Rambling on the current state of development

I haven’t written in this devlog for a very long time now. I guess after the game got accepted on Steam I put a lot of attention into that. There’s so much day-to-day business stuff I have to do each day now. Replying to emails can take a very long time.



I haven’t been putting time into development of the game itself, which is an ongoing theme of this devblog. But there was a time when I was super productive, pretty much exactly one year ago. I was getting a lot of work done and updating this devblog daily.



I think one of the most useful aspects of this devblog is that it gives me accountability to you, the reader, to keep you informed. When I was in the habit of updating this everyday, I would feel guilty if I missed a day. But then when I get into the habit of missing many days in a row it’s equally as easy to keep missing them.



So what I want to do is get back into writing down my daily development progress, even if (or especially if) I don’t do do any work. It’s been too many days to count now exactly how long this project has been going on. I think it’s in the realm of 500+ I’ll start writing the date down instead, and maybe I’ll get back on track to the day numbers at a later state.



23/11/13

* Added new difficulty option for normal and hard modes



The game is normal by default, but players can enable hard mode in the options menu. Hard mode buffs the enemy HP and attack damage and is really quite a lot more challenging and interesting that I had expected. It makes you play the game a bit differently and a bit more intelligently. I also plan to have an even harder difficulty mode that is unlocked when you complete the game. I may also put in some kind of permadeath mode where players aren’t revived after fights (for a given level).



DD has been in development for a very long time in terms of real days and years, but the time spent in coding the game has been less. I am still excited about the idea of writing a book-long post-mortem on the game when it’s all complete. There’s a lot of things I’d like to talk about and share with others.



As a game developer I do play a lot of other titles. I probably play a new game every day or two. There’s so much great stuff out there, and in retrospect, perhaps there are some things about Dungeon Dashers that I could have changed to appeal to a larger audience (e.g. just made a more standard roguelike experience with procedural generation, standard loot, but still with my combat system). It’s hard to say. A lot of people like the storyline and puzzle elements of the game. I just hope I can make enough and make it interesting for a long period of time.



I guess there’s always an opportunity for free updates with new game modes in the future… or Dungeon Dashers 2.