As promised for approximately three straight dev diaries now, today I’m finally going to dive into a closer look at the patrons of the Bleakwatch Inn! But before that, I’ve never really set the stage for exactly what is going on in Bleakwatch, so let's do that first:
Since the last devlog, I’ve made some pretty big changes to some fundamental elements of the game. The kind of changes that made me sit and contemplate for a good long time about whether I was walking myself into a giant scope creep trap. In the end, though, they were changes I decided were absolutely necessary to get Last Call to where I wanted it, and could be implemented without spinning things completely out of control.
With the basic structure of the combat system in place, I’ve spent much of the past two weeks working on building out all the pieces of Last Call’s core loop.
Last time, I touched a bit on the general overall structure of Last Call. Today I wanted to dive into some more detail on what makes up the bulk of the game: the combat system.
As I talked about last time, shelving Wilderness was hard. But, I was fortunate enough to come up with a new idea that was able to salvage a lot of the guts of Wilderness to get me started well ahead of zero.
So since dev work on Station Zeta wrapped up, I’ve been working on a new project. To give you a little taste, here’s the current state of Wilderness:
The idea of being a speedrunning has always fascinated me. I think my first encounter with "official" speedrunners was probably one of the early GamesDoneQuicks way back in the early 2010s. But even then, the concept of it was something that, to me, felt like it had been there all along.
As I mentioned last time, in today’s entry I want to shift away from the puzzle aspects to focus on the visual side of things. The overall aesthetic of Station Zeta is a very retro, pixel-art presentation, but that’s not the visual part I want to focus on. Instead, I want to dig into the thought process that went into developing Zeta’s visual vocabulary.
It’s probably not much of a surprise to say, but the thing that’s taken the most time in building a puzzle-platformer has been the level design.