hopeful that I won't. Regardless, there is quite a bit more work to do before the game reaches a playable state.
By the next time I write a blog post, the game should be almost playable, with the only thing missing being more enemy types, more abilities, and a bit of polish.
I pray to the god of game dev that I can reach that goal, so I bid you goodbye for now.
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