– Changed the sprite for W magnets
– Changed an easter egg
– Fixed an unlock that wasn’t working
– The descriptions for two skins are no longer switched
– Fixed a bug where sound wouldn’t unmute properly
– Added a description of changing weapons to the tutorials
I was hoping I could finish Hammerkind before it was time for me to start moving around again, as I’ve a pretty nice situation where I could dedicate most of my time to coding. And it turns out, I did! As of early this morning I finished the last major thing on my checklist, and felt confident enough to set a rushed release date for this Saturday. Which was just in time, too — I left today, and am writing this on a train!
Between now and then my awesome tester team will be helping me do one last scan-through for bugs, and I’ll be rushing in some needed bits of polish that shouldn’t take too long. This thing is finally ready and I couldn’t be more excited!
I took a few days off from Hammerkind development this weekend to participate in my first Ludum Dare! Ludum Dare is an event where you attempt to create a game, based on a theme, in 48 hours. It’s a competition with scoring and things, but the real point is just the challenge and intensity of concentrated game development. It gives you an excuse to do something fun, where time pressure supplants the pressure to perfect every last detail. It was really fun, and I couldn’t be happier I joined in!
The theme this year was that old Zelda line/meme, “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this!”. I decided to try a game where you are the reason it is dangerous to go alone… so when your targets travel in packs, you need to split them up so that you can pick off stragglers. For the “take this” part, I worked in a ~mysterious~ story bit where you’re “taking” your prey to fuel something called the capital-f Furnace. And then despite all that sounding rather dark, your character is some funky frog thing called the Woplin that is 100% silly.
While it’s rough and rushed, it’s also complete and mostly free of bugs (occasionally things can end up walking inside walls, but that shouldn’t occur very often). You can go try out Woplin here.
I might return to this sometime and clean it up a little, and refine the level design and difficulty curve (the actual levels were built in the last 2 hours as I was attempting to squash some last-minute bugs).
Now to get back to Hammerkind. I love this!
The way things are going, I could very well be done around the very end of April or the very beginning of May. Hooray!
Alright, glad to finally have a website set up. This took far too many false starts. Thank god for wordpress. I’ll pick out a different theme eventually (using the default theme has to carry some kind of bad connotation), but for now I kind of like how the default looks, with a few minor changes.
Hammerkind is finally in its final stage of development, whatever that means. The beta testers have been a huge help, and I’m eagerly anticipating releasing this to the public. The portion of the public who are fans of Homestuck, anyway. It might be a little confusing for anyone else.
What I’ve got left to work on is mostly visual flair and extra bits of fanciness to complete the feel of a well-rounded game. Depending on whether the rest of my life becomes a little bit smoother, I’m predicting anywhere between 1-2 weeks and 1-2 months. The last month of not really doing anything hasn’t felt very good, but it’s far superior to the entire year that the project was abandoned!
More news will come as warranted.
