Every project has a start.

When I first started working on this game, I thought it was going to be a really short project, something that should take at most 3 months (2 months of development and 1 month of polishing it up).

Now, 8 months later, after having rewritten the game from scratch and redoing the basic level progression a few times, I feel like I've finally finished developing the main game. Which only means that it's finally time to starting polishing whatever the heck I have and making it into a proper game!

This devlog is mainly for documentations purposes, so I may look back at it and try to understand how the development of this game went.

The start of the project

I've been working on another game (currently called "JJAT+") for the past ~6 years. Ideally, I wanted to finish that game before starting anything else. However, this also means that I haven't have anything new and finished to show others for quite a while.

Eventually, two things prompted me to give this side project a try:

1. I played through Catherine early 2019, and then started speedrunning it around July of that year. I liked the puzzle aspect of the game so much that I started wanting to make my own version of it;
2. I wanted to make something special to try and submit to the SRL Mystery Game Tournament. Since (I foolishly) thought the game wouldn't be too hard to make, I decided to give it a try and see how far I could take it in ~2 months (and then using as much time as possible to polish it afterwards).

In one weekend, I had a working prototype, so I knew this was doable. Developing that into a game, though, was quite hard...

Rewriting everything

After 4 months of development, I got tired of everything breaking from time-to-time, and being force to make levels around bugs. So, I did the only sensible thing and rewrote everything (kinda) from scratch!

One issue I had is that I didn't document anything as I wrote the first version of the game. At first, all was fine. However, as I stayed a few weeks away from coding the game (doing levels and modeling/animating stuff), I started to forgotten the specifics of the game's architecture. This is partially my fault, as I tried to do every interaction between objects using Unity's Event System (which seems to have been deprecated, or moved somewhere else, without any notice), even though I haven't used Unity in ages and had never used the Event System like that.

The main issue I had with the way I was using the Event System is that the communication was always in a single direction. However, in some situations it would be interesting to be able to query another object (for example, when pushing a line of blocks you need to retrieve the slowest speed of the blocks in the line). I eventually learned that you can use "out" arguments in Events, which allowed me do messages that return something to the caller.

After around 1 month of rethinking my actions, I finished rewriting the game and everything was away more stable. From this time onward, I mostly focused on making levels, although there was still the occasional bugfix and I did redo the assets to make the game (hopefully) clearer.

Initial release

Well, this game has finally gotten to a point that I feel like I should "just finish it already". By this I mean that I should stop doing more levels or implementing new features and should focus on:

• UI
• Menus
• Backgrounds
• Songs
• Sound effects
• Particles(?)

Basically, I should start polishing the game up.

In order to get some feedback (and to start tagging releases, and properly tracking changes), I've decided to already release the game in this initial state. It currently only has two basic menus, so the game may start and end.

But that's it for this first release. The next couple of steps are doing a level select screen and then allowing to remap the controls from the game.