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.