Devlog No.036

Currently I'm just working through the monthly NPCs. The current one I am working on is the Saint NPC from Dec. I've already got her sprite made, just need to do her portrait and then I'll post her. Then I will do her animation which I'm just going to go ahead and do some BE for her. After that, I will be doing the snek a'garian lady. I already finished both Ridra the vampire and Mun the shrine guardian. Hopefully everyone enjoyed them!

Here's a little peek at the new NPC Towra


After I've finished the next two ladies though I'll be back to working on the next area. I already have an idea of what to do with it, just need to construct it. It'll mostly just be reusing assets that are already made, but I'll cook up a few new tiles. I'll also have a little bit more story and I want to add another minor quest potentially. I'm not sure if I will 100% be able to do it, but the next area might be just a little bit more open, kind of mixing things up a bit. I don't want to promise anything just yet, but it might be something nice and unique to have considering most of the game has been linear up to this point. Though I will say that it isn't going to be a modification to the main game. The regular progression of the game will remain semi-linear with the branching paths.

Consider it some experimenting and we'll see how everyone who plays it feels about it.

It should be notable that one of the reasons I haven't allowed players to go forward and back (screens) was that I was trying to set out to make the game more linear so that the player would always know where to go. In metroidvania type games that I have played, it's easy to stop playing for a few days, then come back and just not know what you are doing or where you are going. Not that you can't remedy this with a good quest journal, but I'm very much inexperienced and wanted to try my best to avoid that sort of trouble for my first game. Well... that and because of the transition system in my game, anytime you visit a new room, it gets reset. That means that enemies will reset along with golden candy, etc. Not that I couldn't design the maps to be played forward and back, just that it's a small detail to consider and how a player may be able to exploit it and also some enemy spawns are set up right at the end of a screen and I'd have to go back through all of the maps and double check them.

Which who knows? Maybe there will even be an upgrade at the end of the game that makes it so you do have full freedom to go forward and back. (But there are definitely some areas you are not going to be able to go back through like the boss areas.)

With that said, there have been requests for a map, a bestiary, and an item list. I'd like to add all three of these if possible, though I will say that the map and item list will be easier to implement than the bestiary. I may even experiment during this build and see if I can add a simple map for the next build. We'll see how that goes!

For now though, I don't really have too much else to report. I'm just going to continue working!