Beta build v0.8.5x2 - Level 3 and more

FINALLY some new level content after way too long of only having 2 levels. Intractable doors have been added which has allowed me to take advantage of game space in a new way and add subsections to levels, so I've also gone and expanded levels 1 and 2 - each are around 30-40% larger than before. Meanwhile, level 3 is bigger than both level 1 and 2 combined. I've got some more to say about level 3 and its design, but I've got some important things to talk about first.

Recently I came across a website while doing some analytics for my game that was promoting sharing pirated versions of games for free, Project GLUTT included. I'm well aware this isn't an uncommon thing, so it wasn't a huge surprise to me. There's not a lot that I can do right now to prevent it without creating custom code for anti piracy purposes, and that's a difficult and lengthy process that I'd rather spend developing the rest of the game. Really though, what bothered me the most about seeing this was that the person who shared one of the recent pirated Patreon copies of my game included a comment saying that they hoped I saw my game was getting pirated, and that I "deserved it" for not creating new levels fast enough.

For those of you who don't know, making this game is my entire career right now. This is not some side project I'm just cashing in on monthly donations for. I keep my Patreon earnings public to be transparent with people. I don't know what the cost of living is like for most of you, but in my country, rent alone is more than HALF my entire income. Food makes up another 30% of my expenses, and then I have electric, gas, and internet to pay too. I need to be able to afford gasoline for my car as well, which also needs occasional service. And I'm currently in year 3 of paying of medical debt that my health insurance won't cover. There are a hundred other smaller expenses I have as well, but these are just the most essential ones and the ones I have to pay every month. Very luckily, I don't have to make any payments on my student debt right now, but I don't know how long that will last with new policy changes. Despite that, I currently have to work extra part time jobs in order to have enough money to not be evicted or starving or have my utilities shut off. Even so, I still get a minimum of 6 hours of work daily exclusively on Project GLUTT. Last week as I had a little more time than normal, I actually worked closer to 10 hours daily in effort to make up for lost time.

What I'm trying to get at here is that, as I know most of you have already heard plenty, game development takes time. I do not nearly have the funds to hire other people to help yet. I've been very fortunate to get some help from artists with some of the enemies, but they only have so much free time to assist as well. I'm still spending more time myself working on Project GLUTT than anything else I do, and it's exhausting to maintain, especially when it would be easier to use my degree to get myself a job that lets me breathe and have free time and afford to comfortably pay bills. I know not all updates I release will have big new content like new enemies and levels, but I have to still have some order to which I develop things, or I only compound the work I have to do later in development. I had thought that even when there's not a lot of new flashy things in an update, people would still want to see what has been added, rather than have me just not release any update at all until I have something big and flashy to show off. And yes, sometimes the significant amount of content in an update is bug fixes, but that is quite legitimately the most essential step of all. I will NOT skip fixing bugs in favor of adding more content, because that will absolutely ruin the flow of development when I have to go back and fix literal thousands unfixed bugs that have now compounded to make brand new bugs with the new systems since they were built on broken systems. It will double the amount of development time the game takes at least, and also make it less playable in the meantime while bugs go unfixed.

I am really, really trying to get this game developed in a timely manner. I want it done as much as everyone who plays it. People who share pirated versions of the Patreon game are actively slowing development down when it means I receive less revenue for developing Project GLUTT, as I then have dedicate more time to finding work from other jobs just to pay my bills - and again of course, it keeps me further from being able to formally hire other people to help with development. It's also perhaps the one thing that seriously makes me consider quitting development - solo game development is already like trying to paddle a boat up a waterfall, and posts like the one made by the pirate feels like someone shooting holes in my boat.

I do try to be as fair as I possibly can with my Patreon. Besides having earnings public, I keep the beta builds on the lowest paid tier there is. I always post the game changelogs publicly in the Discord so EVERYONE can see exactly what content has been added in each update, and decide for themselves if they want to pay for the latest beta build. If you want a beta build one month but don't want the next, you can subscribe once to pick up the latest one (and all older ones) and immediately unsubscribe again until you see me post an update you're interested in paying for again.

