HM4 prototype 4 released

Hi all,

Another Wednesday, another upload. I'm really happy to showcase this particular release.

Included is my first attempt at making a playable level. It turned out well, but there is always room for improvement. Expect the levels to better better and better over time. Many things can still be changed, such as hallways, blocks, mechanics, engine, and usage.

It also contains many gameplay improvements, the most important being fighting. This was done in a really rushed fashion though. Expect small changes to the engine, as well as big changes to the content over time.

The engine is basically complete at this point. I consider this to be the barrier between alpha and beta builds. The alpha build is finished, and I'm just starting the beta phase.

Performance has been greatly improved as well. Two massive memory leaks were detected and fixed. Kind of strange how those made it through. The resources were being freed - or at least I did something of the sort - but it was borked due to an incorrect reference being used. Other performance improvements were made in how the level is displayed. And there are a lot more improvements left to make, which I will get around to eventually. The map display doesn't buffer anything, and needs to flood fill and create the visible surfaces every frame. I consider this an acceptable approach for such a prototype especially considering it only took me a day to do. The good news is that the buffering system should be similarly quick to implement, taking only a day or so.

Moving fowards I'm sort of at a cross roads. On one side the quality needs to be improved. There are fixes planned, and I will periodically make improvements throughout. The problem here is that I'm nearing my natural limit as far as art related tasks like user interfaces are concerned. I simply need outside help to get that last quality boost which is so badly needed. I also would like to fine tune the tower some more, especially interactions with the monsters. This work should only take a few hours here and there.

The other thing I could be doing is to build the tower. I have lots of assets to use from my previous games. The characters, equipment, potions, and monsters are already done. I do need to redo the skills, and rebalance the game of course. I could build the tower up to and including floor 10. The break down would be 2 floors per theme. The themes would be: forest, hell, tundra, desert, and dream - the same as my previous games. Most of the assets required to do this are ready. I expect that I could create the first 10 floors in 2 weeks time. Most of that time would be spent on assets (creating skills, balancing, and monster ai), with the floor itself only taking a couple hours or so.

These 10 floors should give me enough to start selling the game. Getting traction at this point is crucial, basically make or break. The main problem is that adding floors at this point will take much longer, as I don't have premade assets ready to go. I suspect that it will take a week to add a single floor. It could go faster but that would require a small team, so that I'm not drawing all the art myself, but I just don't have that kind of money right now. My thought is to "package" maybe 10 additional floors together spread out over 10 weeks. And because of diminishing return, I would like to spend additional time doing other things like general improvements and new game mechanics here and there. Let's say two weeks total dedicated to other stuff. This brings us up to a total of 3 months to add 10 additional floors as well as some improvements here and there. The critical importance of these next two or three weeks should be clear by now. I'm reaching a period of diminishing return on my efforts. I either gain traction or fail.

Long term I would like to see 50 floors or so in the tower. If it takes off I mean. My plan would be to keep adding floors until the idea is exhausted. Then I'll start over from scratch on a different game, reusing much of the code and assets. Hell it only took me one month to transform my previous project into this game so it is doable.

I wanted to add that I'm extremely disappointed with how little work I got done this week. It may seem like I did a lot, but I didn't. Most of the work was already done, just hidden.

One final thing. I really need funding and traction to keep going. Any help, even feedback, would be greatly appreciated. And  a shout out to the two people helping me.

Cheers

Matthew

A tired wannabe indie developer