Devlog 1: what must be done

For a game who's development for about 80% of it's life has been a one-man show (the latter half, mind you), Phoenix Core: Shadow has made massive improvement from the rough tech demo just a month ago. I personally like the big-pixeled look of a lot of 2D games out there, but I didn't think it was right for this game's style to intentionally do that with the 640x480 window. However, I also didn't want the game becoming too small to see easily when in fullscreen, so I just made the game run in 640x480 while in fullscreen, too. Some people might complain that there's letterboxing, but it's all for the good of compatibility.

Speaking of which, this game is going to be for both Windows and Mac, and if I can find a way to compile it, Linux. I wish porting it to systems like Ouya were possible, but getting it to Unix-based operating systems is already a bit of a hassle, so I doubt that it would work at all on Android.

Right now, I'm fleshing out the first ten minutes of gameplay, getting the controls to feel correct, and just general stuff that I should do now so I won't have to deal with it later on. There's a lot to do, but I've been chugging along steadily at what I've described as the first few footholds so I can get some serious work done.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not very confident in my programming skills, but the further I go with development, the better I get. I used to do a lot of HTML, some C++, among other things, but they've gotten rusty, so I hope that work on this will get me back into other programming languages, too. In fact, most of the last hour was spent with me trying to remember how to set and recall variables in the engine. I was overthinking it.

The biggest time sink with this game is that basically everything can be interacted with, sometimes with multiple lines of dialogue depending on whether you've completed an objective or not, or even just how many times you've interacted with it. And sometimes both.

Story-wise, the game consists of three Acts, each of which are split into fifteen chapters, which take roughly an hour each if you just blow through the story. There's an absolutely massive amount of content for you to explore and find, however, and a mind-blowing number of easter eggs to discover.

Here are some screenshots from early testing:

Bathroom

Test map (some of the tiles in this image are incomplete, and the map itself isn't part of the game)

Both of these images are related to the very first chapter of the game, as it is the chapter with the most development time put into it.


Now, there are some very important things that I haven't gotten around to doing yet that I'm going to at least begin today, including a settings screen so you can change whether it plays in windowed or fullscreen, and change game volume, among other things. I also need to finish the pause menu, which will allow you to examine items, view the current quest, and there might be a map function if I figure out a way to give each map (or parts of a map if they get big enough) a coordinate.

Over the next couple weeks, I'll be posting a lot about how I go about making this game, and after that things will settle down into regular devlog format. If you want to know how I do something, let me know and I'll probably be able to tell you.

Until then, stay frosty.
-q