A new start.

Where have I been?

Hey everyone, it has definitely been awhile and I apologize for my absence. I have had a lot going on in my personal life that has taken my attention away from game development as a whole. As some of you might know I am still just a student in university. I changed universities and along the way changed my major and just been trying to focus on my personal life.

However, I am back to doing game development and my first goal is to fully release Project Dagger. So I have been working for a little while now rewriting the entire game. Throughout development Project Dagger has been many different games with very different goals. During my time off though I realized what I did wrong so far with development and what I want for it going forward.

Rewrite progress so far.

One of the things I was working on was the buff system, the old stat system was not as good as it could have been like in the current Steam version. For example, the old stat system just used integers to represent the values and the new version has a class with built in functions for managing things like modifiers, buffs, temporary or permanent increases, and much more. This approach is just overall way better.

One of the other things is reworking the inventory system and character stat system. Those of you who have played the Steam version might realize there is no longer mana and there is now just heart containers. I feel like taking a note from how Tiny Rogues works it makes the gameplay feel a lot more high stakes, where you are dodging projectile based enemies and simply have to dodge, each enemy hit is equal to one heart.

Of course weapons are still based on numerical damage amounts like 4 - 7 Damage, etc... This is because enemies do not work with a container system for hearts and will still have higher amounts than the player.

In line with the change to the tooltip system and the data it shows, there is also a change to items and how they are presented when you look at them on the ground. I felt like showing you the stats and information about an item when you go to pick it up makes a lot more sense than picking it up and then going to your inventory and looking.

A lot of the changes I have made and will be making rely on reducing run times, increasing the pace of the run, and giving the player as much useful information as possible while reducing unnecessary content. I am also working on adding proper controller support and steam deck support. This explains why the HUD is the way it is now with the player now just having 2 weapon slots and 1 potion slot at the bottom right of the screen.

A lot of this is just reworking what currently exists in Project Dagger and then improving. I felt really strong about the initial early access release but I guess now that some time has passed I no longer feel like the current version is the direction I want which is why these changes are all happening and why I am rewriting the entire game.

But yeah that is it for now, thank you all for your support this entire time I am extremely grateful. I hope to be posting another post soon going over some of the other changes. For now this is what I will leave y'all with.