Demo Progress Day 5: There is no demo :'(

Progress

I feel like I made significant progress today, but I clearly over scoped what I could accomplish in 5 days. Well, half-days, I only did 4-5 hours per day, but still. It was around 24 hours total.

So what did I manage?

• Update the UI to better indicate the dice based skill systems
• Implemented Skill upgrades after enemy waves
• Reworked the UI layout to make it easier to playtest
• Added icons to Skills and prepped a lot of code needed for updating and replacing equipped skills.

What’s Missing

So first of all, I’m not releasing a demo in this state. There is a lot missing from what I originally wanted to achieve.

• Main Menu and a way to restart the game (or a pause menu, or a help menu…)
• Passive Skills not implemented (idea is that enemy waves upgrade equipped skills, bosses drop passives and new skills)
• Skill Upgrades are very basic (I basically just double values each time, not really great, need this more robust)
• Skill Replacement (lots of prep done, but lacking a ton of UI work)
• Actual Dice models (free and even some paid models with animations have their own rolling mechanics; I need something deterministic, I need to tell the dice to animate and roll an X)
• More enemies and bosses (need more waves and more boss fights to test progression, for demo was hoping to do 3-1-3-1, ended up with a 2-1)
• No sounds (only have some free BGM, need a lot more)
• No effects (was hoping to at least get some basic ones hit, casting magic and getting hit for instance, not just a boring punch animation)

Next Steps

While I didn’t quite achieve what I hoped, and while I’m not quite at the “alpha demo” stage, I do feel like I made some good progress. And I do like the idea I have here. And I kinda feel like I could make it work with enough time.

So what does that mean? Probably that I’ll keep working on it, just not on a schedule. So when time allows, which after I go back to work probably won’t be much. And for the rest of my time off will be fairly sporadic.

But I’ll keep plugging along, and I’ll keep posting significant updates, and hopefully in the next few weeks I can have an actual demo and get some feedback from people.