Pixelmusement Dev. Journal Entry 09 Last Updated:
March 31st, 2014

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Downloads
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Development Journal
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F.A.Q.
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01 - Concept to Public Alpha 02 - Fundamental Problems 03 - Weapons are the Key 04 - Now We're Getting Somewhere!
05 - Shoot The Walls! 06 - Candy-Coated Particles 07 - Game Design is Hard 08 - Game Design is STILL Hard
09 - New Name and Progress! 10 - Transparent Features
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Ivxscape --- Development Journal

09 - New Name and Progress!

What was once called Vectorzone, is now called...

Ivxscape Logo

Coming up with a new name following the release of "Vector" on Steam was the least of my worries. Much of the story I had behind the game heavily relied on the name, so changing the name meant I had to change the story, which meant I had to change the mechanics, which meant ridiculous amounts of work and new design stuff and frustration and lameness and... and... OK, I think I'm done there.

The point is: it's taken a lot of work to get everything reworked and I don't have the kind of time to work on this sort of stuff as I once did. All of my estimates in terms of how long it takes for me to make a game can just be thrown out the window at this point. To that end, I'm not going to be making any promises anymore in terms of how long it's going to take to get this game out. When the time is close, I'll be able to be more definite, but as it stands, any estimate I give would be a complete guess with no basis in fact. :P

Beyond that though, there's been a number of changes to how the game's going to work at a fundamental level, so let's talk about some of them. The first and biggest change of course being the name itself. "Ivxscape", typically pronounced IV-IX-SCAPE, is a shorthand word which stands for "Iridescent Vectorized Extensions Landscape" and is the name Humans have given the world which you are sucked into prior to starting the game. When the game was still called "Vectorzone", the goal of the game was to ultimately destroy the Vectorzone entirely so that it would stop damaging the world's networks. The goal of Ivxscape is simply to find a way out, but the end of the story is still very interesting in and of itself and doesn't simply amount to getting out... nor will I reveal if you ever actually DO make it out or not. ;)

In terms of gameplay, the crafting mechanic is gone... technically. In its place is an "extension" mechanic, which is where that part of the new name comes into play. Each program you equip onto your Vector Assault Crafts has slots for adding extensions, much like the sockets found on items in games like Torchlight and Diablo. The difference however is that each extension requires large quantities of two or more different kinds of resources and the effects can be extremely powerful. There's also a very large number of different kinds of extensions, though to install one, even if you have the resources necessary, requires you to also have the template for it, though each template can be used an infinite number of times.

Another big change is in the way you access sectors. Originally, there was a fixed number of sectors each time you played, accessed from a 16x16 grid. The new methodology is actually similar to a Minecraft mod called "Mystcraft". Throughout the Ivxscape you find these items called "Glyphs" which have a symbol of some sort on them much like a rune. You use glyphs to access new sectors and each glyph has a particular effect when used, altering the random generation of the resulting sector in some way. While you can use as many glyphs as you want at a time, you can't use the same glyph more than once in a single entry command and the more glyphs you use the more dangerous the enemies will be.

During the past four months between this development journal and the last there was actually a feature that was both added and axed from the design which I'm kinda sad I wasn't able to keep in without completely unbalancing the game, that feature being "farming". It was going to be possible to not only farm resources over a stretch of time by returning to previously-visited sectors later on, but you could form two farms right next to each other and the resources would mutate, producing other more interesting kinds of resources. I ultimately axed this new system though because it relied on there being a large quantity of different kinds of resources, and the present design relies on there being only a few different kinds of resources by comparison. (The farming-ready system had 144 different kinds of resources, the current design only has 16.)

However, beyond all that, much of what was planned before the name change is still in place. While I still have lots of design work to do, I'm confident that the current design is well balanced and simple to understand. (Or at least, will be once I have the in-game tutorial stuff ready.)

Thus, programming has resumed! The first Pre-Alpha for Ivxscape should be ready to go within a couple months, but again, I'm making no promises. There's lots of pre-game work to do in order to set up the new UI and get all the graphics prepped and everything, plus I've pretty much elected to start over from scratch, though I'm cutting and pasting code wherever I can to save myself some time. And yeah, I'm properly calling these first releases "Pre-Alphas" now, even though I still think the concept of an "alpha" being complete-enough-to-beat is ludicrous. But hey, that's just me. :B


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