Happy New Year! New years invite reflection. Today, I’ll reflect on dev logs themselves. More specifically, why do we write them? What are they for? And why do I have writer’s block? ( Note: Chinese Translation of this devlog is available! Courtesy of Baojie ) A Quick History I started my first blog post about 12 years ago. At the time, game dev was still foreign to me, so I lurked on game dev…
Spot the difference in this picture of two enemies at the moment of their demise. On the left, an enemy in Phoenotopia. On the right, an enemy in Star Iliad. Notice anything? The one on the right sports a “hit glow” FX. Note: Chinese Translation of this dev log is available! (Courtesy of Baojie) Phoenotopia surprisingly never had hit glow – something that is pretty much standard for most enemy…
One common feedback we received for Phoenotopia was to add a map. Note: Chinese Translation of this blog post is available! (Courtesy of Baojie ) Unfortunately, it was too difficult to do since Phoenotopia wasn’t designed with 2D geometric considerations in mind. Perhaps it’s best explained with this picture: (The starting house. Some say the confusing layout was a metaphor for the difficulties…
The game has evolved a lot from whence it started. For fun, let’s dive into some old concepts. Don’t worry, they won’t be spoilerific since the current story has evolved far away from what will be shown. Note: Chinese Translation of this blog post is available! (Courtesy of Baojie ) The First Step It starts with some programmer art: (the weird trees above are giant hairs) From the get-go, we kn…
One of the most common requests I received for Phoenotopia was to add a double jump. Of course, once the game was out, adding a new movement mechanic like that wasn’t feasible without dramatically altering the levels and puzzles. It’s one of those deceptively small changes that carries massive, far-reaching consequences. Still, I mentally bookmarked the idea for our next project. And now, in St…
Note : Chinese Translation of this blog post is available! (Courtesy of Baojie) When it comes to making commercial video games, let’s just say it’s not our first rodeo 😎 (It’s our second) Steam automatically compiles various play data from gamers. From Phoenotopia, I know that we have a roughly even split of keyboard users and gamepad users. From achievements, I can tell which bosses were defe…
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Announcements are the developer’s own posts to the game’s Steam news feed: updates and their patch notes, in-game events, releases and sales. The important ones are marked on the players chart.