Deep Madness Dev Log — Week 5: A New Beginning
I’ll be honest. This past week was a fairly uneventful one. There aren’t many exciting new features to look at. That’s partially due to Thanksgiving, and partially due to some changes that are taking place regarding development. But I’ll explain afterwards. First I’ll show you what we’ve got for this week.
The first major addition to this week’s build of the game is graphical. As you can see above, the player has been replaced by a sprite. Instead of being a square, it’s now a character made in the general style of the original pokemon games. This is another piece of programmer art, as you can likely tell. It’s definitely not going to be in the final project. This also shows a key issue with the current rendering system. I can’t actually do transparency, which leads to that white space behind the character. It’s something to work out, but not a massive priority if I’m honest.
As for how I made the character, I took the scientist sprite from pokemon and messed with it a little bit. I’m really not an artist so there’s no fancy technique here.
The second addition is the non-player characters. In the first level, there are now two characters who run around in circles.
This isn’t that impressive, but it also means that I’ve got the beginnings of a system for handling multiple characters, or other entities, in the world. It’s an important system that’s going to be a part of dang near everything in the rest of the game.
Finally, we have an improvement to the editor. In the past, changing a tile meant clicking on it to cycle through each individual tile type one by one. It was a pretty lousy system, but I built it in a hurry. The new system allows you to bring up a menu by right clicking, then select a tile. Then you can paint that tile onto the map by holding down the left mouse button. It’s still a little rudimentary, but it’s way better now.
That’s it for this week. As I said, there’s not much to look at. With that finished, let’s talk about that announcement. In a sense, Deep Madness has been cancelled. The game’s designer found that he couldn’t make the time commitment required to work on the project, so he had to quit. Since “Deep Madness” was his idea, and not really a genre I’m comfortable with, I wouldn’t be able to design the game myself. As such, I’m going to be changing the direction of things a bit. For you, that doesn’t mean much. Everything that’s been done so far can be preserved, since the new game I have in mind will have these features too. But one thing that will change is the name of this game. I don’t really have a final production-worthy name in mind, so it’ll just be a project name for now. This will be the last devlog for Deep Madness, but next week will begin the devlogs for “Dog Eat Dog”. I know namechanges are a little bit confusing, so I’ll make sure to avoid them in the future. The game’s final name likely won’t be “Dog Eat Dog”, but it’s what we’ll refer to it during development.
If you’d like to play Deep Madness while it’s still at this early stage, or if you’d just like to support us as we make it, you can make a pledge at our patreon. Patrons receive the most recent version of the game whenever a new dev log is released, which is normally every week on Monday. Patrons can also gain access to the editor tools used to make the game.
