Seven Signs was supposed to be something very different, in its early stages. Now it has become another game that's not going to go beyond prototyping. And another learning experience..
About 88 days of building the framework and learning Unreal. Mostly spent on the main character movement, UI, AI, interactions.. some useless water that created nothing but bugs from the start, and a lot of debugging. When I started the project I had a much more organized production in mind.. O o. I never expected the amount of mess and debugging.. Same links:
https://vm.itch.io/dark-prototype
Give it a try if you want.. It's just one [demo] level. And it's dark. The idea was to feed monsters light... and they become light. The problem is: it's all very dark. It can't.. not be dark. One possible solution is to simplify the environment a lot to make this darkness work.
I'm not sure about the whole project anymore, because of a few things. One, it took too long to get here.. a prototype should be done in days or weeks, not months. Well, I needlessly worked hard on creating a framework that could be expanded upon. : / Two, I have problems with Unreal.. cuz yeah, it's not designed for 2D and 2D support is buggy and limited. It was just fun to use, but now I have performance problems, on top of the already existing limitations.
The stuff that worked kind of nicely for this project, and I like: first, the main character and the AI, which share some code. The player can move around in a complex environment with random slopes, no matter how steep, at any angles. And the AI can do the same, and follow you around, most of the time.. in this messy platformer. Also, it's a minimal shooter, where you pick up every projectile you shoot, there's no life-bar, so it's got minimal user interaction.
All in all, a project I liked working on, it's been fun, and it's also one of my longest-lasting projects to date. Unfortunately, another fail, another RIP, and another heavy stone that only adds to a long chain of unfinished projects. It's hard to keep making things, and not finishing anything worth something. I lack the positive experience of finishing projects I care about.. and I got used to making either very small, pointless test projects, or slightly larger projects that eventually RIP. -__-
I miss the good old days, when I was writing music, and finishing something I'd be happy about, at least for a while, was a breeze..