What has been going on?

A lot of things.

A number of these posts have ended getting published together for a few reasons, but development has progressed. Unfortunately there has not been a massive amount to show in the intervening time, it was mostly rewriting sections to use the new memory systems, fixing issues, and starting working on the demo story.

So let's talk about that. Not the story, but the demo.

I've been saying that I have been wanting to make a metroidvania for a while, and I do still intend for that to be what the game is, at least in part. That's not what I'm making though.

The thing is, I don't really know what balance of things I want the game to be at this point. Metroidvania is a bit difficult to reconcile with the space station/space ship idea. I have some ideas, but implementing anything that makes sense, expecially on the Jaguar where I'm writing everything from scratch, seemed like a fairly tall order. I know I want story though, and I like adventure games. I don't have to have a polished platforming system for that. I don't have to figure out how to shoehorn a combat system into a universe that hasn't had any on-screen personal combat to this point. I could start by implementing some of the basics I would use, and get a demo.

So that's what this is. It takes place part way through the planned story, when the player has already met all of the crew (the intention is to use crew as some of the Metroidvania unlocks, so you build the crew up as you go) It is a simple short event, with some narrative, dialogue, a very short and straightforward adventure game style puzzle, and that's it. Probably no more than five minutes of gameplay, and that is if you're reading all of the available dialogue slowly. It is not necessarily intended to be a section of the game, as much as proving out some of the systems.

After this demo is done, I want to do a similar one showing some combat, perhaps boarding an enemy ship, and fighting their crew. For that I definitely need to rewrite the physics (currently, if you bang your head on anything, you snap on top of it) and obviously work out a combat system. I will be grilling Helge to see if there is any reference in any combat in canon lore that I could take some inspiration from. While this may be a separate demo mode, in the game itself, it is intended that these are not independent systems, and you will change between these fluidly.

There is also the plan for a spaceship shmup mode, where the player can pilot the ship against oncoming enemy ships. Implementation of this mode is probably a bit easier than the rest, but I have no experience with making this fun at all, so this scares me, and I don't have any assets for this yet, so that will come later.

How far have I got with the adventure demo? Quite far actually.

I have a story system, which acts as the script for what is happening, who goes where, and says what. There is a dialogue system, although currently the only branching dialogue is done by the player choosing to talk to one character over another. I have NPC animations. I have points of interest that the player can interact with. I have music. Pretty much the only actual feature that I'd need to complete the demo is the index the images, so that I can do full screen effects by palette swapping. I need a considerable amount more content - sprites to flesh out all of the rooms, character animations, sound effects, and then scripting the remainder of the scene, but I'm fairly confident that, at this point, the majority of the features are implemented.

So, what's next? Well, the image indexing for one, and adding more content of course.

In terms of posts, I have a few things to talk about optimisations, plus some waffling about the dialogue system. We'll see what I feel like talking about next.