Augury Devlog #4, Final

Hello again friends. This is the fourth and last devlog for my September 1GAM, Augury.

There’s always that feeling when you’re ceasing work on a project, that feeling of “glad to be done and doing something new” mixed with “ahhh if only I had more time I could do X, Y, and Z.” What’s that expression? Art is never finished, only abandoned.

THE FOCUS OF THE MVP

A lot of the time I spent developing on Augury was spent defining then developing to a set of MVP features. It was something I wanted to try so I stopped ending up with a bag of mechanics, as opposed to a somewhat complete game. Overall it went really well for me. I was able to build on top of that feature set and I at all times since it got completed had something playable.

After I finished it though it was very nice to relax and just noodle around with the gameplay and development. As you can see from the gif above that ranged from gameplay tweaks to just doing some particle effects. It was a fun time, and I felt unburdened by the need to do a bunch because i’d already been disciplined enough for this month while developing the MVP. I had licence to noodle.

SOME STUFF I ADDED

I’m not going to go over everything I did, as I think it’d be more interesting for people to just play the game and see what they think. Here’s some of the stuff i found fun and or interesting to do.

FIRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEE

I did a bunch of particles! They were really fun to do. They’re not really something I get to do in my dayjob so I pretty much knew nothing about using them before I started.

I did not make these from scratch myself, I pretty much followed these two youtube tutorials to the letter, they were great!

Weapon Trails - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8hijUge7IY

Fire - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Mw6NpSEb2o

COMBAT AND PUSHBACK

I added a physics knockback to the sword swing. This was something I added in one line of code because it sounded fun, and it turned out to be a MASSIVE help in how the game felt. Plus it was just a really fun little thing to play around with.

I never did get around to making a charge attack that super amped up the knockback. Alas, it’ll have to be for another time.

SOME STUFF I LEARNED

Something that I’ve been getting better at since doing 1GAM this year is just….not feeling the need to build everything by myself. None of these projects are something I would commercially release, they’re hobby games. Therefore, I don’t need to do everything!

Melee combat is so hard. I feel like I barely scratched the surface with this project. I think I’d need to make a lot more of them to even feel like i was close to making something fun. This is a two pronged thing by the way - I feel likei@m bad at both the physical feedback AND the design of an interesting combat system.

So much of what makes melee combat FEEL good is the physical feeling feedback that you have in the world, the weapons, the characters, the enemies. It’s a large amount of work, and also fascinating. Ranged combat is so much easier in that regard, because no one expects it to feel nearly as meaty and full of feedback as they do melee.

With the above in mind melee is probably a bad fit for a 1GAM, at least on the surface level of thinking about it. Something that I use 1GAM for though, is getting better at things in a consequence free environment, And how else am I going to make a good melee combat game than by making a bunch of bad ones? Eventually I gotta get better at it, surely.

AM I HAPPY WITH AUGURY

Overall, yeah. It’s a pretty cool looking little thing to have made in a month. I’m not mega happy with how the combat is. I don’t think it’s especially...fun? I know I certainly wouldn’t play it in its current state more than once.

That’s fine though. I had fun making it, and I feel like the next melee game I make will be even better for the lessons I learned here.

Next 1GAM

As I mentioned in my last 1GAM I’m going to make a tactics rpg thing! I’ve been playing a lot of Fire Emblem, and I think it’d be a bit of fun to implement some of the systems for its battles.

I also think I want to fold in some of the randomization of soldiers and such from XCOM. I want to make sure every single one has a name and that you’re ideally able to change those names and have a bit of fun.