Floors of Discomfort Development Update #9

Hey guys! It's been a little more than a month, but so much has happened in this last dev period that I just delayed this post a little bit. Regardless though, here it is! Development update #9.

This month was a huge month. All sounds are done, the trailer is done, several new items have been added, features have been added to the settings page, tons of bugs have been fixed, and lots of polishing has been done. The best part of all, the game is done, and we have launched our Greenlight campaign. I will address each of these things individually during the course of this post.

So sounds. Sounds have been something that I've been talking about for a while. It was one of those things that I kept pushing to the side and never really took the time to focus on them until this month. This month I added sounds everywhere that I felt they were needed. I've learned that with sounds, sometimes less is more, so I've only added the sounds that I feel really do add something to the game. Needless to say, I'm glad they're complete.

The trailer is completed! Like I said it would be in the last dev update, the trailer was completed this month. It was a gruelling process... it took two days of work to complete but I finished it. It was more because video editing on Linux is damn near impossible :P. Regardless though, I managed to finish it and it came out pretty good I think. Here it is:

A controls menu, and a resolution changer have been added to the settings page. These were last minute additions, but very much needed in any game. It came out well I think.

Items are a big part of Floors of Discomfort, over the course of this last development period all of the usable elite items have been added to the game. By usable I mean they are either passive, or require the player to activate them. Elite items are items dropped by the elite enemies of each level. Here are each of the items and what they do.

Spectral Jaw - Has a chance upon killing an enemy to increase attack speed greatly for two seconds.

Dark Mass - Has a chance upon killing an enemy to spawn a black hole which sucks in enemies around it for 5 seconds.

Leech - Has a change upon killing an enemy to regenerate one bar of the player's health.

Sack of Goo - An item that allows the player to restore his health to full. Has a 5 minute cool down.

Laughing Skull - Give an extra life to the player. Upon death, the player will be resurrected with full health.

Staff - Has a 1% chance upon hitting an enemy to launch that enemy into the air.

Baby Raptor - Spawns a baby raptor to your side that will follow you and assist in attacking enemies. He does very little damage, but he's invincible so he's a nice little extra dps boost.

The chance for an enemy to drop an elite item has also been increased significantly. It's gone from a 10% chance to 45% chance upon killing the enemy. When play testing I found that the enemies just never dropped the items so I realized then that the probability needed to be higher.

That also goes for body parts. Body parts have a greater chance of dropping now, just as a side note.

So bugs. I can go on and on about bugs, but I won't. I'm just going to say that a lot of the major bugs have been fixed, many of which where game breaking so that's good. A much more interesting topic to talk about would probably be the polishing that has been done. A lot of little things have been added to give the game a better feel, and make it more interesting. Just to name a few:

- Jump height now depends on how long the jump button is held.
- The knight now has a medium rage attack when slashing.
- Player can now turn on a dime. There is still deceleration, but not when changing direction.
- The health of the later enemies has been increased to match the difficulty expected out of them.
- The tree boss on floor three is actually a challenge now (more of a bug fix I guess)

There are probably a few more, but those are the most interesting ones for sure.

That about does it for the changes to the game itself. A lot of the other additions/fixes are not really worth talking about, but a lot has been done to make the game feel nicer. It wasn't much of a new feature month.

A large chunk of this month was dedicated to marketing. I've been very active on social media, I did a Reddit AMA, I've talked to bloggers about the game. I've been making a great effort to get the game out there and get exposure. It has worked to some degree, but an official review hasn't been done of the game yet unfortunately. Regardless, we have decided to release the game, and it is the right decision to do so.

Floors of Discomfort is available for purchase on the official website: http://threeprongproductions.com/fod/ for $5.99

We are also trying to get through Steam Greenlight right now, so if you are interested please vote! http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=418768384

We have also submitted the game to Desura, GoG, and Itch.io.

It has been over 10 months of development. It's amazing to see our idea become a reality, and it makes me happy. It started as an idea and blossomed into something I am proud of. There is still a long road ahead of us, but I am confident about the future.

Well, that's about it for this month. Thanks for sticking with me until the end of this long winded post.

