This week is the close-enough mark for the start of my 3rd year making this game, and I'd like to take a little look back at how far I've come as a programmer, artist, and game designer.

2021, ~January-June

So I have to start here, because I have no record of 2020 so maybe I didn't even exist then..

Heres a screenshot of my ugly little game, made in GMS2! I started in GMS2 because I liked how easy it was for beginners. I remember showing this version for a show n' tell at school, and people said it looked like Terraria. Heres the earliest version of Benevolent I have an image of, and she looks off-brand to say the least. The colors are off and her design has less personality than I remember. In this version of the game you had this teleportation ability that let you teleport in a small radius around you.

Look at that portrait, haha! I totally stole the code for the system and I though the different expressions in the portrait was phenomonal. You also get a better look at the lighting system I had, which was made from cutting circles out of a black rectangle drawn over the whole room.

Oh lord, I made seperate animations for the different outfits. This looks terrible to me now, but I guess it was acceptable back then!

2021, ???

Heres a uhh... Platformer testing environment? I don't really know, but it looks like that. You can see a design for Benevolent that looks a bit closer to the current one in terms of colors, but still looks just far enough to be right. Not much else to say about this one.

2021, July

This was another platformer engine test, this time using tileset collision. Didn't work well, but it was cool at the time. It uses the same sprite as the other one, so maybe they were made at the same time, to test wether object-based or tileset collision were better for my game.

2021, July-2022,~January

This one was a real contender for the one going forward, but I decided to switch to Godot in around January I'm pretty sure. You can see a much more developed HUD and style than the other ones, which I liked the HUD. The version of Benevolent was also used up until recently, and her design actually pushed me to change engines. Her little hand-balls were too complex for me to even comprehend coding in GMS2, so I looked for an alternative and found Godot. This version also had a cool dialogue system I learned from FriendlyCosmonaut on youtube. Thanks FC! This rendition of the game also finally changed the name from Inner Demons Chapter One to Inner Demons Calamity, a much nicer name. The problem with the old name stemmed from me wanting the game story to be split into chapters, and Inner Demons Chapter One: Chapter One sounded silly.

2022, January-Now

That brings us to now! Working with Godot has been an absolute wonder, and I've made much more complex and quality systems in it than I was able to in GMS2. GMS2 will still forever hold a place in my heart for being my introduction into commiting to a game idea. The screenshot above doesn't look so good, because I've just re-written the player script and disabled animations for a bit.

Heres the image I posted earlier this week to show of the new artstyle I've adopted.

Benevolent has never looked better, and her stance screams personality! Guilt has also been added to the game, but I'll show him off later. In this version I also fixed the whole 'new sprite for each outfit' problem, since now each cosmetic option is displayed on top of a base sprite before being drawn to a viewport sprite and given a nice, thick black outline. I really hope to release a test demo soon, but I want it to be something really cool to show off.

That's all from me this time, and I hope this is a cool look-back (technically first look) for anyone reading! Here's to another year of Inner Demons Calamity!