Happy Belated New Year!

Date: 2025-01-15

Hello, it's me again, Captain Zouveleki at speak, or write or whatever. Firstly happy holidays and whatnot, because yeah why not, it's already middle of the month, this year is going so quick!

So about what's going on, to be precise I've been working on different prototypes, seeing what catches more my attention. Lost Savior is there, still owing it a rewrite or a very good revision for enemies. It's what made me stop, besides some issues with room design that I need to address. So we'll talk a bit about that now that we're on it, and then I'll put a couple words for the other prototypes.

On Lost Savior, I'm kinda stuck due to two things, and also because work is taking a bit more of my attention, but I do have the time, just not the brain for now, ha!

The first thing is the enemies, as I mentioned. The issue is that the enemy behavior I wrote is very dumb. I wouldn't mind if it's flawed, because you don't want a perfect enemy that predicts every move. But you do want at least the illusion that they at least react to you. And my behavior is not even close to that, it's very very very dumb. So there's two options. To scrap and redo it, or to continue iterating over it. And I think I will do the first one. I just don't feel happy with it. However then I need to evaluate what's the current doing wrong, and make a plan for how to solve it. The logic is just very flawed, I was fine with doing a naïve approach, but it just resulted in very ultra dumb. Yes, words I do! I am aware at least that this is the first time I try to do any sort of more complex than a banana enemy behavior. RPG AI is far different since you have only a couple of "variables" to track, and for Gravedigger the mechanics were very strict, which made just simple chasers good enough. Maybe I should do them that way...

The second thing is the rooms. The thing is, for caverns, it's easy to surround inner rooms with walls, to kind of frame the action and pack things up. You can make the walls infinitely thick if you need. But there's a couple instances where I want to make delapidated buildings, and it makes kind of tricky to do these framings. Think about it this way. You enter a building, and the room is smaller than the screen. There's a lot of extra space around, and you kinda feel like the player can't focus, and can see two rooms ahead. So basically, I need to figure out a way to obscure what's outside of the room. But then I also need to stop what's outside of the room, and maybe even would be worth to disable the things obscured by vision. This means a lot of work of course and a bunch of edge cases that have left me under a bit of paralysis. But we'll see.

My main problem is that I don't have the time I'd like to tackle these issues, and when I do, I'm extremely tired and want to sleep all day. But from what I've been working on, I think maybe it's because it has the most shape that I feel more interested in this project.

Now talking about the prototypes...

Despite not having time, I still want to keep creatively active, so I have been experimenting with some ideas. So I've done a couple other prototypes, just to throw things and see what happens. This has some bad effects, as well, I make these things because I'm interested at them. But then I am now feeling like I should finish them all, and that really sucks! I didn't really want to overwork myself with 20 projects!

The plan should be then, design these things as small projects from the get-go, instead of making things I'm sure will turn into giant projects. Lunette Lander was one that was a success in that regard, since it's a very small, very dumb almost aimless maybe badly designed silly little game. It's technically finished and it's there.

But then I got some other stuff. Frozen Hope is a game that is big, and dangerous for that reason, I'm currently neglecting it and I'm not alone on it, so the more pressure I have to not leave it abandoned. I got a not-farming game that was inspired by Giftpia, which has some cool things done but no gameplay (or name). A TRPG, which is a bigger plan for smaller projects, which I'll say it's okay, but I feel that if I leave it for too long I'll lose it out of sight and will feel weird when coming back.

And then there's the elephant in the room, Drekirokr. I chip it from time to time but haven't been doing any big progress on it. I don't really have a lot to say. There's a couple problems that have bogged me down a bit. And of course the never ending amount of bugs, that I keep constantly fixing and missing lines or language mistakes I keep finding. And I'm not even counting the fact that my English is terrible and the whole English translation is a mistake.

I'm currently reworking parts of the story, just very unfocused. Many things I would love to pretty much rewrite from what it's done, but I'm basically stopping myself from doing so. I had restarted the game in Godot, but while that was a fun little thing, I decided to abort that, since the sink cost phallacy hit hard. I also don't hate the game as it is in RMXP. It's just that there's a copious amount of technical debt everywhere that always makes me feel tired.

Man this post is such a downer, I'm sorry lol.

Don't worry, I'll figure something out, this is wall of text! And you made it. So thanks for reading.

You read the entire thing, right?