Foreseeable Futures

Watcha doin'?

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Infinite Level Games Discussed: The Future Project, ???

Happy new year! I trust you had a pleasant holiday and are off to a good start to your personal 2024. While I won't attempt to speak for everyone, I find the start of a year to be one of the most exciting parts of the year. And I don't even feel that way thanks to new years resolutions or anything like that. It's just nice to have something of a blank canvas to work with, you know? For me personally, that sentiment is especially true as I am now knee deep into my next project. In case you're new here, I released my biggest game The Future Project back in July of 2023, followed by a content update the following November, so in terms of me and my game dev journey, 2023 has been an exciting one. It even ended on a fairly exciting note thanks to a video put out by a YouTuber named Wicked Wizard, where he covered The Future Project and even enjoyed the game! That positive attention has given my game a nice boost in attention and players, so a big thanks to Wicked Wizard for showing the game to his audience. Here's a link to that video if you're curious to see what he said. I'm linking to the portion of video that covers The Future Project specifically, but quite frankly the whole video is entertaining and worth a watch.

On the topic of The Future Project, that seems like a solid place to start this dev blog. Even though the game is out and, as of the All's Eye update in November, has all the content originally planned for the game, there's still been the occasional patch to address bugs and gameplay issues, so I've not fully put the project away as of yet. In fact, as I write this, a new patch is in the works to address some issues brought forth by new players, which should be releasing some time soon after this dev blog goes live. That does beg the question, though...how long do I plan to tweak and update The Future Project? Will there be any other content updates? Well, the answer is it depends. I will say there's no active plans for further content updates, but there are certainly ideas. And looking at some upcoming events in 2024 which I can't talk about yet, those could be a good motivator to bring some of these ideas to life. There's also the simple possibility that those playing The Future Project want more, and I'd hate to ignore that desire. So I won't say it'll never happen, because it absolutely could. As for patches, my plan is to release those on an as needed basis. Much of the issues on my personal bug list have been taken care of for some time, with the more recent patches addressing problems mentioned to me by players like you (and if you're not a player yet...would you like to be?). That's what I mean by "it depends". After all, if it ain't broke then don't fix it, right? So please, if you're playing and you do find something that you think is a genuine problem to be addressed, then feel free to let me know. Some of the aforementioned new players have been great about letting me know when there's an issue, and to those people I say thank you for bringing these things to my attention. I am one guy after all, so while I try my best to give you a polished experience, there's no doubt going to be things that slipped past me. It can be hard to fix what I don't know about or things that simply don't occur to me, so keep your feedback coming!

As for if there's a hard cutoff point for new patches, I will at least say there is no such thing at the moment. Perhaps if I go long enough without hearing any reports, then I may declare to be done with the game entirely. But for right now, that's not the case. There's been enough newcomers to the game over the past month that I simply don't feel comfortable patching it once or twice more and then calling it good. Plus, if I do update the game substantially in the future, that will open up some new bug possibilities, thus incentivizing keeping the project on my hard drive for if problems arise. So for now, it's best to keep the possibility of future patches open. Hopefully that gives you some confidence that if some bug comes along that really messes up the experience, it can get addressed. My pride simply doesn't want people to have a sub-par experience due to obnoxious bugs in the code, thus I'll keep things handy for in case a fix is needed. Hopefully no other patches will be needed because the game is just that polished, but just in case I'll be at the ready for if something unexpected comes along.

Outside of The Future Project, I'm hoping to develop some skills of my own for the sake of both current and future games I create. Shortly after releasing the All's Eye update I made a shortlist of things I want to learn and understand better to hopefully make game development in future even easier. For instance, I used next to no C++ during the creation of The Future Project. Everything was done with Unreal Engine's Blueprints. That does speak well to how powerful their Blueprint visual scripting language, but you can do a lot more if you're willing to dig into the C++ a bit. Blueprints are great for quickly creating things within Unreal Engine, and that's a big reason for why I opted to develop the game this way. I wanted to focus on making compelling content and gameplay mechanics and avoid getting too bogged down in the technical aspects of the engine. Unreal's C++ capabilities aren't all I'd like to learn. There's some compelling plug-ins I've found over the past year I'd like to try, and the Unity pricing debacle from last year got me curious about Godot and how it works. That might seem odd given that I appear to have something working for me in Unreal Engine, but I think it's good to know what tools are available to you along with their strengths and weaknesses, because Unity Technologies taught us last year that anything is possible. So while I'm planning on doing other games in Unreal Engine, I am going to take some time to study other software to see if a different game in future may be a good fit for it.

