Given the date, I just want to make sure everyone understands that this is serious and not some April Fool’s Joke.
I’m back everyone. I somehow managed to survive GDC and being staff at another convention both in one week and not come out sick or dead.
I was hoping to playtest the game at my alma mater’s Prototype and Playtest Night but space filled up there pretty quickly so I spent my time playtesting others’ games instead of my own. However, I still came out of the conference with some ideas for how to change up my game.
I believe I’ve discussed changing the title of Rogue Lives to Memento Mori before and I think that’s going to be the working title from now on. The basic idea stays the same: Zelda-inspired rougelike where each run is a new life in the reincarnation cycle of a legendary hero.
However, I’ve decided to try changing the gameplay to work off a card based system. Every card (probably called a Memento in game) is supposed to have some memory of the hero stored inside of it. With each life, the hero will be able to add some new memory to the deck based on the accomplishments made in the previous run. I’m still designing how that would work.
In addition, I’m planning on a simpler dungeon system of moving between rooms with the press of a button instead of having to navigate inside of them. This was born out the switch to the card system and a desire to get that up and running on mobile. This seemed like a simple way to do that and fits the somewhat turn-based structure I think the game will go in with the new system. I still plan on things like locked doors and closed doors but they will obviously need to be changed a bit to fit the new structure.
I also decided to start “from scratch” on a new project for this but over time, I plan on incorporating as much of the old version as I can to save myself time.
Over the last week, I’ve taken just about every opportunity to work on the project but that leads me to my last announcement: Due to how hectic my schedule has been with all of the outside issues that need to be taken care of, this will be the last Progress Update post for a while. I still intend to make them but I don’t think I can make enough progress on a weekly basis with my schedule the way it is at the moment. Honestly, I don’t think I was making enough for a while. My current plan is to make one whenever I feel like I’ve made a decent amount of progress on this new protoype.
That’s it for now. I guess I can’t say see you next week so I guess I’ll see you later.
J.D. Kelly 