- Weekly Dev Log #27 - 21 December 2022
Greetings! Welcome back to another weekly dev log, let's get into it. So, the last time we left off, I had just started work on upgrading LoC to the latest version of the Godot game engine. At this time, the upgrade is mostly complete besides needing to redo particles effects and replace broken tilemaps, very exciting stuff. However, I have a couple pieces of big news for Lands of Crown, those being: There will be no more weekly dev logs. The pace is just too slow and it probably appears to most readers that nothing occurs within a week to even justify a dev log anyway. I like the idea of staying in touch with the community and not simply abandoning everyone, as I have seen it happen too often in the past, but this method does not seem to be working. Therefore, there will be no more weekly dev logs, but that doesn't mean there will be no dev logs ever. I have thought about doing a dev l…
- Weekly Dev Log #26 - 14 December 2022
Greetings! Welcome back to yet another weekly dev log, where I discuss all the changes that occurred within the last week! Although the last few dev logs have been quite lackluster, I hope to change that starting today. I've been hard at work thinking, planning, and coding and I have a few things I want to discuss today. First of all, the game is currently being updated to use the latest version of the engine (Godot) I have been using which, although still in beta, I believe to be a worthy endeavor in the long term. For as long as I've been developing Lands of Crown, a constant issue and cause for concern has been the impact and effect of 2D lighting on the game. Due to the way lighting is handled in the old version of the engine, lots of sprites were being redrawn to the point where even the bare bones amount of lighting I was currently using was enough to cause the FPS to tank, This m…
- Weekly Dev Log #25 - 7 December 2022
Greetings! Welcome back to another weekly dev log, let's get into it! I understand that for these past few weeks, there has been very little progress for the game, and for that I am sorry. I did not realize just how busy University would keep me, and how little time I would have to work and think about Lands of Crown. But that changes soon! Starting this week, progress should resume it's previous pace, and there is a lot I want to do in that time. From what work I have been able to do over these weeks, it has mainly been minor tweaks and bug fixes here and there, along with other under the hood changes to make development easier. Perhaps I should put an end to these weekly dev logs and move to a monthly schedule or release a dev log every two weeks instead of one week. I think it would allow for more substantial news about the game, rather than the slow drip of content you see in the we…
- Weekly Dev Log 24 - 30 November 2022
Greetings! Welcome back to another weekly dev log, let's jump into it! As I have talked about in previous dev logs, I am currently attending University. As such, a lot of my time has been taken up working for my classes. I haven't had a chance to work on Lands of Crown in a good week or so, and for that I truly do apologize. I can understand your frustration at the situation, which brings questions up such as "Will this game ever be released?" or "Will this game just be abandoned?". I can assure you that no, this game will not be abandoned and yes, it will be released at some point. However, game development is a marathon, not a sprint. And as working on this game is not my full time job at the moment, there will be times when development slows down. But I just want you to know that I will keep working on it, and that it will be finished someday. I have big plans for Lands of Crown that…
- Weekly Dev Log #23 - 23 November 2022
Greetings! Welcome back to another weekly dev log, let's get into it! Keeping in line my larger plan to overhaul the game, I decided to spend this week working on an area that should be pretty integral to the game: allies! The problem that exists for allies is that allies are hard to regularly come by, and they are not incredibly useful while playing. For instance, if you somehow get an ally in the current state of the game they can only follow you around and help in fights. Now, this is not a bad start, but I want them to be capable of a lot more. What do you have in mind? For starters, allies should be able to be directed around and told "Stay here." or "Attack this target." to allow the player more freedom in how they play. If you need to stealth around a building, you can't exactly have an ally or two following you around otherwise you would end up setting off all the traps. Allies…
- Weekly Dev Log #22 - 16 November 2022
Greetings! Welcome back to another weekly dev log where this week I spent a lot of time working on stealth! As I'm sure many of you have experienced, stealth in Lands of Crown is currently... lacking, to say the least. There aren't really any ways to sneak into buildings, and there really are no stealth items or abilities (besides perhaps the Ghost's ability). This was not intentional, but rather a byproduct of working and developing the game. While other systems and mechanics got more and more work put in, stealth was not really considered or accounted for. Therefore, as part of a larger plan that I'll talk about later, I made it a focus this week to work on stealth and see what could be done to make it more fun and worthwhile. However, instead of adding some new item or ability to act as a temporary fix, I wanted to fix some of the root issues regarding stealth. Stealth, even with non…
- Weekly Dev Log #21 - 9 November 2022
