Hello! I took a month off from game development to focus on some personal, real-life things. Now that it's mostly settled, I'm back full-force into game development. I think it's fair to say, I'm working harder on this game than any I made so far.
As I alluded to last week, I spent a great deal of time reworking the game art. Here's a screenshot showing how the game looks now:
Notably, you can see the main character changed, as well as all the monsters. They now follow the world theme, which is drawn partially from the over-arching game story (different worlds) - hence the finalized game name, "Gem Worlds."
This month, I started in earnest on the skill system. You can see how it look so far:
In the playable alpha/prototype from earlier this year, players could purchase skills between runs, using (permanent) gems earned each run. You can upgrade skills, and customize your experience - everything from more health to stronger fireballs.
Unlike the earlier versions, in the final game, you can only select a few skills for each run. This is to encourage players to try out different skill combinations, find synergies, upgrade the ones they like, and hopefully also customize your difficulty. You can - for example - upgrade fireballs to their max, and use them to snipe enemies from afar; or you can upgrade your health a lot, and recklessly charge into danger. (There's also an invincibility option, for anyone who wants to just see the story or complete the game more easily.)
The planned skills include a combination of innate abilities, as well as technological tools. There are a lot of ways in which they can interact with each other, and with the world. I hope that will lead to more interesting, fun, surprising experiences, but that also means a lot more testing to make sure the game ships bug-free.
That pretty much wraps it up for this month. If you're interested in the game, sign up to the online newsletter to get weekly updates. It's not spam, but short, to-the-point weekly progress updates.
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