03.06.2025. Devlog №10: A journey of a thousand miles begins with a thousand steps
Two months since the last devlog, eh? What have i even been up to? Well, i've been busy ASSEMBLIN'! I was busy trying to get the game to actually be playable. I am going to show you lots of screenshots this time, brace yourselves :3
A big chunk of the game's development time so far was dedicated to carefully creating basic systems that can be easily expanded later on - a sort of flexible foundation that is crucial for a sandbox game. But this month i had to get back to the world of tangible things and comb through a myriad of small solid tasks. These tasks were of two varieties:
1) Turning the loose heap of scenes into a game. Making a main menu, the settings screen, quickly adding a dialogue system so you can actually start the run from the hub...
There was a lot of this, but it really felt like a leap to go from something you can launch from the godot interface to a standalone exe file :3
2) Adding some meat! A good foundation is fun and all, but a roguelike needs to blow people's socks off with variety. Spells, items, room types - i have been adding them slowly over time, but now i dedicated some time to give the gameplay some love and add a whole bunch more.
The game is technically playable now! It sucks bad though, because i still need to polish it a lot before i can even have some friends test it out.
Oh? Oh what is that? What was all of that stuff in the lastt screenshot??? did you see that?
YEP! Time for the killer feature >:3
The game will be about inspecting dungeons, not just exploring them! The idea of a sort of OSHA that pesters wizards with absurd safety guidelines is not entirely new. But it's a natural fit for the gameplay i am striving for - a perfect incentive for the player to go deeper into the dungeon, to explore all of it. Really, i just want to make a funny roguelike with lots of sandbox elements in it, and having the dungeons be imperfect will add to the fun. For example, the rulebook states that all the potions must be labelled, and who's going to suffer if they are not? The adventurers! Like you! (well, you're actally an inspector, but shh, you're undercover).
The frameworks for spells and items are proving themselves nicely. The framework for rooms turned out to be a little too weak, so i will have to eventually reimagine it if i want the dungeons to be varied - but for now, the current one will do the trick.
Hopefully, by the end of June i'll have the first type of dungeon in a playable state, and all of the systems in place and integrated into the big picture we pretentious and overly optimistic game designers call the "gameplay loop". Then it'll officially be closed alpha. Generally, my current focus is on polishing things down to a finger-licking good experience, so my powerful playtesting peons (friends) will bring me new and exciting complaints and point out the imperfections i missed - not the imperfections i already knew about but forgot to tend to.
Phew! All in a good bimonth's work. I've actually been considering expanding the FEARLESSWITHFEATHERS media empire into the new and exciting horizon of video devlogs. They are all the craze right now! (me. i am the target audience. I listen to them when i wash my dishes). I can only assume 0-3 people are actually checking my devlogs here regularly, haha. But a video devlog? Why, it could reach dozens of people!
The simple truth is that even if you are considering yourself to be an ~artist~ who doesn't need ~popularity~ and just needs ~three freaks who feel strongly about what you make~, you have to ask yourself a question: how will your art reach these three freaks? They don't know about it. Marketing is important, because that's how you can actually show your art to the world! Some people don't know they like stuff you make until you show them what you make!
Besides, i really want to show people how to do devlogs well. I'm finding out this is my motivation in a lot of creative pursuits, haha. There's barely any actually interesting devlogs on youtube! They have little to no talk about game design, about curious technical solutions to weird problems. I'd love to try my hand at that! Except, h-haha, i've never edited videos before, and my game records very poorly on my PC. So we'll see...
Deltarune chapters 3 and 4 are releasing tomorrow, so i will take some time to play them instead of making my own game. I earned a break! You, too, earned a break! Happy summertime, don't forget to go for walks :3