Greetings! Welcome back to another weekly dev log, let's see what's been done in the last week! New Level Generation This week I experimented with some different algorithms to try and make the levels of Lands of Crown feel more compact and close-knit, rather than a wide open area with buildings in it. I felt it was too easy to get away from trouble, and NPCs would be less likely to be seen and interact with one another if they choose to walk to some corner of the map. I'm still tinkering with the system, but I am happy with the results that I achieved. What happens is that many of the open regions in the level are filled with walls, leaving these small hallways between the various buildings. I'll have to make some additional art for these new walls that will exist, as I don't want the regular walls of the level to be dividing the town up, as I feel that doesn't make too much sense in th…
- Weekly Dev Log #20 - 2 November 2022
Greetings! Welcome back to another weekly dev log, this time on an important milestone. We have reached *20* consecutive dev logs for Lands of Crown, meaning it has been about 5 months since Lands of Crown first appeared on Steam. It has been quite the journey developing this project, with many highs and many, many lows along the way. Developing Lands of Crown has not only strengthened my skills as a developer, but also introduced me to the workflow involved with putting a game on Steam. I want to thank everyone who has followed me on this journey, let's see it through to the end! What's been worked on this past week? This week has been spent almost exclusively on bug fixing, which culminated in 3 patches for the demo being released in that time. These patches fixed everything from NPC AI, character interactions, weapon tweaks, etc, etc. If you want to see what is exactly in all the pat…
- Weekly Dev Log #19 - 26 October 2022
Greetings! Welcome back to another week of development, let's get started. As we left off last week, the work on the Rival system has progressed well. I believe I have everything in place for the system to work, At the start of the game you will see who your rivals are, and after each level you'll be able to see how much stronger they've gotten. Then, when you reach the final level you'll have to contend not only with the King but also all your rivals from the start. I just need to make sure it runs smoothly and without too many issues. I would also like to add more variety to the different modifiers that can affect these rivals, so that will be on my todo list as well. Beyond that, most of my time has been taken up squashing bugs and other issues kindly brought up by the Lands of Crown discord. Everyone there has been a huge help not only in finding bugs but also for suggesting a lot o…
- Weekly Dev Log #18 - 19 October 2022
Greetings! I am back again this week with more news about the Agent system, so let's get into it! Last week we ended off talking about Agents and how they'll be this troublesome element to your quests in a particular level. However, what if we took this one step further and had some sort of persistent threat that was present throughout your entire run? Introducing... Rivals! Upon starting a run, you'll be introduced to your rivals for the journey. These are characters who are also travelling to the land of the Crown at the same time you are. Of course, you're all after that Crown, but you guys aren't going to take the same path to get there. This means that you generally won't be seeing your rivals throughout the game, except in certain scenarios, because you're all in different lands completing your own quests and stories. However, once you complete a level you'll get an update on your…
- Weekly Dev Log #17 - 12 October 2022
Greetings! Welcome back to the weekly dev log. Let's get into it! At the end of last week's dev log, I announced that I had something 'in the works' that would, if it turned out well, would accomplish the feat of differentiating Lands of Crown from Streets of Rogue, my main inspiration, as well as doing so in a way to make the game more fun rather than just needlessly adding a new mechanic for no reason other than to differentiate the two games. So, what's this new thing? Well, I did some brainstorming and, along with help from a friend, came up with a mechanic that I'll dub for now as 'Agents'. Agents are characters that you will find in every level that will act and behave as regular NPCs... for a while. It turns out that these Agents are quite similar to the player in that they also have been tasked with accomplishing a variety of quests for the Witch in order to progress to the Crow…
- Weekly Dev Log #16 - 5 October 2022
Greetings! Welcome back to another weekly dev log, where things are a bit different this time. It is no surprise that this game is heavily based off of Streets of Rogue, as that was my foremost inspiration for Lands of Crown. I wanted to recreate Streets of Rogue with a twist, something to make it stand out. But more than that, I wanted to prove to myself that I could make something as complex and developed as Streets of Rogue. I wanted to prove that I was a competent game developer. When this project started out, I wanted to include elements of Streets of Rogue but still have the game be a different thing, not simply a clone of Streets of Rogue. I tried to make the game loop work with an open world setting, but I just didn't see the fun in it. Perhaps that shows that I'm still not there yet. Regardless, because I couldn't make a mashup of different genres, I slowly and surely just emul…
- Weekly Dev Log #15 - 28 September 2022
Greetings! Welcome back to yet another weekly dev log, where I keep you up to date on everything taking place in the game and where things are headed. What have I worked on this past week? This past week I worked on creating a new trailer for the game, as well as updating the GIF on the store page too. The last trailer that was showing for the game was over a month old, and I felt that enough had changed in LoC to warrant a new trailer, especially with the Steam Next Fest fast approaching. I also redid the GIF that plays on the store page, because that was made even before the last trailer, meaning that it was quite old and outdated. I hope that with both of these updates that people coming to the store page can really understand and get a feel for the game. This week was also spent on many bug fixes and improvements. There were a lot of strange behaviors with the AI that I believe are…
- Weekly Dev Log #14 - 21 September 2022
