July 2023 Progress Report
Looking presentable.
Infinite Level game discussed: The Future Project
I wonder how I'll fill out this progress report...hm? Oh, sorry, just talking to myself. Welcome to the July 2023 progress report for The Future Project, where I'll be sharing what all has been happening over the past few months. I've been doing these every few months for over a year now, but I suspect this may actually be the last one. You see, I've narrowed down the release time to Q3 of this year. This means, the game could release anytime between now and September. How exciting! I'll be making a special dev blog post here when I do have a solid release date to share, as well as promoting that fact everywhere I can. In the meantime, let's talk what all has been done between April and now.
...well, I'll try to at least. There's really only so many ways I can say "I fixed bugs" in a single blog post, you know. But there are some other major developments too. For instance, last month I wrote about implementing achievements into The Future Project, and I've actually finished implementing both the Steam and Epic Games Store versions of the achievements in the game. I'm still testing the achievements regularly to make sure they're working as intended. Epic Games Store achievements in particular turned out to be quite a challenge, and I think that challenge made me paranoid that they'll one day just break out of nowhere. But, that hasn't happened so far, so we should be okay there. Thankfully, most of the achievements have pretty set conditions that are easy to look out for, such as finishing the game within a certain amount of time. The more unusual achievements like defeating enemies a certain way take a little more diligence. But so far, things have been working smoothly, which is great!
An example of how items are shown on the map. Notice the two missile icons in the upper part of the map or the gun image tucked between two areas.
Beyond achievements, there have also been a few notable additions to the game itself. However, one of these is more for playtesters, but it's proved a useful tool for myself too. I added a debugging menu into the game itself so I can jump around levels, add and remove powers on a whim, or change difficulty on the spot, among other things. This has been helping me a lot with playtesting and trying certain situations in realtime. The addition made that's more relevant to players is the collectibles map, showing where each collectible is in each of the worlds. However, it should be noted that this doesn't actually get unlocked until you reach the final boss' lair, at which point you can either charge in and finish the game or hunt around for more collectibles before going in. Much of The Future Project is about exploring, and I didn't want players to feel like they had to check off items on a list before leaving a level. I want exploration and item acquisition to feel as organic as possible throughout the main game, then at the end I reveal the hidden items and allow you to scoop them up as you see fit. Personally, my hope is that most players will try the final boss with the items they've acquired up to that point, and if they fail they can decide which items are most important and go for them. But options are nice to have, so if people want to hunt down collectibles before the big showdown at the end, that's a valid option too.
Those are easily the biggest changes the game has seen, but there's been a handful of minor changes throughout the game as well that are not all noteworthy on their own, but come together to help make the game better in the end. The first from my dev log is enemies dropping pickups for ammo and health restoration immediately upon death, as opposed to before where they appeared after the enemy fades. It's the kind of thing that probably should have been there from the start, but it took a playtester pointing that out to me to realize that. Similarly, I've made a few convenience changes for the player in the name of a smoother gameplay experience, such as forcing missile ammo to drop if the player is completely out of missiles or displaying how many times an earth platform has been summoned, and if the player needs to wait before summoning earth again. I've also given our antagonist, the Saboteur, some changes and additions to give their attacks more impact. The most notable is a change to their special ice slash attack, which I know I haven't really shown but trust me when I say it's a big improvement over what they were doing before. It much more closely matches the flashiness of their other elemental sword attacks, and more flash is generally a good thing. Some additional light changes include auto completing comment text on a button press, adding some decoration to the worlds, and various adjustments to enemy and player properties.
I've also been doing a ton of playtesting in the hopes of finding as much to fix as I possibly can. I tend to set aside at least one day a week to fully dedicate to playtesting, but there's often plenty of times throughout the week where I either do a short round of playing or have my wife playtest. Notably, I've been trying to do a lot of playtesting on the Steam Deck as of late. There's two major reasons for this. For starters, early on when playtesting I realized that the game was running pretty badly on the Deck, which I thought seemed a little silly. So I decided to get this game running as good and consistently as possible on Deck, effectively making it my reference point when it comes to optimization. If you're curious, I'm trying to get it so you can smoothly play the game at medium graphics settings, with maybe the odd setting on high here and there, all at the Deck's standard resolution. And thankfully, over the past few months I've largely been successful. I've been able to play through most of the game on my Steam Deck at an acceptable rate, with only the occasional hiccup in performance here and there. During playtesting on Deck I simply make a note of where performance hits occurred and go make the necessary adjustments in-game. Also, as small as this sounds, it's worth playing to make sure the game still works right on smaller screens. Early on I had the occasional issue of UI going off screen which is obviously not good. As of right now, I haven't had any new issues in regards to screen size on Steam Deck, so it's looking like I might have gotten all the issues. Now watch me eat those words later...
There’s also been some interesting playtests over the last few months that have shown me what all is possible in The Future Project. Probably my favorite has been my minimum percent run, where I get through the game with as few items as possible. That includes whole powers, by the way. I think I'll refrain from saying what powers can be outright skipped, but know that there are at least a couple you can ignore if you're so inclined. I was impressed by how different the game could feel in this situation, where you have to ask yourself how to do certain tasks without the powers that they were designed around. It honestly felt like playing a different game at that point, which I thought was cool! Of course, this type of run is meant to be for more advanced players of the game. I wouldn't expect anyone to do this on their first playthrough. But, once you're more comfortable with the game's mechanics, there are achievements for clearing the game at a low percent. Might be worth a shot! On the polar opposite end, I'm actually currently playing through the game on hard mode and gathering every item and upgrade I can before moving on to any major battles. You can become quite powerful this way if you know where to look, but I'm even taking it a step further and doing the odd sequence break so I can be even more powerful than one would normally be capable of. Why do this? Just to see what's possible, and if I should adjust the game's balance accordingly. And if I'm being honest, it's just kinda fun to do.
To wrap things up, I do have one quite amusing bug story that is actually a recent development. I can't get into the details why, but there's a late game power that, combined with pausing the game, created a most curious situation. The player would suddenly be very speedy after unpausing the game, but only for a brief moment. It was definitely pretty funny to see and discover in the moment. Thankfully, solving that bug was actually pretty easy. I just had to tweak certain operations, make sure I didn't break the pause menu in doing so, and then be on my way. It was easier to fix this unusual bug than to implement achievements, if I'm being perfectly honest. But anyway, that will wrap things up for today. While it's certainly a lot smaller than it used to be, my bug list still has given me plenty to do, and I should probably return to it. Before I go, I do want to once again remind you that wishlisting The Future Project on either Steam or the Epic Games Store (or both if that's what you want) is highly appreciated. The game's getting closer to a release date, so having it on your wishlist will be helpful for knowing the moment the game releases. And it makes me a happy camper too. After all, who doesn’t like seeing numbers go up? Thanks in advance!
Until next time!
-Lance T.