The New Site
MetalPetal
With the downfall of Cohost, which was the previous main place I was blogging about Project Petunia, I figured it was finally time to use this domain name I've been sitting on for something good. This will be the site that I post to from now on for all game development related matters.
The Development Progress
Since I am now having to justify the time of anyone who wants to see Project Petunia on another website I think giving out some more detailed information about the development is warranted.
Currently Project Petunia has been hurtling towards its very first playtest build. I have been tuning and changing the game as to make it feel good under my own hands, but you can only discern so much on your own when it comes to Platformers, a genre of game heavily affected by game feel. Game feel is a nebulous term, but yet it almost completely determines whether someone will ultimately enjoy playing a game or not. It just needs to feel right or the whole experience crumbles into itself.
As for the playtest build, it is my most polished and feature complete initial build of any project I've worked on yet. That doesn't say much for an obvious alpha of a game, but I have been dedicating more time to make sure the first impressions of this game for any would be playtesters ends up as positive as a game in development for a few weeks can manage.
This extra polish is a lot of features that people take for granted, but do indeed have development time behind them. Things like pause menus, adjustable options, controls, that sort of thing. These are features that would have ended up in the game later on regardless, but getting an early start on them now should hopefully give people a better time with the first playtest build.
The final question is probably the most important one. How much actual content will be in the initial playtest build? The answer is more than I've added in the first release version of previous games of mine. There will be three playable levels in the build. I will also be keeping the game's three debug levels accessible to players of the build. There isn't any reason for doing so, but there is also no harm in having them around if players want to mess around with some mechanics.
The three levels of the release will be consisting of two standard platforming levels and a level featuring the game's "vehicle", a hoverboard. Each level has a corresponding difficulty to it as well. I am hoping beyond the feedback regarding game feel, I can also get a rough idea of how and in which directions I can push level design in this game to be interesting, while also scaling difficulty in a natural way.
The Future
The immediate future of Project Petunia is obvious, but what about after the first playtest build hits online shelves? After I drop the first build, I am going to try my best to collect as much feedback from it as I can. With all the feedback I can gather I will tweak and change and tune Project Petunia into the best version of itself. Whatever that will look like, we will just have to wait and see.