Indie Quest — Week 8; finally a demo!

This is the eighth entry in my devlog about my endeavor in making a game within 2 months (supposedly ) and releasing it as part of my course’s capstone. You can read the previous entry of the series below:

The team has been working hard this week to bring up the demo and finally we are able to release something that is playable (check the link at the end of the post). It is still buggy but more on that later.

Mood, feelings and motivation:

There weren’t many events that happened this week that would affect us negatively. Morale was high I believe since we’ve reached a milestone with a demo that translates everything we’ve had before but with polish added in (some of which we mentioned last post).

We are a team of 3 and almost all of us have other things to do to support our families, we have little time to work on the game. It is getting harder to balance things out with the amount of work needed. However while things are sometimes slow, they are progressing and that is the important part.

We are currently facing a few problems with Unity’s builds were a WebGL won’t build well but a Windows build would work flawlessly. At first we might have been doing something to break things on WebGL but it turned out not the case, WebGL is still buggy as it would seem. 
Due to that, we are focusing more on PC builds for tests and feedback. Once we reach a point where we have 85% of the features working as intended in game, we’ll come to a decision on which platforms to support.

Bugs, Design and Development:

It wasn’t easy building the demo and there has been many problems that rose at times where everything just looks perfect. To give an example, internally we are currently working on version 0.06 (the released demo is 0.03) — a lot has changed from 0.03 to 0.06. When I test the game inside Unity not a single problem occur, once I build it out and Serg tries it out, he reports weird bugs that don’t occur at all with me. Hunting down these aren’t an easy task.

But, fortunately @ Highsight’s Discord channel came to the rescue again. The community has rescued me multiple times and have helped me understand a lot of things; a special shout out and thanks to:
@ Highsight himself
@ Gamieon
@ HuntingtonGames
@ MrMadsDK
Seriously these guys, have helped me solve a lot of the issues I have come across and had me banging my head at walls!

What I have added to the game so far (this is referring to version 0.06):

• A new mouse cursor that appears and disappears in game a long with locking the cursor in game (it is a keyboard based game so far).
• The first special weapon that uses the player’s mana.
• Effects for the projectiles when thrown to give more dramatic effect.
• Rebuilt the first 2 levels and WIP on the third level to account for waves (as you’ll see in the demo, if you kill the first wave, it ends the level). The logic was there but I never used it.
• Pause menu works now if you press Esc.
• A loading screen at the beginning of the game with Kreed Games (the name I’ll release the game under).
• Chance of getting powerups from mobs has been reduced and now powerups actually increase your HP and Mana accordingly.
• Reworked the first 4 levels.
• Many bug and quirks have been fixed.

There are still a few bugs to iron out and a few problems to resolve; game development is famous for fixing one thing only to break 2 others. Our target is to release a polished demo sometime next week or the week after. But please don’t hold me to that as things might come up — I wish I was doing this full time so I can make more solid promises.

Art; Graphics and Eye Candy:

There hasn’t been much progress on art this week as I have been occupying Serg with testing the game. He is also currently working on the Ghost enemy and another level’s art.

However he managed to finish the castle’s entrance and once of the earliest places you’ll encounter in the game:

Audio; sounds and music:

Aleix has dazzled us yet again with a very cool boss track you can listen to here.

Progress Results:

At last, the section that I have been excited and looking forward to write about ever since 3 weeks ago. The demo!

There are currently a Mac version and a Windows version, you can download and play featuring 5 levels.

The controls are simply A and D for moving and space to launch the ball. There is a debug button “F” to skip a level but I am against using it as it might bug the game (but it could also resolve a bug with a level not loading properly).

We’d love to hear your feedback and your opinions it will greatly help us create a better game; you can help us by filling this small questionnaire. It won’t take more than 10 minutes maximum.

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