Greetings! Welcome back to yet another weekly dev log, where I go over all the changes from this past week, as well as where things are headed in development. What have I worked on this past week? New Art! If you've seen the store page or played the demo recently, then you'll no doubt have seen the new art in the game. For the longest time I felt something was 'off' about the art, and I figured out that it was simply too similar, too plain. To remedy this, I added a variety of new tiles to all the floor/wall tiles in the game, so that you'll see randomized tiles instead of the same texture repeating over and over. Behind the Scenes additions! As it always happens in game development, a lot of the changes and new code is not for the player to see, but rather to ease development along and add more tools to use. There have been a few of these changes this past week, including a redo of a p…
- Weekly Dev Log #13 - 14 September 2022
Greetings! Welcome back to yet another weekly dev log where I talk about how development has been progressing and where things are going. What have I worked on this past week? New Items! I've spent the last week working on adding 12 new items to the game that are meant to act as utility items to help the player in certain situations, rather than simply a weapon to wipe out any opposition. I plan to add more items, again focusing on stealth or diplomacy rather than combat. I want each playstyle to feel unique and somewhat focused. Item Manual! To go along with these new items, there is now a certain NPC found on the Boat that will show you what every item does and what it's stats are. You can see armor, weapons, items, and more in the Item Manual, and I think it will also be a good place to include lore tidbits as well. Where are things headed? For this week, I plan to focus on creating…
- Weekly Dev Log #12 - 7 September 2022
Greetings! Welcome back to another weekly dev log where I share my progress for the week and where things are headed. What have I worked on this past week? Discord! Finally, after a long time we now finally have a Discord for Lands of Crown! It is still very young and bare bones, but its good to go. If you want to join, you can click here to do so. New Dialogue! For the longest time, the dialogue responses for all the classes was very rigid and not very interesting. NPCs could only give a single response, and said responses were baked into the code of the game. Therefore, we now have a system where NPCs can choose from a variety of lines to say, and those lines can be translated too. This is a welcome improvement that I hope will introduce some personality and life into these characters, let me know what you think! Small Additions/Changes! As always, there's been a ton of small tweaks a…
- Weekly Dev Log #11 - 31 August 2022
Greetings! Welcome back to another weekly dev log, where I discuss all the things I worked on, and what lies ahead for Lands of Crown. What have I worked on this past week? Traps! As I was looking at the game, I realized that it was lacking something, and that was traps. If I want stealth and non-combat play styles to be useful, I need to create challenges that those play styles excel in. So, what do we have then? Exploding Traps, that upon destruction/activation will explode and afflict those in range with an effect. Bolt Traps, which are placed on walls that upon activation with shoot a bolt that can apply an effect. Spewer Traps, which spew out a stream of (for now) fire, ice, or poison attacks. Spike Traps, which raise up a wall of spikes that damages anyone who gets too close. Wall Traps, which simply raise up a wall that blocks a path. To go along with these traps, I've also added…
- Weekly Dev Log #10 - 24 August 2022
Greetings! Welcome back to another weekly dev log, where I go over my progress for the week and what lies ahead. What have I worked on this past week? This week was definitely a 'under the hood' week in regards to progress. There have been a number of minor improvements and tweaks, for example in buildings with trap objects, such as Cauldrons, they will now always have a random effect, instead of always being two poison cauldrons and a blast cauldron in a particular Witch house. I changed how keys and owners work, so that now a key will only spawn if needed, and a key only correlates to a particular owner. This means that I can have multiple small buildings in a chunk each with their own locked items and corresponding keys. Along with these, there have been a number of small changes and improvements. Beyond that, I've been working on adding additional weapons and classes to the game, su…
- Weekly Dev Log #9 - 17 August 2022
Greetings! Welcome back to another weekly dev log, where i discuss all the changes of the last week and where things are headed. What have I worked on this past week? A Demo! As you are probably already aware, last Thursday I released the Demo for Lands of Crown, and I think it went quite well. If you were playing the demo you will have noticed multiple updates for it, when I was fixing bugs and polishing features. There was quite a few fixes that needed to be made, but I'm glad to have ironed those out now. Quality of Life improvements. As mentioned above, there were quite a few things that I had become used to while developing the game, that needed to be changed for someone first playing. Such as how inventory cycling works when scrolling, and changing how menu indicators worked, among other things. There will probably still be more things to tweak and change as development goes on, b…
- Demo out now! - 11 August 2022
Greetings! After nearly 5 months of development, Lands of Crown is finally ready as a Demo! Now, just as a disclaimer, this demo is meant to show a 'vertical slice' of the finished game. This means that all things shown are subject to change as development continues. I will of course be listening to any and all feedback I get during this time to improve the game as much as I can, rest assured. I look forward to hearing from everyone who tries it out! Until next time, aGoldenFly
