November 25th, 2013
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Dev. Journal Entry 09 Last Updated: November 25th, 2013 |
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Vectorzone --- Development Journal
It's been quite awhile since I last posted any info about Vectorzone. I'm doing so now because I feel like I'm making solid progress, though there's still lots of design work to do and re-programming to handle before another public alpha will be ready to go. This has also been a very busy year for me, what with selling my house, building a new computer, doing more ADG videos, starting up a YouTube channel (and dealing with all kinds of stress related to that), among a plethora of other things. However, I have indeed been working on Vectorzone the entire time. When I last talked about the game here on the site, I was up to my 12th design revision. I'm now on my 20th. That's right. I've redesigned the entire game from scratch 20 times now. A single complete design for a game of this scope takes me about 2 to 4 months to finish when I have a solid block of time to work on it. I've been working on the 20th design revision for about three weeks now, meaning it's had almost as much design time as my best revisions to date and so far it's turning out OK. To give you an idea of how much the game has changed, and how much has stayed the same, here's some details about what was changed between each revision, starting with the one represented in the last public alpha I released, Revision 9:
Revision 9: There's different kinds of sectors, arranged in a 16x16 grid that reveals itself as you clear them. Resources are represented by real-world names like Iron and Gold. You use resources to build new items for your VACs and by adding extra resources to the building process you can augment those items with new capabilities. Abandoned because the numbers weren't balancing out. Revision 10: Almost the exact same as Revision 9, but with different balancing between all the various elements of the game and a slightly different system for building items. Abandoned because the numbers weren't balancing out. Revision 11: Almost the exact same as Revision 10, but with all of the balancing details replaced with percentages of various "normal" values. Abandoned because the numbers weren't balancing out. Revision 12: Introduced various new game elements, removed the grid of sectors to visit in favour of a system for actually moulding the sectors you travel to using special items, as well as a brand new inventory system and a shop in an attempt to make the game more like a dungeon crawl. Abandoned because it was becoming far too large of a design for me to be able to handle solo. Revision 13: Barely lasted two days. An attempt to see if the game would work better without resources and the ability to build stuff; it didn't. Revision 14: Resources and building equipment was put back in, but resources no longer had real-world analogs and instead, take on the form of various vector shapes that come in multiple colours. This design actually came along really well but was ultimately abandoned because it was not a very user-friendly design, requiring players to do lots of math in their heads to figure out if they were doing something beneficial or not, beyond navigating a clunky and complex interface. Revision 15: Similar to Revision 14, but resources are used to infuse items with abilities rather than build them from scratch. Abandoned for the same reason as before: not user-friendly enough. Revision 16: Almost exactly the same as Revision 15, just with really minor changes that didn't amount to anything practical. Revision 17: Added some more story elements to the mix and came up with a much simpler system for allowing players to build new equipment while still having many of the intricacies of Revision 14. Basically, this was the same as Revision 14 but with a user-friendly design. Got very far with this revision too until I tried to put the numbers in place and I just couldn't get them to balance out no matter how hard I tried. Abandoning this revision was a very hard thing to do. Revision 18: This revision didn't get very far and mostly just consists of coming up with various items. Revision 19: I had a thought that maybe I should just abandon everything so far and try to make something in-tune with some of the Minecraft mods I'd been playing a bunch of. However, this idea rapidly became overly complicated and boring to play in my mind. Revision 20: This is where I'm at now. The resource system has been expanded and each now changes colour based on how many you use at a time, rather than coming in multiple colours. It's no longer possible to build items from scratch, but items found in the Vectorzone are procedurally generated and may have slots to insert resources into, providing effects in a similar (but not identical) way to the alchemy systems found in RPGs like Skyrim. The user interface is incredibly simplified, there's no complex numbers to worry about, and the balancing numbers, so far, are working out better than all previous attempts.
And thus, here we are. The funny thing is, many of the core ideas to the game are still in place despite all these rewrites. It's still a twin-stick shooter with an energy system that differentiates between energy you use (which recharges) and energy you lose (which doesn't), the story is almost identical to how it was back in Revision 9, many of the things introduced in Revision 12 are actually still present, including how the sectors you visit are generated, the 16 VACs you can pilot in the game haven't changed at all since the initial concept and the idea that you acquire them by defeating bosses that are made of the same code also hasn't changed. And I've been doing all of this while making a three-videos-a-month web series, which is a big part of the reason why it's taking so long to get anywhere. But, all that said, the last few designs have gone by relatively quickly and the amount of work the present design has gone through without going bust is very encouraging. I've been doing lots of work on the graphical design too, since I felt the graphical design I had in place for the public alpha here on the site wasn't really "vector"ish enough. The present graphical design is very much more in tune with the idea of vector-line graphics, although I don't have a practical example to show at the moment. The alpha available on here right now also doesn't reflect some of the bugs I've solved. The glow effect shader, which makes all the lines glow, has been perfected and looks almost exactly as I intended it to from day one! (Turns out gamma correction was the solution.) I've also solved the problem with the game toggling improper refresh rates on some systems when trying to run it full-screen, and I've also solved a bug that specifically happens when trying to run the game windowed on Windows 8. So yeah, even though it seems like there's been no progress, trust me, I've been working REALLY hard on this thing. There's been no noticeable progress because I've had to essentially redesign the game about a dozen times this year and continuing to code the game while still ironing out design issues isn't exactly a good idea, but I've at least been able to solve some of the more insidious issues that have cropped up since. The last thing to mention is that, because I'm doing public alpha releases, I'm considering adding sound effects much earlier than I normally would. I typically don't add sound to a game until it's close to done, since I feel a game should be as playable as possible without audio. However, I've obtained some tools which should make it easier to make sound effects on a whim so adding sounds ahead of time should be a much simpler thing than before... mind you, they're all gonna sound like they came from an Atari 2600, but then there's nothing wrong with that really. ;) |
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