I think most of the Patreon members I have stay regularly subscribed simply because they DO want to just support the game's continued development, and I am so incredibly grateful for that. When I see posts like the one sharing pirated copies of the game though, I worry that that sentiment is shared by multiple people. Game development is a very long and lengthy investment, and clear communication between developers and fans is necessary to maintain goodwill - I am not trying to scam anyone by working slow. It is an active detriment to my own life and lifestyle to work slow as well. I'm hoping this lengthy post will hope clear up any confusion about why some updates are lackluster in content, and why others frequently are postponed. If people WOULD prefer that I wait to release new beta builds until I have more substantial content developed for them, please let me know - I was just working under the assumption that people would be happy to see any progress, regardless of what that progress is.

Anyway! I've got a few things to say now that are actually about this latest build. First off, I've performed MASSIVE engine optimizations to the game, and it should now run MUCH smoother as it will disable performance-heavy instances (mainly like enemies) whenever they're far enough off-screen and not actively in pursuit of the player. The game might lag slightly when first loaded, as it takes a moment to calculate which enemies need to be deactivated, but this should last less than a second or two. My debugger was reporting the game was able to run the game at nearly 1,300 (simulated) FPS, compared to the ~200 it was getting prior, so the game should be running wildly better for anyone on older systems. Additionally, this makes the odds of a mobile port of the game running well skyrocket, so I might be able to look into that sooner than I thought.

Next, doors and key cards have been added. I made some 10+ types of doors - most of which aren't actively being used yet, but will be getting used in the future. I made sure to abuse the existence of doors in general now though with how it's let me add subsections to levels - as I mentioned above, levels 1 and 2 are significantly larger now, and level 3 dwarfs them both as it is MASSIVE in size.

There are several things to be said about how I developed level 3, so let me try and hit them in order:

• First, this is the first new level I've made since doing things like updating the physics, adding wall jumping, adding ledge climbing, and improving the enemy AI. I tried to especially take advantage of the wall jumping/ledge grabbing with this level, and have a few smaller sections that the enemy AI should be able to use to their advantage as well. Level 3 has a lot of bigger open areas for a lot of the platforming, but there are plenty of smaller enclosed spaces as well.

• Second, level 3 is hard. At least, a good bit more so than levels 1 and 2. I did try to make sure I was fair with its design - for example, I'm fairly certain it's possible to entirely beat level 3 without ever fully alerting a single enemy. That said, level 3 has I think 280 enemies in total - levels 1 and 2 had 70ish and 60ish, respectively. I did purposefully jump the difficulty up in this level a bit more than I would have if this was the ACTUAL third level players encounter in the full game, mainly because I'm trying to stress test things. I want to get feedback from you all about what you think about the harder sections so I have an idea of how to scale difficulty going further into the future. With level 3 being so large as well, it might be easy to get lost - I tried to make sure the overall design loops and connects well with itself so that it shouldn't be too hard to figure out where you need to go so long as you make sure to explore thoroughly. All 3 laser barriers need to be disabled to progress as usual, but two of them you can do in whichever order you prefer.

• Third, with how large level 3 is, I found myself needing to add a new function to the game camera - frequently there are drops and falls into deeper pits that the player might want (or not want) to fall down without seeing the bottom, so now while holding "V" the player can move the camera around a bit further from Mia to help look ahead and see what's what.

• Fourth, with key cards now being a thing, I've added functionality for enemies to carry items. So far these items are only key cards, and in level 3, there is actually only a single key card that's needed/is available. Enemies do not randomly carry these, they will be specifically assigned. To help show when an enemy is carrying an important item like this, they will have that same little sparkle that item pickups like health and ammo have shining at their hip. These items get dropped whenever the enemy hits 0 HP, whether that's through melee strikes or dealing digestion damage. Digestion does not need to be completed to get these items - you can simply regurgitate KO'd enemies and pickup whatever they were carrying (though you will need to fully regurgitate until empty).

I think that should cover the main things I have to say about this update - there are more changes, tweaks and fixes of course, which are all detailed in the changelog. Hopefully you all enjoy having a lot more actual game to play now - the Gene Editors should hopefully be starting to feel quite useful with the buffs they give for these larger, harder levels! As always, let me know any feedback you have :)