Hello! I’m fedellen and welcome to the 5th entry of my Devlog series. We side tracked a bit this week looking for bugs and planning our next project while also doing some turkey related celebrations. Our main goal this week was to introduce Relics into the game but my priorities changed mainly towards some serious bug hunting. Also on the agenda was the continued development of suitable sound effects.
Sonar Ability Unlocks and Hunting Bugs
Early on in the week abonbon had the idea have all purchased Sonar Abilities be unlocked and be swapped out via the character menu. It’s a very convenient feature which lets you try out any ability from the vendor with the safety of switching back.
It seemed like an easy change but adding on to existing code in multiple places including the auto save system pushed quite a few bugs that I’ve still been hunting down. Much of my time developing this week was just reading code in search of some hidden bugs. I’ll often spam click all over my phone screen in an attempt to break the game or find text engine glitches. The main bug that escapes me right now is causing a fun effect so I’ve decided to put it to rest for now.
Planning Our Next Project
For weeks we’ve been throwing around different ideas for our next project. Ideas included a dungeon crawler, farming game, unicorn shooter, resuming Duck Guy, and even a little tactical OgreBattle64 / XCOM cross I’ve been thinking about. Some of our ideas have too large of a scope and my hope is to create many games and not get locked down into a long term project. This week we randomly decided on a unicorn themed side scrolling endless runner. Very simple mechanics to polish keeping the scope super small; not to mention bringing back some rainbows.
Going to be taking some different steps this time around including market research and also the creation of a game design document. I’ve downloaded a few of the top free endless runners and have been studying the different physics mechanics that are fun and theory-crafting how to improve them. We’re also trying to see the different methods they monetize and the different progression systems they use. Putting everything together into one document before we get started seems like it will help a lot. Trying to stay focused on finishing Sonar Smash but that didn’t stop me from prototyping a little scene with some seriously low effort programmer art D:
Next Time
Relics are pushed into next week and continue to be my main programming goal. They “should” be relatively easy to implement as I only intend to add Magnet Relic and a Revive Stone for now. Sound effects and overall audio balancing are also still on the agenda. We’re both very new to sound design and there are some cool sounds but we have a lot more work to do. In addition there are some more tweaks to be done on menus across the game and reworking the tutorial some more before beta..
Thanks for reading!
fedellen, Pixel Pajama Studios
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fedellen, Pixel Pajama Studios
o/