Floors of Discomfort - Where I have been and what I am working on

I left this blog off several months ago during the development of a game engine at the time I had called 3 Prong Engine. The development of that has stopped as I have moved on to bigger things which I will get to in a little bit. I had started talking with some friends about a game idea in late June, a platformer of sorts which would use 3 Prong Engine as it's base code and test the engine's ease of use and what not. The problem was, at the time I really didn't have much of an idea as to what I was doing when it came to game engines, and so the project soon turned into a big mess of impossible to manage code, and so the engine was retired with the game idea. At some point in the future I do plan on possibly restarting the work on the engine again, because they do help, but as of right now I am going to stick with my current game development method. However, that is not what this post is about. I want to write about what I have been up to during the summer, and why I have just neglected to write a post since June.

After retiring our previous platformer idea, which we do plan on coming back to at some point, I started playing around with random level generation. It was nothing more than a fun thing I was doing one night, nothing crazy, but then all of a sudden I had an idea for a game. A platforming, side scrolling, roguelike dungeon crawler that would be hard as hell, and like that Floors of Discomfort was born. Though, in the beginning it wasn't called Floors of Discomfort (I think I had named the folder Storm Cloud or something..). I had proposed the idea to my friend, the graphics designer on the 3PP team, and he thought it was a great idea as well and so we started development.

He started making some graphics for it, I started laying out some basic collision maps, and randomly generated levels. Before we knew it we had the beginning of a game, the first floor was done, we had some items, and the ideas were starting to fit together. This was about mid July. We still didn't know where we were going with this, or what our end goal was, but there was something here, we both knew that and so we continued.

Here is the first development video I had posted on YouTube:

As you can see in that video, things were still a little shaky, not everything was looking and working correctly, but the concept was there.

Fast forward a few weeks and we have already successfully created the second floor. Things started to really take off, and we started to have a vision for the game. We knew what we had to do. This next video update is of me talking about these additions.

Things are starting to come together a little more here, I had made a few bug fixes, and an entire new floor was in the game now.

Going forward another few weeks now and we have made a ton of progress. Three enemies are now present on the second floor, and the third and fourth floor have been created. I had done a complete rewrite of the game pretty much during that development period and so everything was working smoother, but there was still a lot of work to do.

This is the third video update for the game.

After that update it was two weeks until I had posted the next update. That update is the most recent update, and even though it is far outdated from the most recent version, it highlighted a ton of progress. A new level, five new enemies, and a new item.

Since then there has been a crazy amount of progress on the game. Enemies have been redone, new enemies have been added, bug fixes, and player movement flow. I plan on making a video this weekend on all of the new additions and fixes because it is too much to highlight in this post since I am so backed up on my blogging.

So, yeah, that is what I have been up to for the last few months, and why I have suddenly disappeared. With the development of FoD progressing though I will be making blog posts whenever I can, probably whenever there is a new addition to the game that I feel should be highlighted. I tend to only make the videos when I feel that there is a mile stone that has been reached, but the blog posts can be more frequent and highlight smaller changes in more detail than I can in a video.

Anyway, I am back, so expect some stuff. I am going to keep the old posts for novelty value, just know that the development there has been halted and the majority of my development time is being spent on FoD.

- Frankie