Credit: Godot Engine

I've tried saving the most interesting piece of news for last for the first dev blog of 2024, so let's hop right to it. I am currently working on another game! It's quite different from The Future Project. In fact, I'm not sure that there's very many similarities at all. It's considerably smaller in scope, takes place within a totally different genre, and isn't even being made in Unreal Engine. This game is actually being made in Unity, which probably seems strange given everything I was just saying, but I had originally started this project long, long before 2023's Unity controversy and I didn't want to throw all my previous work away. In fact, this project dates back further than you might expect. Before The Future Project I had a philosophy of working on a big game alongside smaller ones so that I can frequently put out stuff at a reasonable time, about a year or so apart. That philosophy didn't really work out though. I released Impressions in 2020 and then The Future Project three years later. Around the time Impressions finished, I began work on this new game while at the same time working on The Future Project. But after some time, The Future Project began to take every bit of my game development attention, so this project had to be temporarily shelved. Still, I managed to get a lot of foundational work done, resulting in me coming back to a project that, technically speaking, has a lot already finished. I resumed work on this game about a month after The Future Project's release, and while it's nowhere near being ready, it's at least been worked on enough that I can give you a peak at the project.

So, what are we dealing with here? This next game is a turn based RPG styled game, but with one key difference from others like it...you only fight bosses. I've stripped out overworld exploration, random encounters with small monsters, explorable towns, and even a traditional leveling system to focus exclusively on boss battles. You're either fighting a boss, or upgrading equipment and gathering items in preparation for the next boss. Now, why would I do that? After all, a big part of RPGs are their worlds, so taking out that component may seem like a bad idea on the surface. To understand what I'm going for, I'm going to take you back to the past for a minute. Once upon a time, about four years ago, I played Final Fantasy VII for the first time. I will be perfectly honest with you, I did not like it. But as I was playing through the game, it gave me an idea. What would an RPG look like if you only fought the big bads found at the end of a dungeon? For me personally, those bosses were often the most interesting parts of these types of games anyway, as they often encouraged utilizing certain abilities and party members to secure victory. You could spam your most powerful attack and it may well work, but you'll probably have a better time if you inflict the proper status conditions, designate roles for each character, and try to approach the enemy with a strategy. Why not focus in on that mindset exclusively, and build a turn based RPG around that philosophy?

What you're looking at in the screenshot is the current prototype of the game. You can probably already see that it’s pretty early in development. I'm still using Unity's default buttons and text font, for instance, and the ground's shading doesn't match the way characters in the scene are shaded. There’s even some debug controls in the upper right! I am once again building all this from scratch, with only the Unity engine itself to start from, so the characters you see and the game mechanics are all homemade. Hard or even impossible to see in this screenshot are the various abilities of the characters, the background stats, and the various effects and statuses characters can have. In addition, I'm also trying my hand at an entirely new art and animation style for this game, but I'll show that off in more detail when things are settled. Right now I'm currently trying to finish a playable demo of the game, then pass that around to some people and see what they think. There's still some polish and "juicing" I need to do to get that demo ready, but things have been coming along pretty well for the most part. This demo will consist of the first few battles, and will exist to help me get some initial feedback on the game's design and enjoyability. And before I'm asked, this demo is exclusively a closed demo that I plan to simply pass around to some friends and other trusted individuals, so unfortunately you won't be able to try this yourself just yet.

My goal with this game is to explore the boss designs of a traditional turn based RPG and see what kinds of interesting battles can be had in this gameplay environment. The player will be given three units that can learn new abilities, use items, and upgrade their attack, health, and "action points" (this game's mana resource). Other than a tutorial battle where you only use the Warrior, these three units are set in stone from the beginning of the game, with no swapping out for other characters. Idea is that the player should become pretty familiar with these three characters so that they can take on increasingly complex challenges. For example, the boss you see in the screenshot above is pretty straightforward as bosses go. He has a minion to aid him, but otherwise his whole game plan is to hit you really hard. However, he does have one interesting quirk...he'll always attack the unit with the highest health. How then do you use that to your advantage? Now, this battle is a fairly straightforward example with very little going on under the hood. Later, a player will get into battles where they have to contend with constantly having a certain status effect, mid-battle transformations, an enemy that can only take damage from attacks if it's poisoned...all of the above, perhaps? I've setup my game's systems to allow for a variety of gimmicks and combination of gimmicks so that players will have to get creative and carefully pick the right actions to make it through to the end.

This screenshot is from the game’s tutorial, limiting your available units to just the Warrior for the sake of learning the basic mechanics.

I don't know when I'll begin talking about this game in more detail. It's still very unpolished and needing a lot of work to become more presentable, let alone playable. But I also recognize the value in talking about your projects as early as possible, so I'll try not to make that wait too long. As stated above, the immediate plan is to get a closed demo put together so I can get some initial feedback on the design and feel of the game before diving much deeper into the rest of it. As for this dev blog, I'll still be doing the monthly posts like I've always been doing. I'm counting on just talking about some aspects of The Future Project I've not yet talked about, such as some of the worlds of the game. When the time is right, I'll show off more new stuff. So I guess that means I should probably get back to working on said new stuff, huh?

Until next time!

-Lance T.