May 22, 2024 Devlog blog - Grahamcracker25

Over the last few weeks, I've been incredibly busy. However, I have been working on hard on my projects. Firstly, I presented a game that I created with another group of students, and successfully complete my final course before graduating with my degree.

Along the lines of my personal development, I have created an entire terrain in The Mystery of Beanville, which is a part of one of the pivotal levels in the story. I've also added many more dialogues, finished up designs of the bookstore level, and the cutscene level. I haven't added the dialogues yet, or the cutscene, to each of those respective scenes. Regardless, I've done a lot of the level design so far over the last couple weeks. I want this game to be finished an released by the end of 2024.

The news for my 2D Action Platformer, it's almost done. I've scrapped the JRPG side, I've scrapped the extraction mode, and most of it. Overall, it's a functioning platformer with tons of action, guns, enemy robots, and it features a save system. The Cowsins Platformer engine had it's own checkpoint system for each level. However, I took that system a bit further and created a save system for the game, so players can hit continue game and load back into the last scene that they played. I currently have it set up with a final boss-fight level, and you can't save on that level. So, if you back out, you have to complete the level beforehand. But, once you win, it's basically just a winner screen then back to the main scene. I'm brainstorming future plans, that may include: an in-game achievement system, and an Easy and Hard mode. Hard mode would have more enemies and less heals, then Easy mode would just be the game as it is now basically. I think those two options, and the achievements would bring a player back. Reality is, I wanted to add all of those game modes to create replay ability. However, I think the easy/hard, and achievements would bring that back more.

Also going forward, even though I had planned on releasing this game on Steam, I may not. I'm planning on Itch.io for sure, however I'd love to possibly release it on Steam. My main drawback is, I don't know if I'm going to charge for this game. I'm working on two other projects right now, that could really have potential for a price tag. But I just can't justify spending the $100 to publish this when it could be played in the browser. I plan on having this game on Itch sometime in the early days of June 2024.

I've also begun working on a project that will be long-term. As in, I'm using Cowsins FPS Engine to create a FPS game that I'm hoping for a release sometime in 2025. I'm currently working on tailoring the gunplay. I want the gunplay to really draw the player into the game. After that, I want the environment to be perfect. I want to really show off my level-design and environment art skills with this project. The AI, will be done using Cowsins AI. As of now, I honestly don't need them to be that crazy of a challenge. It's a basic storyline game, where the player has to eliminate enemies as he completes various missions (finding intel, finding a hostage, etc.) and goes through a "cliche" so to speak story. I want the gameplay to be fun. I want the player to think of an old CoD Campaign or old James Bond Game when they play this. This game, will certainly be at least $2.99 on Steam. I'm hoping for something around 10 objective missions that take anywhere from 10-20 minutes to complete, and follow a basic story of a secret agent. I also maybe want to add in a wave mode for fun where the player can survive as many rounds as they can with waves of enemies. That is a function, currently being worked on in Cowsins Engine so I would love to implement that when it comes out as a side-mode for the player to have a sense of replay ability.

2024 is shaping up to be a really good year for me as a developer and I'm excited to continue forward with these projects.