Time Worked: ~5 hours, 30 minutes
Got sucked into some day job stuff today so didn't get quite as much time as I would have liked but it's fine. 5 hours is 5 hours.
Spent a lot of time on a little exploding people feature today. Basically I drew little chunks of the pixel dudes and made it where if they are hit by an explosive and die, they blow up into little pieces. Fun! I think it was a worthy thing to do, because I think one of the biggest things the game lacks is nice visuals. It does strike me how much better it looks now than it used to, I can't help but feel pleased looking at that improvement.
There are still a ton of things to do. I have set a goal for putting the game up on itch.io by the end of January, which is a solid move I think. I'll have to put a little more thought into it, because I'm not sure if there are like release day boosts on visibility in Itch (I think there are), but even if there are I don't know I care about that right now. I still need to do the very best with the itch release though and try to maintain a lively page right away. It would be an initial release of the game so I need to take it seriously.
I just need to start putting it out there and getting people to play it. I think when I released the last game on Itch it motivated me a lot. Anyway I have put a list together of things that need to be fixed before then and it is huge. A lot of it is just cleanup of stuff and bug fixes, but there are some major problems such as the troops you command being kind of boring in-game. You can just move them and that's basically it. They don't really respond that well to threats sometimes as well, like they will just ignore enemies. So yeah, they need to be made more interesting. I have a few ideas for that. The building system is also pretty dull right now. As you can see in the GIF attached, there is a degenerate strat where you just wall up and funnel them and that's a pretty unbeatable strat if it wasn't for the poor enemy detection of the troops.
There's also the issue that your troops and you still die super duper quick and there's not really an edge for the player - I need to look at other games and consider how that's done. I'd rather avoid just adding health to the player's troops if possible but we'll see. Also the camera work isn't that great. Enemies only chase the player or set bombs and that's it. Enemies also have no unique sprites. And much more.
But that's all good, I still have come a really really far ways and I can't wait to just keep it moving. I had a great two days of effort and I'm feeling like I probably will be motivated to keep working in the coming days.
I'll see ya around.
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