This is just a demo update for the boss battle I'm working on. It only features test battles related to the boss and no random map generation. If you want to play the full game, play the previous version. I hope to be able to add the boss to the main version some time soon, but I'm still not quite satisfied with how the battle feels.
That being said, I could use some feedback on everything boss related, his attacks, his health, his movement speed, his soundtrack, his sprite (which is currently still a placeholder), etc. Do you think that having his health bar at the side like that makes it difficult to pay attention to how much health he has left?
Now, I haven't really made much progress in months already, and the new Godot engine 3 came out, and it has some cool new features that I really want to take advantage of. That being said, I am thinking about porting the whole game to the new engine. This will allow me to add some interesting features like the multiplayer co-op which I've been thinking about for a while, or maybe even a pvp mode.
I am gonna talk about my feelings relating to this project now, so if you think that's too gay for you, or you only want to download the demo,
feel free to skip the next paragraph.
When I started this project, I was only playing around in the Godot engine because it looked very interesting and I started getting bored with Unity. I always wanted to make a bullet-hell like game and since it wasn't that complicated, I decided to use that as a test to see if I enjoy working in Godot. My inspirations for this mostly come from games like Binding of Isaac, Enter the Gungeon, Undertale, Touhou and some other games of that type. The first version I made proved to be very addicting, at least to me and a couple of my friends, so I decided to post it here and make it into a larger project. As time passed by I started getting more and more inspiration, and I added more and more things to my game. Somehow though, the game seemed to be less and less fun to play the more I tried to polish it. So with time, I sorta lost my inspiration because it just felt like some of the older versions of the game were just more fun and addictive to play. This has, over time, turned into some kind of a love-hate relationship between me and this project. I've put a lot of my time into it, but I am somehow just not satisfied with it. The first thing that makes me so disappointed is the fact that the game seems to feel less fun the more I update it, and the second thing is that I don't like how the game visually looks in it's current state. Now, the second problem I tried to fix by stopping all development on the game for a few months and just focusing on practicing drawing, so now I am probably gonna remake some of the sprites. The first problem however, I am not quite sure how to address. The thought that comes to my mind any time I think about it is that maybe I'm just not good at making bullet-hell type games. This really makes me feel uneasy, because those types of games are pretty much my favorite things to play. At times, I really felt like starting the whole thing again from scratch, or even giving up on the whole project all together. My hope currently is that trying to port the game to Godot 3 somehow refreshes my enthusiasm for it. There are some things that I really want my game to have. Among those, the main two are a story mode and a multiplayer mode. I already had some inspiration for the story, and I wrote a lot of it in text files, but until I feel satisfied with how the gameplay feels, I probably won't be implementing stuff like dialogues or npcs. I also designed a lot of the future boss battles, but the boss battle engine I coded for the game still doesn't support all of the features that I need for their implementation. The multiplayer mode was also very difficult to implement in the old Godot engine, so I quickly lost my enthusiasm for it, but now if I manage to port it to the new Godot 3, I might be able to resume working on that. Even so, I can't help but feel like this whole project was just a large waste of time. Part of me fears that continuing my work on it will just waste more of my time. I try to pause from time to time to work on some other smaller projects, just so that I can keep my sanity and positivity. I really want to see this game finished, but the constant struggling with motivation keeps slowing it down and inevitably delaying the whole project.
There, that was sort of a rant on how I feel about this project. Now, I know that no one's gonna even see this probably, but I still felt like I needed to put my feelings out somewhere, and this blog is the most suitable place. If you read it tho, and you have a suggestion for me, make sure to comment below this post. Now, I know that for a lot of people, struggling with motivation seems like a very "first-world" problem, and for a long time that made me feel bad about sharing this, but it's just something that's been on my mind for a very long time, and I just had to put it somewhere.
Here's the actual progress update:
Changes:
-Changed the author name from qsarquest to qsavrquest to reflect my recent change in the username
-Added shift key to controls to slow down the player and enable him to dodge more precisely (you will probably need this to make it through the boss battle)
-Added the boss and boss theme soundtrack, there is also a test boss for testing attacks, but you can ignore this one. The main boss is right from the starting area (btw this is my debugging hub, I think this is the first time I uploaded a version with it on my blog)
-There are a lot of other minor changes that have piled up over time, which are too small to write about here
Download link:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/shbcourlpek4tdn/ShooterGameV0.29.3.zip/file
Controls:
-Movement - WASD or the left controller stick
-Shooting - left mouse button or the R1 controller button
-Return to the menu - ESC or the circle on the PS4 controller and B on the XBOX controller
-Interact - E key or SPACE or ENTER or the cross on the PS4 controller and the A on the XBOX controller
-Map - TAB key or the L1 controller button
-Slow down - SHIFT key (currently doesn't exist on controllers)
You can enable right mouse button movement if you edit the save file to say:
"mouse_movement":true