Hey, look who released a new game out of no where!

Yeah, I should probably, like, actually talk about what I'm doing sometimes.

I'm not really sure to call this a major announcement devlog, or a postmortem devlog. It's.... kinda somewhere in between? I dunno, there isn't really anything to announce other than "hey world, this tiny little game I made to learn how to use Love2D exists! Go play it or something!" So I'll err on the side of caution and call it a postmortem devlog.

What went right

I made Prolog with the intention of learning Love2D, without really caring if I actually make a good game in the process. Well, I certainly learned a lot about Love2D! This project really gave me a better idea on how Love2D works and how I need to structure things in future Love2D games. Somewhat. It took me over four years and four abandoned projects to really get the hang of Gamemaker, so we'll see if that's actually the case especially because upcoming games are going to look very different from Prolog, but I'll get to that in a sec. 

Despite "not really caring if I actually made a good game", I think Prolog turned out really well! By practice game standards, anyway. I will admit, my expectations weren't all that high, so exceeding them isn't all that impressive. But hey, this game is still fun! And that showed me something important: I can make a decent shoot-em-up game without as much work as I'd need to put into a major project to make it good. That's great news for me, because this is the kinda-sorta first game in a series of side projects I'm planning on making called the Quad-I series, a series of small formulaic shoot-em-ups I'll be working on to have something less stressful to work on than my main projects that will still be reliably fun to play.

This game also served as the prototype for my major Tou-Hou inspired side project series, Quad-I, and served its purpose as a simplified test run of the formula quiet well, and even contributed to the formula some.

What went wrong

The code. Goodness gracious, the code. As my first 'good' Love2D game, having clean code wasn't something I expected to achieve. And considering Love2D tutorial's and guide's questionable priorities, I don't blame myself for not making the best, cleanest code. However, that doesn't change the fact that this game's code is a confusing, unorganized mess.

Part of me had hoped that if this game turned out well, I'd be able to expand it to a game with a more "normal" length for loops. With how messy the code is, that isn't really practical without a major coding overhaul, and I'd rather put that kind of effort towards a new major project.

Also, the changelog. I'm not sure if you noticed, but it doesn't exist! Yeah, I kinda dropped the ball there. But with only one beta testing release and one planned major release, I'm having a hard time getting myself to care.

Am I satisfied with how Prolog turned out?

If I were to judge this game the same way I judged my previous major project, not really, no. It would get the same judgment: if it were a flash game is the late 2000s or early 2010s, then I probably would have really liked it, but it's not, and this isn't, so I probably would only play it if a fellow small game dev I'm somewhat acquaintance with was advertising it.

But that's not how I'm going to judge this game! This is a practice game. And by practice game standards, I'm greatly satisfied with how it turned out. Honestly, I'm probably more satisfied with this game than I should be. If I'm going to be real here, it's not as good of a game as Metatanks; It's smaller, it's shorter, it has less replay value, it has worse graphics, and while it's more polished in some ways it's even more unpolished in more. But I think this taught me a good lesson in putting things in perspective. Metatanks was a good game that I expected to be a really good game with a small cult fallowing with my hopes far higher. Prolog is a pretty good game I expected to be a mediocre game. Coming right off the heels of a project I was disappointed in, Prolog looks better in my eyes than it really should.

However, at the end of the day, Prolog is almost exactly what it should have been.

What's next?

Well, not more Prolog, I can tell you that much.

First, I'm going to take a break. Hopefully, a month long one, but with no side project lined up, I'm not sure if that will happen; After all, I started the series of practice games that lead to Prolog's creation about a two weeks sooner than I should have just because I was excessively bored.

After that break, I will probably start these two projects, in this order: Sabaton, and the first REAL Quad-I game.

My first full-length major project will be a game with the working title of Sabaton, which... REALLY needs a better name, since that name is taken by not only a metal band, but a game that seems to be a tie in with said band. But I don't have a better name for Sabaton, so I'm calling it Sabaton for now. Sabaton is going to be a rougelite game greatly inspired by classic Gauntlet Games, specifically Gauntlet II for the Gameboy, since I played a lot of that on my dad's Gameboy when I was a kid. And when I say Gameboy, I mean THE Gameboy, the one with the monochrome green screen and the gray casing. Ah, those were the good days. Ok, they weren't really, but I still had a good time.

At some point, probably some time between 1/3rd of my way through making Sabaton to after I finish it, I'm going to start the first Quad-I game, titled "i!i!i!i: The Quadruple-I Mission". yes, that's going to be the name. Sleep-deprived dreaming Metaphor is bad at coming up with names, and sleep-deprived just-woke-up Metaphor has even worse standards for names. The Quad-I series is going to be a series of formulaic bullet-hell (ok I don't like swearing in my creative projects and text associated with them, but there LITIRALLY isn't a better name for the genre soooo) shoot-em-up games, with the main gameplay Gimmick being the player's main weapon is rather weak, but charges up their Quad-I unit, that can then use more powerful Special Attacks. Unlike Prolog, future Quad-I games are planned to have 3 special weapons, and 3 types of ammo to go along with it. Formulaic isn't a term I really want to be actively advertising for it... but hey, Touhou and Megaman are formulaic as crud and a lot of people love those series, so clearly it's not an objective problem.

I'm not sure how great of an idea talking about future projects I don't even technically know if I'll start is a great idea, considering that sorta thing has put too much pressure on me in the past... well, nobody reads my devlogs, so it probably won't matter.