About: Divine Awakening

On a strange and exotic planet, an old evil has taken hold. The powers of five godesses must be awakened in order to banish it.

A Scrolling Shooter inspired by the unique tone of older games, Divine Awakening has you shoot your way through 5 different levels using a wide variety of weapons and abilities. Using them effectively will allow you more opportunities to get out of tight situations, meaning you won't have to rely solely on memorisation and pot luck to get through.

Divine Awakening is planned to feature:

• 5 Different levels, with 5 totally unique bonus levels
• A total of 14 different weapons and abilities, unlocked as you play through the game
• Colourful and creepy enemy designs, with limited palette swaps
• 10 different character designs, with unlockable character art and weapons

News

Progress update - tileset slog

28/11/24

It's crazy that it's been two years since I wrote an entry on this page, and seven since I started working on this game!

In recent months I have been working almost exclusively on graphics - tile maps and enemy types. I've been drawing enemies whenever I'm out, at coffee shops and art groups, and you'd be surprised by how quickly new designs accumulate by doing this. Creating tilesets isn't as convenient, for that I do a little bit of work before and after going to my day job but with full time work there's not much time to get deeply involved in the work.

As for gameplay, there's not been too much progress. Levels are now broken up into short sections, but only behind the scenes. I have modified the level loading system so that an optional looping section can be inserted into a level, so that enemies can linger on-screen until they are defeated, potentially making the level take longer to complete. This is important because with a fixed scrolling speed and level size, a level without these optional sections will take exactly the same time to complete, as long as the player doesn't die. The level length I have been using is around 3 to 4 minutes long, which means the entire game would theoretically only take at most 20 minutes to complete! Definitely too short for a game that uses a save system.

Not Dead Yet

19/11/22

As expected, work is making it hard to keep going with game development. I have still kept it up though. Primal Dream (still without a logo) is coming along slowly. I recently re-worked the player movement. It's progressing slowly because of the time and energy that has to go into animating the player. I had a small pick at Divine Awakening too, it has some better tilemaps for the later levels now. I find myself wanting to work on it just so I can actually play the game. Other shmups just aren't scratching the itch, especially since I've been trying newer games that are more influenced by bullet hell shooters (which I hate). It bothers me to no end that so many developers went with the imagery of spaceships shooting at things, when their game is actually about running away, finding minute gaps in the enemy patterns without watching where you're shooting. It's dishonest.

Divine Awakening: December Progress

28/12/21

I'm back in full swing! Though there's always lots to be done. I played a bit of Steam Hearts recently, and after seeing it's in-game cutscenes, I have decided that it's not worth sacrificing those for instant respawns. Previously I had to do this because if the player dies where a cutscene is meant to start, the cutscene is messed up. So I had to heavily modify the dying process and add in a checkpoint system. It works beautifully, and respawning now feels really smooth. A consequence of having to add a checkpoint system is that I had to finish the process of saving player data. I can also load new levels now! So I've added a basic tutorial level, and the template for level 2. Currently I am working on a menu to rebind input. So far it does everything it needs to apart from actually change the key bindings, which looks like it's going to be a real headache to figure out.

Once again, I pray that no trained programmer ever has the misfortune of having to look at my code.

Divine Awakening: November Progress

6/12/2021

Progress has slowed to a crawl. I'm still tidying up so that I can release a demo. I managed to lose the story outline somehow, so I've had to re-do that from hazy memories. Character art has also become an issue, since it's much more work than I anticipated. Since the progress I've made is little bits and pieces here and there, here's a list of things I have to do instead of what I've done:

• Sound effects (I am not good with this)
• The options menu, and a weapon config menu
• Cutscene dialog and the boss
• A few graphical things like rank letters for the scoring screen
• Contacting game developers to find out how to publish and advertise.

Even though I still believe in the reasons for which I'm working on this on my own, I'm starting to envy people who can work on games as a team. I'm an artist and designer more than anything else, and sometimes I feel like a trained programmer would have a stroke if they had a look at my code. Sound effects are the worst thing, I have next to no experience with that sort of thing. Well who knows, maybe one day I'll meet some people in the real world who I actually want to work with.

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

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.