Game Update
I’m continuing to work through all the spell effects for each troop in the game and the momentum is building. We ran into a possible new problem when I found a healing AOE effect. I’m not sure if it’s functioning as intended and it’s likely that I may need to add more combat script functionality to make it work. It’s likely that if I have to do that it won’t be in this version of the game and it will have to wait for final release.
I’m excited to see what it’s going to be like to have all the new particle effects running at the same time. It might be a bit of a mess so we will see how it goes. It’s definitely different than your typical tactical RPG which waits for each attack in order to make it a spectacle. We built a spell effect for a punch attack which we purposefully made look less powerful. It might be pretty important to make some attacks more mundane. That’s the typical thing that’s done. We use comparisons to signal when something is stronger or weaker to give the player a sense of becoming more powerful.
Personal Update
Happy Mothers day to all the moms out there! 2020 was tough for everyone, and without the help of my Mom and Dad I would have had a hard time stabilizing to the place that I am now. I’ve always said that my Mom might be the only one that reads my blog entries. A bit of a joke, but it’s nice to know that Mom is always there.
The school year is coming to a close and that means that my kids will be going away for the summer. I really need to pick it up and get this thing on early access Steam. I still have a couple of items that are ahead of it but I won’t have much of an excuse not to finish this year. I’m pretty proud that I’ve come as far as I have mostly under my own power. Sometimes I look at products on the market and I’m amazed at some of the things that are honestly bad products, but somehow they still exist. I need to stop worrying so much about having an absolutely perfect product.
I’m really happy about my girlfriend right now. She recently drew an icon for the game, and I think she’s going to make that key art that I’ve been looking for since 2020 when I tried to initially launch. For the first time I don’t have to worry about the person I’m with. I can just focus on what I’m doing and they support me. She has her dreams too, and I hope I’m adding to her endeavors as well. She’s an amazing artist.
Game Development Insight
Feature creep is a real issue with game development no matter if you’re an indie or a triple A developer. Feature creep is when a developer keeps adding more features to a game, or plans far to many. I’ve seen this with released games that have to many mechanics. Sometimes less is more, meaning that having core mechanics that define your game are the most important thing. It’s all about what makes your game fun. That’s the question you need to ask yourself.
For me in Six Aspects I wanted the player to enjoy fast battles, leveling up, getting stronger, and building tactical squads of troops. Tooling up squads and spending time to let the player feel creative are important. I want to do all sorts of things with the combat like adding a pre-combat phase and character movement on the grid during combat. Those features don’t add enough to the basic game play to make it worth adding right now however. So they go on a features list for future iterations of the game, so I don’t lose those ideas.
Some of those ideas may never happen, but that’s alright as producing an actual playable game has to come first. It’s important to have pillars of development in place to focus. It’s likely that a lot of triple A games have had a major issue with feature creep at times. Of course some of that may also be due to corporate decisions being made without taking into account the state of the game. Expectations of players are a lot higher for triple A games as well.