Summary:
In which a new project is introduced; and the course and state of said project is discussed in brief.
Greetings and salutations!
And welcome to the first dev-log entry for my new project:
Moons in Crystal
What is
Moons in Crystal?
In short, it's a fantasy top-down space-shooter metroidvania.
As this is a dev-log, I won't go into more detail here; for now, the first post in my
TIGSource thread should provide more information!
(I haven't yet set up a page on this site for the game. That will hopefully come in the not-too-distant future!)
Rather, this first dev-log entry will cover the game's progress thus far:
Moons in Crystal is my pivot-project: the project that replaces
A Door to the Mists as my main work.
In this, it has, I hope, the virtue of being quicker to make: with a lighter art-style and a (largely) top-down perspective, levels should, I think, take rather less work to construct. Further, I imagine that it will prove easier to market to a publisher: an action metroidvania is, after all, not an unfamiliar prospect.
But don't let this deceive you into thinking that I'm not passionate about the game! Indeed, I recall that this was a project that I wanted to make even before the cancellation of
A Door to the Mists, one that I'd had an itch to work on. I've simply started work in earnest sooner than I'd previously thought to do.
As to the course of the project thus far, it has changed somewhat already.
In some of its earliest forms, I envisaged the game as something like a half-roguelike: no metroidvania elements, and randomly generated--but without permadeath.
However, I think that I concluded that this demanded quite a lot of time and work: to make each run different, I would want an awful lot of moons, and quite a lot of weapons.
So I pared it down somewhat, and added a little: the game is now intended to have a non-random, more hand-designed game-world, with with some greater complexity added into its traversal and exploration via metroidvania upgrades.
So, how far into development is the project? The answer is: "Not very!"
A number of the base mechanics have been implemented--too many to comfortably list here in full, I feel! Suffice it to say that the player can move around, explore, shoot, collect, and even interact to a limited degree.
However, a number of other mechanics yet remain. Further, only a little content has yet been made.
That said, I do think that I have one of the smaller moons--the "crystal moon" largely done!
I'm not yet sure of what interval I'll take for these dev-logs--weekly? Fortnightly? Something else? We'll see!
That, then, is all for this post--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^
