Hello again! I find it very important to keep everyone up to date with development progress and behind the scenes of Tiny Pixel Planets. So today I will be discussing some of the feedback I got on the last post and how I plan to tackle these issues.
Tiny Pixel Planets is Tiny Pixel Planets
First of all I must get this out of the way because I have seen a lot of comments, and not just on the last post, comparing my game to Starbound or Terraria. Obviously that cannot be avoided given how look wise they are similar, but that is in no way my goal. I really don't care what Starbound or Terraria have done or how to make my game more like those games. I am a solo developer that is working on a free open source passion project, I could care less if people prefer games that are made by entire studios over my game. In fact I highly recommend if you are looking for something big and layered, go play those games, as they are both great games on their own. Now with that out of the way let me address my plans for fixing issues that have been brought up.
Issues I am fixing
I had a lot more features planned for Title Update 6, but it would appear that my game is in desperate need of a revamp, so I have scrapped any feature I haven't added yet in order to focus on these issues. Let me go over the revamped features I have added/plan to add.
The tutorial
Like I mentioned in the last post, the current tutorial in TU5 sucks. It hardly goes over everything in the game, and you have to exit and create a new save after finishing it. So I have added tutorial popups that will be displayed throughout your play through. You can toggle these tutorials on/off in the save creation, and that decision will be auto applied to all new saves from then on. This is already in TU6 and can be played tested in the beta versions in the git repo.
Sound revamp
I am in the works on a new sound system that will allow for customizing not just sound effects volume, but different categories of sound effects. This is a feature that definitely should've been added sooner, but I guess I got to ahead of myself on features.
Settings revamp
I am also working on completely changing the settings menu and adding much more settings. Instead of having one page with all the settings thrown on there, there will be tabs for each setting category (sound, graphics, keybinds, ect...). I am also planning on making it so you can change settings in the game and not just from the main menu.
Gui
I have never felt like the GUI was a problem, but admittedly I am the developer so I tend to not notice things like this. I made the GUI the way it is because I find pixel density very important. Almost every single pixel in Tiny Pixel Planets is the same size, making the game feel consistent. I fear that if I have different pixel density fonts or make the GUI not match with the pixels in game, it will make it look horrible. I will experiment with GUI resizing, but I make no promises that it will change. I guess my alternate would be to resize the entire game to make the global pixel size smaller.
Player animations
I have been experimenting with new player animations that are much more fluid then the ones currently in game. My biggest hold back is that if I redesign the characters, I will also have to painstakingly redesign every clothes/armor in the game. And if I add more frames to the animations that will be even more work. I will work on the animations, but this will delay TU6 by a sizable amount. Also I have increased the player's base speed which feels so much smoother now.
Space navigation
I don't necessarily understand what is wrong with the current space navigation system, but I will be adding a star system map to help with navigation.
Closing remarks
I am a solo dev, that does all the programming, art, and game development myself. I am trying my best to make Tiny Pixel Planets something everyone can enjoy, but maybe it's about time I accept that I need help with working on Tiny Pixel Planets. If you are someone that can lend a hand with development, or have some ideas of your own, feel free to take a look at the github repo, or get in contact with me at [email protected]. Anyways until next time, go explore space!