Until next time

- Frankie

Floors of Discomfort Dev Update #8

Wow! A month really flies by when there is development that has to get done. I'm probably slightly late on this one update... It's all because I wanted everything to be perfect before I wrote this post! So here we go, development update #8

This past month or so consisted of a lot of little changes. Floors of Discomfort is at a point now where there are tons of little things that need to get done before the game is ready for launch. The little things include a change in the items UI, sounds, collision fixes, settings menu fixes, some aesthetics, promotion, and the infamous bug fixes. A few more things have been added to my todo list but it is slowly dwindling. Most of the stuff on there now is for the advertising side of the game! Marketing is important, I know, but I hate it. Oh well.

Okay, so I mentioned an item UI change. This comes as a result of the increasing amount of items being added to the game. Originally we had a hotbar system, the kind that is found in most RPG games; however, this wasn't working for the game. It was in the way and just didn't work with the fast paces play style that this game presents.

 

That picture is an old one, but you can see on the bottom that there is a hotbar, yeah that's what I'm talking about here. It just didn't work the way we had hoped so Jerry (the designer) got to work on a new design. Before we knew it we had a brand new design, and one that is here to stay. It is a ring design. By holding the tab button a ring menu pops up that will display all the current items the player has in his inventory. He can then click on one, selecting it, and use the right mouse button to activate it. Below is a picture of this design.

This design works so much better, and I think everyone will agree with that. Those are all the usable items at the moment, the ring is not filled because we still have a few usable items to implement, and we also want to leave room for future items that will be created. You can also see that when an item is selected the icon for that item will show up at the bottom next to the character specific attacks, indicating that the item is selected. I am very pleased with this change.

Sounds! We have begun adding sounds to the game :D This is a big step for us. For the longest time the game had no sound, and it was really missing it. Over the past month we've been adding sounds little by little. The basic sounds are in there, attack, jump, fall, hit. We are working on adding the more specific sounds for specific enemies and hopefully that will be done by the next development update. Music on the other hand is lacking. We currently have a few songs in place it is far from a final sound track. Three Prong Productions is a team of two. I am the programmer and Jerry is the designer and artist. Neither of us have much experience in game music. Our goal is to be as self sufficient as possible in this game development process, so we are going to have to learn to create our own. The current music in the game are all originals, but they need to be improved so that's something that will be improved upon.

The settings menu in FoD is very minimal. It is simply a menu for sound volume, music volume, and full screen toggle. There has been a long standing problem though of the sliders not working! This dev period I finally got around to fixing that problem. Now the setting menu works as intended, with the exception of full screen but that's a whole different problem I have to look into. Here's a picture of the settings menu.

Another nice fix this month was collisions. I've had a problem since the beginning with collisions, I had to write some hacks to get around it. This month though for some reason everything clicked and collisions work great... I am going to be completely honest, I did not structure my code the best way possible. I have since learned since I started the project, but I am stuck in this code structure that results in half an hour to fix something like collisions across all enemies and characters! I have considered rewriting the game many times, but realized it probably isn't worth it at this point. In the future I will use some better coding structures for sure though.

The final awesome addition to the game this month is something that I am really excited about! When the game is beaten with each character, that character will have his own end game... cut scene of sorts that will describe why the character is in Nexrolis' universe. Jerry has been doing a crazy job with creating the images this month, here is a sneak peak at one of my favorite scenes Jerry has drawn so far.

It's all coming along really well.

That it for this update! By next month I'm hoping to have usable items done, sounds done, and a trailer done... it's going to be fun. See you next month!

We are now on IndieDB so if you're interested in FoD you should really check it out, I'm always posting art and videos on there: http://www.indiedb.com/games/floors-of-discomfort

Also be sure to follow Three Prong Productions on twitter! @3ProngProd

Hopefully I'll have a video update by the weekend as well so be on the lookout for that.


P.S. we are looking for beta testers so if you would like to be a part of that send us an email at threeprongproductions@gmail.com, tweet at @3ProngProd, or send us a message on IndieDB

- Frankie