News

Divine Awakening: October Progress

22/10/2021

I fell into a rut, which I am now out of. Level 1 is pretty much complete for now. It will still need a lot of fixing up, but it can be played from start to finish. I really really need to get onto doing the character art. Anyway, moving on I will be working on levels 2 and 3 at the same time, and gradually adding more sound effects. Hopefully there will be something more interesting to share here soon.

Divine Awakening: August Progress

24/08/2021

What happened to July? I can't remember. This month I've picked up the pace again. I merged all my old to-do lists into one monster, so I know where to go now. Here's what I've been working on:

Level decorations. I won't put as much interaction as I originally wanted to, but some little touches help.
Game Over (again). I need to finish this off, as well as retry and respawning. I won't keep up the pretense of "continues" in 2021
Moar enemies. No reason not to be working on this. The tentacle code now has a sibling: monstrous necks.
Character art. I haven't started this yet, but it's high time I did.

Divine Awakening: June Progress

29/06/2021

Progress has been all over the place lately. Mostly because I'm not entirely sure how to go about designing the level layout. When I have attempted to work on it, I've been sidetracked trying to balance out enemy hp and weapon damage, etc. etc. I suspect the first level's completion is still at least 6 months away. At this point, things are taking too long, and if I find myself spending too much longer on level-specific things, I will be simplifying my game in order to finish it before life gets in the way. Hopefully this year I will completely finish all of the "backbone" content, such as menus, cutscene controls, etc. etc. Thankfully, those things are all *nearly* finished.

Several new enemy designs are completed or WIP.
I have created a tentacle node which animates itself according to custom parameters. This will save a lot of work animating tentacles/tails/etc.
I have begun work on cleaning up and optimising my code, mainly clearing up clutter and commented code I'm not using anymore.
Weapon special attacks are more or less completed, and an ability configuration is now stored and read by the game. A configuration menu is WIP.
Enemies worth a certain score value now drop gems which can further increase the score when collected.
I finally have a way to use pathfollow nodes with enemy movement. Each path will be stored as it's own scene to use like an "add-on" to enemies.
The weapon levelling system is more or less complete: Dying reverts the players level by 1 until it is the same as the game level, and weapons level up according to score increases since their last death or level change.

Divine Awakening: May Progress

12/05/2021

Things are progressing slowly but surely. Here's a list of things completed since the last post

Scoring system: the combo system is more or less complete - use many weapons and a score multiplier goes up.
Cutscenes: triggers are finished, and the story has been pretty much planned out.
The level boss has animation, AI, and the beginnings of a dramatic death.
Sound effects are currently done by sending a signal to a "sound controller" that plays the right sound. I've made it possible to play looping sounds now.

It's hard to deal with so much at once, but I'm chipping away at it. I'm trying to make a set of functions that I can reuse, for things like explosions or firing bullets, to save myself work in the future. I might break down some of them here at some point.

Divine Awakening: Progress

14/04/2021

There is much to be done before a demo (alpha? beta?) version can be released. I've listed the main things to be done below, but of course more little things pop up here and there.

Scoring system (combos, reactions, weapon levels)
Cutscenes (triggers, dialogue, animation, etc.)
Enemy layouts and tweaking
Level boss
Sound effects

This is, being realistic, still months of work. In the last couple of days I've managed to make some decent progress on the scoring system, and added dialogue boxes, but I also managed to get sidetracked completely changing how enemies react to being hit. The best thing at the moment is that I'm getting distracted while testing and just having fun playing the game. This is central to my design philosophy - everything should be fun to test. Hopefully by the end of all this it will be quite a good game, and more than just another beginner's project.

Divine Awakening: Page updates

21/03/2021

This part of the site is getting major updates now that my game is approaching a marketable state. Most of the links at the top don't work at the time of writing, but I'll be adding to them in the coming days. As for the progress on the game itself, it's still early days but hopefully sometime in the next few months I'll have a demo containing the first level finished and available for download from this site.