Project MCH - Devlog 1

Hello everyone, this is Ray!

Today, I am writing my first devlog of this project that I have started. In it, I want to go over the many events, troubles, joys, and hurdles that went into creating this game. So, without further ado, let’s delve into what this project exactly is.

The Beginning To start, I want to go over the inspiration for what this project was originally about. To start, this project was originally going to be submitted to another game jam, titled the “Magical Girl Game Jam #8”, thus giving it it’s theme and general appearance of the game. The theme that I went with at the time was “This entire city must be purged.” in which the original premise was that the character would go around hunting or killing enemies, in a sort of doom-esque fashion. Given the nature of how certain magical girl shows like to add darker themes to their stories (like Puella Magi Madoka Magica), I figured it’d be an interesting concept.

Development The development started off pretty smoothly. I modeled a quick pistol, a simple low poly character, and bad but fast-to-implement animations. From there, I started building the basic gameplay systems and messing around with enemy AI. As time went on, I started doing more in regards to magical-based abilities, so I incorporated a few things such as the ability to hover, a “shotgun beam” attack, and a temporal orb to slow down enemies. However, I started to run into issues within the project.

During the development, I unfortunately had several issues come up, and the biggest factor of that was scope creep. While at first I originally planned on just a third-person shooter with magic, I soon started adding several other features to fully flesh out the gameplay. Taking some feedback from previous projects, I wanted to make sure that the gameplay felt great and made sure it gave ample feedback to the player. While I believe within the current state there is always room to grow, I do believe I have gotten it to at least an acceptable rate. Second, time and deadlines became an issue. During the time of the jam, I had some other things take up too much of my time, and thus my development slowed a lot. It got to a point where I could only implement some small features or fixes in between larger sessions.

Due to these issues, and a few more, it became so that I wasn’t able to get the game to a state to even submit it to the original game jam.

The New Game Jam When I was unable to submit it; it kind of bummed me out not going to lie. Motivation for finishing the project dwindled a bit and I almost was about to trash it all together. However, I soon came across a game jam that was about improving old game jam projects. With this jam, I got the newfound motivation to finish the project, or at least get it to a more refined state.

New Developments The biggest part of this was not only getting the project closer to completion but also looking a lot better. The biggest change that I made was creating a new player model from the ground up. I designed the character taking some inspiration from magical girl shows and adding a few twists such as the gas mask to tie in with the sort of “hunter” theme I was going with. Then, I modeled, rigged, animated, and exported it to unreal while vastly improving the quality of my workflow. From there, I reconstructed the original animation states, and character actor, and fixed up some of the programming in it to allow scale easier with updates. I then added more weapons and functionality with an inventory system (something that I often struggled with in the past LOL). I added some more feedback to the player, a new settings menu (which I also never did before in the past LOL), and a lot of other QoL stuff. Finally, I started working on a basic game loop akin to the one I’ve done before with Dr Aple. While I don’t plan on having this be the main (or only) game mode for a more developed game, I think that for now, it explores enough of the game’s systems to demonstrate the project.

Final Thoughts While I have enjoyed adding to this project, I know that it is still VERY far from anywhere near a finished state. I had to dumb down the enemy AI due to certain issues I was having, so the enemies won’t attack the player unless the player walks into it (are they still considered enemies, lol?) Furthermore, I want to rework some aspects of the game, add more content, and especially new features to the game. I think that I will definitely enjoy working on this project more in the future.