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.

Here's me completing a single level in a new run of the gem roguelike:

You can see quite a lot of changes from last month. The most obvious one is the skill shop; specifically:

• Collecting gems collects them permanently across all runs (the three types have three different values)
• Between runs of the game, you can upgrade your skills
• At the skill shop, you can buy new skills, upgrade existing skills, or buy other upgrades (e.g. health) with your collected gems

While feedback on this ran contrary to what I hoped, I decided to make the game more roguelike (-like?) - dying three times takes you back to the beginning of the current world. Along with permanent gems, I hope this will lead players down an experience like Hades, where they adventure for a while, die, upgrade a lot, and try different builds the next run-through.

I also ran a limited alpha test (around six players played it and reported their feedback, incuding recordings and streams of them playing the game). Thank you all again for testing and providing feedback, be it a little or a lot - it helped me correct the course of the game and identify some much-needed things to improve upon!

This month, I also completed two major blocking tasks for the game: I sat down and wrote a complete end-to-end story for the game, including designing all the major characters, and some world-building/lore. Based on this, I started modifying the first world's art to fit the theme of the first world (Brightshield masjid/mosque).

I have a long way to go with art, which is the focus of this month: design the worlds in detail (including obstacles and monsters), and coding whatever's necessary to make it look good. This includes polishing the first world to a gleaming sheen, something I already sunk many hours into (and expect to sink many more). Already, you can see:

• New tiles
• A new level border
• A large new parallax background

I hope, inshaAllah (God willing), I can complete the first world art, and some of the subsequent worlds, this month. We'll see how it goes.

If you're interested in the game, sign up to the newsletter to get weekly updates. It's not spam, but short, to-the-point weekly progress updates.

What happens if you take a classic gem-collecting boulder-dodging action puzzle, make it turn-based, and add in roguelike elements like skills, monsters, and procedurally-generated levels?

This:

This is a prototype (mostly getting game systems working with placeholder or simple art) which I toiled away at for the last 30 days. Currently, it includes almost all the core systems:

• Collect gems, dodge boulders, and make it to the exit without dying
• Environmental elements to avoid, like explosive falling mines and lava pools
• Procedurally-generated levels (five completely different level types)
• Monsters, melee fighting, and two skills: an explosive fireball, and a stopwatch that lets you stop time for five turns.

What's missing? My favourite roguelike element: the ability to spend gems to buy permanent upgrades and unlock new skills.

My current vision is something like a cross between Boulder Dash and Hades. You pick from an assortment of unlocked and upgraded skills, make a run, die, upgrade and pick an entirely different set, and try again. I planned 100 levels across ten different biomes, each with their own unique set of monsters and environmental dangers to deal with.

If you like what you see, sign up to the online newsletter to get weekly updates! In the coming days, you will also get instructions on how to access the playable prototype of the game!

Introducing Crystal Caverns, a match-3/roguelike hybrid with persistent upgrades. In the last two months, I took this game from a rough prototype to what you see in the video. At present, the game includes:

• A bare-bones battle system: players and monsters take turns attacking.
• A basic match-3 game with collapse mechanics, albeit you can swap any two tiles
• Victory and defeat
• Persistent currency (crystal shards) which you retain across battles

Battles appear bare-bones at the moment, but include some depth: - Players can attack, critical-strike, boost defense, poison enemies, drain, and heal. - Monster attacks affect the board in various ways (currently, they just eat random tiles).

That includes enough of the core game to improve upon.

Next month, I plan to turn my attention more towards the roguelike side of the game: generating dungeons with monsters, finding treasure (including persistent treasure), and balancing exploration with progression.

Hello! Long-time readers of this blog may notice a couple of changes:

• A new, mobile-responsive theme
• A complete restructuring of content

I decided to redo the blog to make it mobile-friendly, and to hange the content - instead of game development notes and game design articles, instead, I plan to focus on my games.

What can you expect going forward? Weekly posts show-casing the best of whatever current project I'm working on.

Old articles will stay available for a while.