The end of prototyping for a game is always interesting to me. It is both and exciting and terrifying time. It's exciting because it is the first time that you see your work actually become a game. All the different mechanics and pieces you've been working on for the first time come together to make a coherent piece. But that's also where the anxiety comes in as all the things you've been avoiding to further development need to be addressed to make the game feel clean and put together. This week I've been working hard to finish the primary mechanics required for basic blacksmithing in the game. With that comes the possibility of my first demo for the game, which I plan to release next Friday. 

The primary work is what I call closing the loop. Mechanics have been made, interactions have been established, but a game isn't really a game until there is a loop - some sequence of things the player does repeatedly throughout the game. For this first demo, that loop is something like: buy materials, process them into a sword, sell the sword for money, and repeat. Up until now, most of my work has been in that middle step, processing materials into a sword. This is by far the focal point of the game, but until this week there hasn't been much of any reason to do that or any way to continue doing that. This is what I call completing the loop; once the focal point is established, putting the other elements in place that make it repeatable and purposeful. While you may think this is a small task, a lot actually goes into it. Most of my programming on this project has been moving and shifting data based on what the player does. Now, I need to add a number of feedback systems so the player knows what they are doing. After that I need to add the buy and sell mechanics. And once that is done there's a large number of artistic and polish things that need to be done to make the game give the feeling I want it to. I think most people would be surprised at just how much some of their favorite games are built up and fun to play because of the environment and polish rather than the mechanics themselves. This isn't to say that mechanics don't matter, but more that you need to convey those mechanics to your players.

So, this week I got the crafting put together and added a sell counter where the player can sell their swords. The crafting displays the stats of the blade and pommel that go into it, as well as the sword that results. This hopefully will allow the player to start thinking about their forging and start making connections between the material they are working with and the blade that results. After I get the buy counter in place (which is somewhat dependent on some environment designs I've been playing with), The player will be able to buy fuel and ore, and process them into swords to sell. This is where the true difficulty of this game will come in. Because this game is supposed to be an emergent game built around the stats of materials and the tools of the forge, playing with the math and the numbers to get the game to feel correctly is going to be difficult. I am hoping to have about 3 different metals with different stats to be in this demo, which means changing a large number of values on three different metals. That's going to take a lot of trial and error, and most of it will only be able to be tested in game. I have a few tools to help map out the math, but I won't really know if those estimations will feel right until I'm working in the game. Also, I can change the equations that determine how different stats are calculated. This is awesome as I can really tweak the feeling of the game, but it does make decision making more complicated. If the game doesn't feel right, is it a numbers problem or an algorithm problem? And if it is an algorithm problem, that means I need to rework the numbers in each metal. But, that's next week's issue so I won't belabor the point.

Another aspect of things that can drastically change is all the small mechanics I haven't put into place yet. These can really change the feel of the game, especially if I implement several of them. A couple of small examples are work times on the anvil and grindstone, and the quench tank cooling the blade when quenching. They are things I haven't implemented yet, but I know will have drastic impacts on the game feel once they're in place. The big question is, are those necessary for a working proof of concept? I'm not sure, but given how much work the demo still needs I may have to really think about that this week. Part of the fun of this project is how granular these mechanics can be. It makes deciding what is important and what to work on a challenge at times, but also keeps me excited for what the game could be. Another example of these small mechanics is allowing the grindstone to cut into the broad side of the blade to make it lighter. Weight and balance are two of the important criteria for a sword and that small mechanic would add so much to how the player can adjust that. Otherwise, those two stats are kind of static based on the metal you use. It would be really nice if all three of these could make it into the demo, but even if not I will still probably implement them pretty quickly after next week.

Well, we've looked a lot at the development side, let's address the elephant in the room; the ART. As you might've noticed, the images attached to this post look drastically different than what is on the page for the game or in previous posts. That is because after a lot of thinking I decided to scale up the art from 32x32 base tile size to 64x64. This allows me to get a lot more detail and will let me get the game looking much closer to what I want it to look like. That being said, that means I have to redo ALL the art that I've already done. I kind of knew that was going to be the case anyway, but it puts some new pressure on development that I didn't fully realize at the time. Because I now have this new art at a higher resolution, half my project is half the size of the other half, and won't be fully fixed until all the art gets redone. This make the game look kind of funky right now, but I'm hoping it will pay off by the end. For right now I have about three different areas in art that I'm thinking about. Those are environment, stations and the player, and UI/icons. Each one needs to be redone, and I need to make some serious design decisions for all of them. 

The environment has definitely been taking up the most space in my mind because it kind of determines the stations and player as well. The level is hopefully going to be pretty simple. The player is in a single room with all the forge equipment and stations inside it. That being said, I want to add the outside art as well. Down the line I might add a day/night cycle, seasonal art, or NPCs coming and going from the shop that I want to give the player the feeling of honing their craft while the world spins by. This is a crafting sim after all, and while not a traditional sandbox, I want the player to feel like their metal and their blades are their sandbox. It's going to be tough to get just right, but I want the player to feel that in this little room, they have developed skills that the rest of the in game world value and will come to them for. Down the line I might add more to the world for the player to explore, but for this demo I would just like to have an outside world around the edges of the smithy. The dimensions of the smithy and layout of it will also determine a number of decisions for the orientation and placement of stations, which is why I'm waiting to do the new station art until I have the level built.

The other big questions in art come from the UI side of things. There's so many decisions to make like how big icons are, what is the size and font of text, how will background and bars look, and what exactly do I want the player to feel with each menu and UI element. This is a lot to think about, and I think will also pull largely from the environment (which is also why I've been thinking about environment so much. Even with all these questions though, I am really glad I decided to do the art for this game myself. It is a lot of work, but I think the game will feel much more like what I want it to because of this. I am not the best artist, but I get to make all these decisions and change each aspect to point toward what I envision, which is really exciting. The long table in the images attached to this post is my latest piece for the game and I'm pretty happy with it. I'm excited to get all the art updated and in place to see how it looks, and I hope next week the game will be looking much more put together.

So. Now I've hopefully outlined what needs to be done this week. No pressure right? Honestly, as daunting as all of this is, I'm really excited. The nice thing is that the bar for completion is actually pretty low. I can just add in the buy counter, scale up the old art, debug things a bit and release that. It won't be exactly what I'd like, but it will be released. This is a proof of concept, not a full blown marketing demo. However, if I can get everything done, the result will feel much better and hopefully more in line with my vision for the game. I'm excited to get all the pieces put together and see how it feels, and I hope you maybe just a little bit are too. Feel free to follow the game page or look out for my next devlog on Friday. The biggest reason I want to get a demo put together is to see if this game concept is something that interests people, so once it is out I'll have a feedback form to see what people think about the idea. Well, that's all for this week and I'm looking forward to announcing the demo next week.