Regarding the Demo for Mass O' Kyzt

As with every video I have to mention my upload schedule- this is the first video in a while that's actually been on time. If you're watching this, I appreciate your patience with me straight-up not doing what you subscribed for. Anyway, let's just get on with it.

The demo for Mass O' Kyzt will very likely be released alongside the full game. This is due to the fact that it's a much better idea to start with a complete product and cut bits off rather than to built a small version of something, release it to the wild and then try to build on top of that.

The fact that I've revamped large elements of the game like three times now should be proof enough of that- it's very difficult to gauge when the game is actually done and whether the game is what I want it to be. It's probably not the best idea to just start making something and mutating it until it's acceptable, but my experience with design documents have been disappointing at best.

So far, all the projects I've tried to start that involved a design document have failed and I've given up on them before long. Of course this is entirely on me, I'm not trying to tell you that design documents are useless but I would have to change the way that I approach creative design to be able to access the full potential of a design document.

For some reason, my brain just doesn't work in a way that facilitates design documents. Maybe they're too rigid or I'm just bad at writing them but something's awry. I'm probably not going to return to design documents until it's more suitable, for instance if I were to become part of a team.

I'll stop rambling on about design documents for a moment and get back to the point. Mass O' Kyzt is a difficult game to trim, since it's not particularly big to begin with. It's got a nice core gameplay loop which is only just rearing its head after months of work and re-working. Naturally, the big question is "How am I going to make this demo both fun in its own right as well as able to incentivize further purchase of the game?"

The most likely scenario is that the demo will limit the number of consecutive waves that the player can play, and also will gate off a lot of the unlockable stuff that I've got planned. This means that the player can get a feeling for the core gameplay without being able to just play the entire game straight through.

As to when the game will be released, the current estimate is some time in January. Maybe around Christmas, but since I need to create a bunch of new maps, environments, player skins maybe and I'm sure a lot of other stuff I'm forgetting right now- I have my work cut out for me. I can probably implement some of this stuff in updates after the fact once I've established a sufficient baseline of unlockable content, but that could take a while.

We're already almost over with November and I'm just barely finishing what I believe to be the core loop. Sprite work is what takes me the longest and unfortunately it's what I need to do the most of at this point. As I'm sure you have been able to tell if you've seen the current iteration of the boss sprite that comes in five waves, I'm not exactly the best at it.

This video has really been quite rambly and it could get a lot more rambly so I'll cut it short now. I'm not quite ready to create the next Devlog video and I didn't have quite enough content to fill up an entire video just talking about the demo when I really just needed to get across a few key points, so yeah I allowed myself to go off on a tangent a bit more.

One more thing, if you want my hot take on something that I can make a video about- please let me know, it's not easy to come up with video ideas all the time. I've got a few more video ideas, but it would help to have something fresh.

Anyway, thanks for watching and stay tuned for the next video I make probably being Devlog #16, but no promises because everything I say is incredibly volatile and open to change. Goodbye!

How to use the Steam API with Godot

I'm back!

That's right, after like a month and a half of not doing anything game or YouTube related I've decided that I can come back now and not have a mental breakdown.

I've still got a lot of schoolwork coming up and that's not going away any time soon, but I've finally cleared my current backlog of work and I'm feeling a bit more confident now.

Anyway, yeah, I'm back. How do I do this YouTube thing again? Videos. Something about videos? I don't know. Let's get a few things clear because I did some stuff over the past month that I want to advertise in a mainline video, so here we go.

First off, I made a Discord server for Mass O' Kyzt, that game that apparently I'm working on. If you want to join it you can, I made it primarily because it sounds fun. Don't go there expecting any serious events, formal announcements or particularly well-enforced rules.

I will however be posting a checklist of things I do with regard to my game. You'll get a (potentially boring) list of small changes constantly being drip-fed to you through the #dev-diary channel. I'll post these just as I do them(or plan to do them) and just sift back through them to make sure I cover everything in my Devlog videos.

This means that anyone on my Discord channel will be kept slightly ahead of the curve, able to see what's going on in my game before I tidy it up into a nice clean format. Also, if this proves to be too annoying for you, there is a mute channel option if you right click on it.

So yeah, all around a fun time. I said there wouldn't be any serious events but hey- maybe I'll organize something if there's enough interest in it. Who knows, currently there's like nobody in the server so I'd appreciate it filling up a bit before I propose something like that.

There's a never-expiring Discord invite link in the description of this video, and it's also linked in my channel header. Both of these will grant you access to the esteemed Mass O' Kyzt Discord Server.

Anyway, let's move onto the other thing.

I made a small arcade-y game called "This Game Is Not An RPG"! I only spent about a week of on-and-off working on it, but it's been received fairly well and I'm personally quite proud of it. From a self-analysis point of view, I think it's quite polished compared to my previous work and it holds up with a simple and intuitive premise- "hit the squares".

It's got a nice scoreboard integrated into it, and as usual almost everyone beat my high score of 144 already. Again, the link to this is in the description, I hope you enjoy it. Oh yeah, there's an easter egg somewhere in this game. I won't tell you where but someone found it within like 5 minutes of the game being published so maybe it's easier to find than I thought.

Anyway, thanks for watching and stay tuned for more videos now... that's right, I have to make more of these. Exciting.

A Temporary Hiatus