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.