What's Been Done These Two Weeks?

Honestly, a lot of it has been boring maintenance and behind-the-scenes stuff that probably won't get anyone excited.

• A big overhaul of the map (one-way doors and water show up properly on the map now, this was only made possible through changing how it's drawn which took a lot of iterations to get right but ultimately just changes a few pixels you'll only look at every once in a while)
• A similar overhaul of the pause menu, reorganizing stuff on the system / collectibles status screen to fit things better and looking less messy.
• Balance changes, prettifying some areas that were rushed, fixing some softlocks (none of which were serious enough that I feel it's worth rushing out a hotfix this time! Hooray!)
• Some new systems for future levels.
• Implemented the 4 remaining originally planned spells (they're currently not ACCESSIBLE but getting them all to feel as fun and versatile as the basic bullet spell was a challenge so I've put this off for MONTHS.)

Finished one new level though! It's got a bunch of lore but ultimately mostly exists as a pure gameplay experience based around a gimmick (the sun trying to eat you). Given how large the game's gotten already (according to my test play savefile getting everything will already take ~20 hours!) I'm worried players will get bored unless I introduce new twists regularly so going forward more levels will probably be based around a central gimmick - this one is called Fastest Sun In The West and a big part of the core gameplay was based around that pun (thought you might remember a certain NES game with a similar level).

I'm thinking of retiring having Short Desert's secret path be how you unlock access to the Circus, because it's such a high pressure, janky level it feels better as a completely optional challenge - instead, you'd need to follow the plot of newly introduced character Deputy Carrol to learn more about the area story and then go in through the front door (which is currently just there for internal consistency but doesn't actually work).

The Elephant-Rune In The Room

Carrol would basically be an RPG party member so I'm still trying to figure out how that would work - mechanically it wouldn't be too hard (I could just reuse the follower code from Touhou: Hollow Hearts and even then I'd got this figured out years prior) but from a design and flow point of view - e.g. do I want to have paths that can only be accessed with that follower due to unique co-op mechanics, and if so how do I make sure the player can't get permanently locked out of anything important?

Cheester was originally just a throwaway character (I found "Cheester the Cheese Thief" in my notes one day and was like "okay I'm gonna do something with this concept", and since most characters so far are just very cynical and hostile I figured it was time for someone that's super positive and optimistic) but I was so happy with his design/concept I feel like his plot has to be the big thing connecting several different disconnected prior ideas - like what all the different hidden orbs will do.

...and somehow that convinced me that okay, this game needs a JRPG battle mode now. I'm not 100% on-board with this idea myself, since it's the biggest scope creep so far, but I was surprised by how easy it was to add the vehicle system and I figured that making the game change genres entirely just to mess with the player would be fun. The vehicle system uses the same player entity as regular movement, it just changes the player's state - so in theory, you could be switched from one room to another by collision triggers. And the same goes for the RPG mode: you could go through a door and suddenly be in a threequarter perspective RPG overworld just by me changing one variable in the player object. (And what I'm envisioning is that exactly this will happen in the endgame: you've practiced all these different things in separation and then the finale forces you to do them all in the same level. Kinda inspired by how the Nier games seamlessly switch between perspectives and modes, but I'll wait even longer to introduce it so it really throws the player off guard!)

Besides, there's already too much reading of flavor text, and the further I get into the game the less I feel like it's in contact with its Pizza Tower roots, so maybe I should just go all in on the Undertale influences?

Progress-wise, after you find the cleric Cheester asked you to find, you'll have the starting party and a bunch of previously inaccessible mousehole-sized level entrances can now be interacted with, sending you to the World of Cheese Crime levels. Said cleric will be a foxling, Cyrella, since pretty much every major character so far has been a rabbit and I need to balance things out.

The final two slots are optional and I'm thinking you'll have several options for who to recruit here, depending on how other plots pan out - for instance if Frie survives but gives up her plans for world domination, she can be the party mage, or after finishing the movie world Porkchop might leave her acting career and want to be doing some REAL necromancy; or on the melee side you could recruit Hookpaw Jones at the cost of losing out on her shop permanently. (To keep scope manageable, the optional characters would just get a couple unique story vignettes each but not actually affect how the WoC plot plays out)

Apart from the big effort in actually implementing the system, I want it to somehow integrate as smoothly with the core gameplay as possible so players won't feel betrayed by the genre change - not sure how to do this exactly but it might boil down to the player being locked into a box dodging enemy bullets on their turns, or just have things move at high speed with button inputs instead of menus to select things? (And of course, on the RPG overworld you'd move at the same high speeds you do in regular gameplay)

The Roadmap

So remember back in the first devlog where I titled it "Roadmap" and then didn't have one? This time I actually bothered to get all of the ideas that's been floating around in my head and shoving them into some sort of structure. (Usually I do all my planning stuff on physical paper just to get an excuse to be away from the screen / be productive while I'm involuntarily away from my screen, but I figured it would be slightly less unreadable with a digital version so I quickly mashed one together). And geesh, it was quite the rude awakening seeing it all laid out in front of me for the first time! I knew I had expanded the scope a bit from the original "five worlds, 50 collectibles" goal but geesh, I was still subconsciously expecting to be somewhere at the 20% mark with Bread Ruins finished and this is looking a lot bigger just comparing the size of the rectangles! This might keep me busy for another year at this rate.

How to read this mess:

• Left / right corresponds to time with stuff that's ready / in the works on the left edge and future stuff to the right
• Gray boxes are individual things, the larger boxes are what's commonly called "epics" in software engineering - big vague concepts made outta a bunch of smaller things.
• Arrows are direct dependencies where one thing MUST be finished before the next makes sense

What Does it MEAN??

Things for the near future are pretty clear, at least - adding the plot for Nugget Mines will happen soon, along the way I'll add the last few levels for the area and wrap it up. After that, Lake Slushi. Along the way there'll finally be some more movement abilities to unlock, which will result in a giant backlog of unfinished little loot closets I gotta suddenly actually make. World of Cheese will be the final really big addition, after that I'll try to get things to narrow down into some sort of conclusion instead of just sprawling in literally all directions.

I still don't really have any clear ideas about the ending, but I'm thinking something like Fallout or West of Loathing where the main ending is a collage of the different conclusions for each area will be the in order - since each area will have its own independent shorter storyline it's kind of the only way that'd work, anyway.

I'm not a super big fan of the idea of "true endings" or one ending being objectively better than another (because why would anyone want to get the worse one, then?) so it'll probably have to be some sort of personal taste choice: e.g. at the end you need to decide who you trust more and then escape with them, but there's nothing objectively better or worse with any of them - it all depends on your opinion about what's the right thing to do at the end.

Any More Demo Releases This Year?

Probably not - there's a lot of big things releasing this holiday season and realistically, you guys will be busy playing those instead of some random indie game that's not even finished yet. So get yourself some [local holiday food speciality] and see you guys in 2025!

Or, well, I'll try to post a new devlog on december 29th, to stick with the "once every 2 weeks" schedule - and hopefully there'll be something more meaty to show off at that point!

Stay flippin', folks!

/Yal