Hello! I made lots of changes to Gem Worlds over the last couple of months, based on player feedback that the game could use more interesting interactions between things in-world.

Based on that, I added a few terrain types to the game; they generate in each world:

• Teleporters: previously existed, but now exist in every world
• Light Stars: they move back and forth, even through dirt tiles
• Receeding blocks traps: once you step on them, they pop up into walls for a few turns, then reset

I also added, then scrapped, a couple of terrain:

• Pipes, which move you from one spot to another (inspired by Supaplex's pipes)
• Conveyor belts, which constantly move everything on them

Conveyor belts added a lot of interesting dynamics to the game. Unfortunately, they also contributed a disproportionately huge amount of bugs. In the end, I scrapped them.

Meanwhile, they also exposed a huge performance issue, where moving caused a drop of ~130ms (roughly ten frames). Fixing this required ripping out and rewriting the main collision-detection system, which resulted in an explosion of bugs, and took way too many weeks to fix. Alhamdulillah, those are all fixed now.

I also added (again based on played feedback) keys and locks! In every 5th and 10th level of each world, the exit appears from the start, but lock blocks surround it; you need to find one (or three) keys to unlock them and exit.

I'm looking forward to shipping a new v0.5.0 demo soon inshaAllah, and getting (and integrating) more feedback and features into the game. When that ships, I would really appreciate it if you could give it a quick play-through, and let me know your thoughts.

Despite not working much on Gem Worlds during Ramadan, I'm very happy to announce:

• Gem Worlds participated in the Steam Going Rogue festival. This resulted in a huge visibility boost (around 50k visits in a week).
• As part of that, I launched the Gem Worlds demo. While the fesitval is over, you can still play the demo here
• I finally have access to Mac hardware to develop and test my games. Accordingly, I launched the Mac version of the Gem Worlds demo, too.

Based on feedback from a couple of players, I changed a number of things in the game; most notably: - I added keyboard bindings and fixed tooltips for all skills and items - You can change sklils at any time, by quitting to the skill shop (you resume back from the same level afterward).

While this resulted in lots of people looking at Gem Worlds, it resulted in a mere ~30-ish downloads. This confirms one of my hunches from a few months back: the core game itself isn't that interesting or captivating. Based on the feedback I received from a couple of players, despite being designed as "play, die, retry with different skills," the replayability and interest in continuing through the game is minimal or zero.

This dramatically hurt my motivation to work on the game. It's the biggest game I've ever made (by at least 50%). Regardless, my plan is to inshaAllah continue slogging through the leftover work to get the game out.

At this point, I may not run a beta version, either; that requires at least a significant amount of players (new and recurring), which I didn't get access to. I'll provide updates on that as development continues.

Hey all, just wanted to drop a quick note and let you know that Gem Worlds is pretty much content-complete. You can play the game from start to finish, and aside from some bugs and missing polish, the game is done.

For the next couple of months up to the release, the plan is to add missing polish (like sound design, story events, and an ending) and find/fix bugs. There won't be much to show, but it's critical work.

On the bright side, I am also planning to launch a demo of Gem Worlds. The demo will remain up-to-date with the rest of the game (it won't lag behind in terms of features or fixes), and I hope many of you will play it and pass along your feedback.

In summary, the roadmap for the next few months (other than Ramadan, which is most of April and won't include much/any gamedev) looks like:

• Add sound design, story events, options, etc.
• Launch the game demo
• Add polish and fix bugs
• Repeat until the game is ready for beta testing

It's been a crazy two months since I wrote the last blog post. In the last post, I talked about the 21 skills and ten worlds. Since then, I launched the game on Steam. Based on the first month worth of metrics, it looks like the game will be a flop. (Steam gamers tend to like deep games, tend to hate puzzle games, and it looks like the roguelike aspects of this game aren't enough to lift it out of the puzzle genre.)

Instead of dropping the project, I decided to cut scope, and cut the number of worlds in half, from ten to five. This will save me anything from weeks to months of development, and will allow me to shine a light on other, much-needed areas - such as audio production. Plus, if players enjoy the game, I can always add more worlds and skills later.

That brings us to the completion of the fourth of five worlds. Here's a list of some of the interesting enemies you encounter in the third and fourth world:

• An ice-mimic in the ice world. It looks like an ice cube, and spawns breakable ice walls as it walks.
• A bee-hive in the tree world; it spawns cute bees, which (sadly) can be killed, but eventually respawn.
• A creature that waits for you to approach, and once you do, relentlessly stalks you
• Troublesome teleporting tree pixies that hit you and teleport away

You can see (if you look carefully) two ice mimics here:

Here's a brief preview of the fifth and final (space / spaceship) world, featuring laser fields that oscillate on and off, and damage anything inside:

That's it for this month! If you would like to recieve weekly updates, you can sign up to my newsletter. That's the best place to get updates about the game; plus, I'll be sharing the password for the beta there, when it's ready.

From October, I worked on designing and drawing skills for Gem Worlds. I think of the game as something like a cross between Boudler Dash and Hades: you dodge boulders, collect gems of different types, battle enemies, avoid enviornment-specific obstacles, and eventually escape through the portal. At the same time, you can pick from 21 different skills - a mix of active and passive - and enemies can use skills, too!

As a game designer, I hope the array of different skills will allow users to not only custom-pick the skills that best fit their personality and play-style, but also control the difficulty. In my previous game, Oneons, which I designed to be brutally hard, I added an optional heal skill in response to players complaining the game was too difficult; I hope that approach can work here, too.

The skills break down into two categories: active, and passive. Active skills require you to use them, and come in two variations: cooldown based (e.g. usable every 4 turns), and quantity based (e.g. only 4 uses per level). These include elemental attacks like fireball (area damage), freeze (stop monsters for a few turns) to time-bombs that explode after a few seconds.

Passive skills always take effect, all the time. These vary a great deal, ranging from the mundane Fireproof skill (which makes you invincible to explosions) to the game-changing Wall Walker skill (that lets you walk through walls) or the More Gems skill, which greatly increases the number of gems in a level (thus dropping the difficulty).

Second, I started working on the second (or third, not sure yet) world - a desert-themed world. I couldn't draw art good enough for it to be a "crystal desert," but I hope the monster art will bring that out. The video only shows the tiles and background; here are some monsters in various stages of design, from concept to final sprite:

As I mentioned earlier, 21 skills, which is a lot. After the first world, which introduces the game mechanics to the player, monsters will start including their own skills - ranging from passive ones (like being explosion-proof or teleporting away if hit) to active ones that affect the player and environment in different ways.