Past and Current Projects (Feb 07 2025)

This week I noticed a really bad bug with Relentless Waves. Some of the enemies didn’t have sprites for their bullets. It was a late change I made that I didn’t notice. I fixed it but that’s one of those bugs that’s really embarrassing to let out.

While I was thinking about past games, I remembered one I made for the final project for Intro to Game Development. It’s not on my itch page but it’s called Shelf Puzzles. It’s a puzzle game where you can carry blocks and have to put them onto switches. Part of me kind of wants to revive that game (using my platforming physics from the 2024 Collection), but it’ll be a distant project.

I also thought about Randomly Generated RPG. I still like it, but I also thought, can I do better than having a do nothing ability for the players. The obvious effects I could’ve done are buffing your stats or decreasing your cooldowns, but I’m not sure I want them. It doesn’t want to dictate your strategy or be something you want to use all the time. The last idea I had was to swap one of your abilities for a new one. That’s probably the most promising one but I’m not sure I want people to waste time trying to get new abilities until they get the perfect combination. Anyway it’s most likely not changing.

Onto the current project. I considered how to handle cards, specifically if I want to use spreadsheets. It would be great to have spreadsheets handle all troop power and health. But unlike Randomly Generated RPG or Battery RAM, I think very few cards in this game would work well with spreadsheets. They all want to have unique abilities that won't work well with spreadsheet instructions. And then for the Clash Royale game that I’ve basically abandoned, 0 of the spells used spreadsheets, and I’m pretty sure 0 of the environment cards could use spreadsheets. Which is why I’m just going to program all the cards manually.

Another idea I had for a game is one where you and another player are giant robots fighting each other. You’d install weapons onto your robot, except that weapons can take damage and be destroyed. You’d have to consider where you destroy their weapons, or attack the main body and win that way. It sounded cool except that it’s really similar to the card fighting game. Which then made me think, maybe just have this game be that robot fighting game. Troops would then be weapons, and then environments would have to be something else.

The one thing for that robot fighting game is that maybe weapons start off with all their abilities, but when they take damage the abilities will either change / get worse / no longer work. But probably that’s just way too complicated to write out for a card game.

AI Opponent (Jan 31 2025)

First things first is that the bullet hell game is now released, you can play it right now. Adding art and flavor to enemies was hard, but even harder was coming up with a name. I gave up and just went with the bad name of Relentless Waves. I also put on the title screen that the enemies keep shooting after you defeat them, to make it crystal clear that it's intentional and not a bug.

I also started work on getting an AI done. It checks through every possible chain of decisions it could make, remembers which one has the best result, and then plays out the best one. To do this it also has to undo constantly when it's done with a chain, and needs to go back to a previous one. This was...very difficult. I spent days working on it and only just got it working a few hours ago. It's also slow, the game lags a lot when the AI is resolving everything, and it always feels like it's about to infinite loop and crash. And the game is still very simple, all it's doing is placing a troop in one of 5 rows. But at least it's making progress.

I also had 2 weird dreams this week. The first took place in Japan. I have no idea why, it just did. I was walking around on some school field trip, when suddenly I realized that I had won some art competition that I didn't even know I entered. Suddenly the field trip shifts to traveling towards the art competition to get my prize. While trying to enter, the mobile app I had to login to wasn't working, and I ended up spending a bunch of time standing outside. In the end I don't know if I ever got in or not, even though I supposedly won the show.

The second one was in an airport. While at passport check, for some reason the staff there were really interested in asking me about stuff. My notes say "philosophical questions" but I don't remember what those questions were. It went on for a really long time, until I eventually asked "and what is all this discussion for, why would my answers matter?" They responded with "I'm just curious, that's all." Then after I passed passport check, an alarm went off in the airport. My first though was that there was a fire in the airport and everyone had to evacuate, except that as I got to the exit of the airport, I saw people trying to get inside the airport. This baffled me, because why would people be trying to go inside of a burning airport? Then I realized that there was no fire, the alarm went off because there's been a zombie apocalypse, and the people outside are zombies.

And that's it for this week. The notes were pretty short this time because figuring that AI took so much time.

Seeds of a New Game (Jan 24 2025)

The bullet hell game has reached an unfortunate problem: all that's left to do is add art. And I didn't have the willpower to do any of that this week. Also I've played it enough that I don't feel like I have enemies that desperately need balancing. I'll have to force myself to add more art next week because I'd like to release the game this month, but I'm not going to enjoy it.

In this downtime I've tried to figure out what the next game will be. There's still that turn-based Clash Royale game that I shelved, but after all this time I feel like I have to reinvent it. The most obvious way to do so is to turn the game into Plants vs Zombies Heroes. That game has a lot of similarities to Clash Royale: you play cards into rows and they attack the other player. That game doesn't have any troop range or movement, which makes it much simpler. Another thing I quite like about PvZ Heroes are the environments. Each row can only have one environment, which means they can get replaced.

There are some things I don't like about PvZ Heroes though. One is deck building, which I didn't like in Clash Royale either. It's too much work making a deck, which means you just play the same one over and over. For my version I'm just going to give each player random cards. Another thing is that the balancing is not great, which I want to improve on by using math by assigning values to damage, health, draw, and destroying things.

Another thing is that, since I'm at the start of the project, I should try to find a way to add an AI opponent. Playtesting the bullet hell game was doable cause it was single-player; playtesting turn-based Clash Royale was annoying cause I had to control both players. If I had an AI opponent (even if it wasn't any good) I could actually play the game over and over. The AI would probably work similarly to the brute forcer I made for the puzzle game in the 2024 Collection: it checks what would happen in combat when it plays a card, and then figure out which leads to the most optimal result (as dictated by the math). It'll be a challenge to do this but the payoff should be worth it and very educational.

Other misc. details. I got my Celeste speedrun time to 33 minutes and 29 seconds. Improving upon that is still possible but at my skill level it's going to be very marginal, which means I'm probably done with it.