Mass O' Kyzt: What's left?

I've spent the past seven months or so working on this game and I feel that I'm nearing the finish line. It's a good feeling, since as much as I love working on it, I'll be glad to have something that I can present and say "Hey, I made this!"

So the point of this video is to discuss what I think is left to do at the present moment in time. As it has done countless times before I'm sure my final product will differ somewhat from my working specification, but I'm feeling confident that it won't change too much now.

So what is left to do? I've completed what I believe to be the core gameplay loop, so I think pretty much everything with regard to the actual gameplay is going to stay pretty consistent from now until release. At most, I'll make some balance tweaks and I still have to draw some UI elements which are looking a bit dodgy at the moment.

The big task is going to be drawing a bunch of unlockable items. Things like player skins, enemy skins, maps, and tilesets. I think this is most likely what's going to take up the bulk of the remaining time, since I need to create enough to give the player something to work towards.

I don't know how many "skins" I'll add, though I'll probably add at least two for the player and at least one for each enemy type. If I need to, I can always update the game with more content later on- as long as there's a solid baseline so that the game feels sufficiently complete, and so that the player can feel as though there's something that they want to play the game to get to.

I've currently got an icey environment which I'm pretty happy with, and I'm just about to experiment with some slippery "ice" tiles, though I don't know if I'll keep them. I'm planning a nice lava-filled environment, which I think will look nice and be a welcome contrast to the aforementioned icey environment.

I've also got some vague idea for a "bizarro" environment which I'm imagining would have some bright checkerboard textures, vibrant colours, etc- I'm aware that it's a bit silly but it's not necessarily lore-breaking. The Kyzt are able to 1. fuck with your perception of your environment and 2. build complex structures- it all makes sense. Trust me.

On the topic of complex structures, it was recently suggested to me that I could make a kind of technological "space-ship" design of environment. I'm thinking that it would take place inside a human ship that the Kyzt have invaded and are trying to take down from the inside.

That's quite a lot and it still doesn't even include the skins that I have to create, though I imagine those would be simpler on account of not being an entire screen's worth of data at a time. At the rate of about one environment per week, plus doing all the skins in one week, plus giving myself two weeks for final changes, accounting for the fact I can't estimate timelines to save my life and Steam's "final review"- the game should be ready for release by the end of January.

I'm gonna take this opportunity to say that despite the fact I'm talking about six weeks from now, that is a frighteningly close release date.

I've been working on Mass O' Kyzt for around 7 months now and I'm pretty ready for it to be done, but I really can't overstate how strange it is to actually imagine it being finished.

So here we are, I guess that's my schedule. If I can finish the lava-type map by next Sunday, I'll be right on schedule. Realistically who knows if I'll be able to do that but that's become my goal during the writing of this video.

Thanks for watching and stay tuned for more of the video equivalent of someone laying awake at night, thinking to themselves in their head about what they're gonna do tomorrow and how they're going to do it. Goodbye!