Development diary #7

Jupiter Moons: Mecha Devblog January

Let me start by saying Happy New Year!

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday period and took some time to relax. While I did manage to squeeze in needed family time, I was also continuing with work on the Jupiter Moon: Mecha demo, which is nearly here (I know, I say that every month).

Throughout December I focused a lot on the (boring) back-end of the game, which isn’t the most exciting but is extremely important. This mainly included finding and patching bugs that kept popping up with the addition of new content. On the ‘visual’ front, I managed to get some UI work done (the start screen (below) is now in the game), item tool-tips, a game over screen, and some design work on the nano corrupted arena’s you’ll be fighting in.

Battles need a worthy arena A few months back I shared the random arena generator, which is working really well. However, as you venture through the story of Jupiter Moons: Mecha I wanted the growing presence of the corrupted mechs to become apparent. For this, I decided to manipulate all the current arenas to become ‘corrupt’. You can see a preview of the new nano corrupted arenas below.

A Powerful mech deserves some powerful items In December I shared the new post-battle reward screen where you’ll be received powerful items. I spent the last month updating these items and making them more cohesive with my final vision of the game. The balance of the items will no doubt change once the demo is available and I can see what’s potentially too powerful or slightly underwhelming.

Here’s a shot of all the items currently in the game.

So, how far away is the demo? As I keep saying, the demo is nearly ready. I want to be transparent with you and let you know exactly what’s missing, which is what I’m going to be focusing on in January and February.

Wishlist full game!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1288540/Jupiter_Moons_Mecha

At its core, the demo build needs more content, mainly in the form of campaign generators. This will allow the demo to offer a scaling difficulty with progression, cards and items that scale with rarity, and an increase in the variety of post-battle rewards. Included in my ‘more content’ list is also the addition of 3-4 more card mechanics. I would love to introduce a new card type for every 5 minutes of gameplay, with the whole demo aiming for a 20-25 minutes play through.

Finally, the demo needs a shop. This will not reflect the shop in the final game, but, as I write this, any currency earned in the demo is about as useful as a destroyed corrupt mech! The in-game shop will provide a little bit of variety to playthroughs, allowing you to experiment with different items and mech builds.

It’s pretty safe to say that not all of this will be done before February. I’ve had an overwhelming number of offers to test the game/alpha demo. It’s possible I have an alpha build ready very soon, but this will be missing some of the features mentioned above.

Once again, I want to take a moment to say a massive thank you to everyone who has read this/these developer blogs, interacted with me in Discord, shared any of my content on social media, or even shown an interest in Jupiter Moons: Mecha. The progress I made as a game developer in 2020 was amazing, and a big part of