Hello, Catalysts!! It's been 2 years since release! Boy, time flies, doesn't it?
As I said in the Dev Update, this game's pretty much done-and-done! I'm real satisfied with where it's ended up and the reception it's got. Still, cool milestone! I had to post SOMETHING for it.
Actually! While we're here! How about I post OLD DEVELOPMENT SCREENSHOTS?
Behold, the first ever gif i recorded for Settlemoon:
Placing buildings was the first thing I got working and it kinda all revolved around that. That building sprite is unused in the final game, but you CAN get it in your town if one of your buildings ends up being invalid.
Originally, items were going to be made using combinations of materials, instead of just dropping a single material to instantly make an item. The whole recipe thing ended up being really complex...too complex for this kind of game! I eventually brought it back as a sort of puzzle for NG+ with the weird distillery building.
Check this out too, some of the first adventurers:
You could probably already glean this from the "generic" depictions in game, but this set of adventurer cosmetics are considered the "default". They have an...interesting fashion sense, though, so you're rarely gonna get anyone looking exactly like this.
While i'm at it, here's the original draft of how I expected progression to go:
You can see that I stuck pretty close to the plan for the first 3 bosses, but diverged quite a bit for the latter half! That's just how things go during development.
Developing this was overall a lot of fun! If you're trying to get started on gamedev, it's really important to get the "game loop" closed as fast as possible. That means being able to launch the game, play it until a stopping point (like the credits!) and return back to the title screen without using any debug tools. Once you have that set up, it's just kind of expanding that loop until it's satisfying! For Settlemoon specifically, the loop was "place buildings, wait, get money".
One more thing before I wrap up this post: An early draft of the Quest screen!
This menu was REALLY tough. I had to convey a lot of info in an intuitive way...This big map looked nice, but it broke the whole "3 horizontal stripes" format the rest of the game was in. It would've been weird.
The quest menu is still kind of my biggest sticking point with this; i think if I were to do a big revamp (or a sequel...) then quests would be delegated to specific buildings instead of a whole entire other menu. But, sometimes it's best to just stick with what you got already! Redoing stuff endlessly can get you caught in a loop where nothing gets finished.
Anyway, that's it for now! Thanks for reading, and thanks for playing! I've been really busy with other projects, but I can't reveal any of them quite yet...Keep an eye out for anything with Lepioid on it!