Time moves unendingly on and on.

And the game development progresses.

The goal for this stage of game development was to produce a 'vertical slice', a short demo, containing as many of the game's features as possible, but minimal content, which can be polished to a degree where it can be shown off as a thing.

I am not there yet. Development is slow. In part this is by design, I am streaming the entire development, which means that, with distractions and limited time available, only a small amount of progress can realistically be made. However this choice was made in part as the act of streaming it helps with motivation. If I'd done it differently, the velocity would have been higher, but I'd have burnt out long before this.

The vertical slice was then decided to give me a shorter term goal, it was also something which would help me decide on game design decisions that had I could not make before actually implementing them. Have I finished it? Nope, not at all.

I have done one third of what I want to do. Kind of.

I have broken the game design into three parts. Action, Adventure, Shmup. I have been working on one of these, the adventure game section.

This is only in part because of my love of adventure games. I have a plan for this: Adventure game system to create basic gameplay, interaction etc, then extend that with combat and exploration for the Action game system, and finally reuse what I can if I still have energy to do the Shmup game. I would like to add spaceship combat in the shmup sections, but as it's a very different game style, it's very much a lower priority right now.

With the adventure game then, the idea was to pick a scene from the story of the game, and implement it as a short puzzle. The point was not to make a particularly difficult problem, but to have some mandatory narrative/exposition. This is not a pixel-hunting adventure game, or an inventory hunting one. You need to go to the right places, and talk to the right people. Hopefully it will get you to connect with the crew of your little ship.

At this point, the implementation of the adventure game portion is pretty much complete. The story for it is complete and implemented. There are some bugs, including sequence breaking ones, and some logical inconsistencies if you do things in a different order. There is also a CPU stall, at least one crash, and some graphical issues that need to be fixed. And it's missing content, half of the rooms aren't decorated, and most NPCs don't have a walk cycle.

Regardless, I have made the demo, as it stands, available for download now, just so people can see how it's coming together. Updates will continue. For the most part I'll be leaving the adventure game as it currently is for a time though.

Or, I probably will. I keep flip-flopping between what I want to do here. Part of me wants to work on the important code parts, which would now mean moving onto the action section, and part of me wants to just polish the adventure game until this bit is done.

The current plan is to pivot to the action part. This will be more Metroidvania than I've currently done. While not immediately important to the action part, I want these gameplay parts to have more exploration. So I want to work on stations. Stations should be made of rooms like ships, but should also be different configurations. This will mean I have to create a system to be able to stitch together station modules to have a semi-randomised layout, then I can work on improving the exploration/platforming mechanics, and add NPCs to interact with, before implementing combat.