Howdy folks! Ghostly here!

It's weird to think that the demo has been here on GameJolt for a year now. It doesn't feel that long ago, but at the same time, it feels forever ago now. I'm probably not making much sense. Anyway, it's the end of 2020, and now that the three planned demo chapters are out, I want to reflect on this year's progress and what comes next.

The MAGFest Demo

This year kicked off with MAGFest 2020 in January! It was my first experience showcasing in a convention setting, and I has a blast! I'm very grateful to the MIVS staff for giving me and my game such a great opportunity. In fact I wrote a whole devlog about the convention here, so I won't dwell on it for too long.

I left MAGFest with a lot of excitement, a sense of forward momentum... and still only one chapter done. Plus, I learned a lot from watching people play the game, and had a lot of small (and big) flaws to fix. So after some post-convention fixes...

Spicy Fish Girlfriend

So "Echoes in the Waves!" was supposed to come out in March or April. It ended up coming out in June. This was partially because levels take time to put together, and partially because by April the world was burning. Needless to say, the update got delayed a little bit.

I've had Maya's boss gimmick roughly planned out in my head for about as long as she's existed as a character. She's a siren, so she has the ability to influence the player characters. However, that's also the kind of gimmick that can easily become unfair if handled poorly. So I decided that this could be a good opportunity to further cement in the player's mind that they should be swapping characters frequently.

Maya's Trance mechanic is built to discourage staying on a single character for too long, reinforcing the game's core mechanic of swapping between different characters.

Even with the core mechanic in mind, I needed to find a way to make Maya as a character fun and unique. Basically, I found myself writing really boring dialogue for her, and needed more ways to spice things up. So I made her a rock star who does mercenary work on the side, and wrote her to be Casey's old partner-in-crime. By the way, yes, they absolutely dated.

The rock star thing was also exactly the inspiration I needed to write an absolutely killer boss theme. Beware the Deep was such a fun theme to work on, and it's still probably my favorite track in the game. ( Well, in the demo at least. ;D )

As I said before, the level hit the demo in June. People were generally pretty positive, except for a tiny problem. Well, actually a structural problem, so not exactly tiny.

One, Two, and... Two?

Those of you who have played the most recent updates will probably notice that Maya's chapter, "Echoes in the Waves!", has been moved up to Chapter 3. The new stage, "Pulling the Strings!", has been moved in to take its place as Chapter 2. It's a bit of a weird move, and I think it warrants an explanation.

Originally "Pulling the Strings!" was planned to be Chapter 3. However, during the development of the Chapter 2 Update, a couple of my testers voiced concerns about how Maya's Trance gimmick, which requires the player to rapidly swap between characters, was asking too much of the player.

While Chapter 1 is built to teach the player about character swapping and spell abilities, it doesn't offer a lot of time to get used to those mechanics, which Maya's Trance gimmick necessitates.

Those concerns were echoed (heh) when the Chapter 2 Update was added to the GameJolt demo. I received a lot of feedback saying that Chapter 2 was a huge spike in difficulty compared to Chapter 1. So I discussed the dilemma with my testers, and we came up with a solution. Rather than water down (heh) the Maya boss fight to the point where it more in line with Chapter 1, we decided to swap Chapters 2 and 3. Maggie would now be Chapter 2's new boss, and her stage and mechanics would be designed accordingly.

Maya's new home in Chapter 3 is much more fitting. The fight is fast, frantic, and Maya's Trance gimmick makes her a fitting gatekeeper to test the player's character swap mastery before launching into the game's second half.

The Synergy Rework

Getting back on track, so I told one of my testers, a friend of mine known as Taizen, that after Chapter 2 was out, I'd take another look at the game's scoring mechanics. Seemed like as good a time as any, so why not?

Let's start with what Synergy Boost is, and what its purpose is. Basically, Synergy Boost is when you use a character's ability, swap to a different character, and use their ability. This grants the player a score multiplier, as well as a boost in attack power for all three characters.

The purpose of Synergy Boost is to encourage the player to effectively use all three characters during gameplay.

So the core problem with the Synergy Boost system as it existed through the Ch 2 Update was that switching between characters felt arbitrary. You could keep swapping characters and throwing out empty abilities to build multiplier, which meant the system was little more than a way to keep your hands busy when nothing else was happening.

So I worked with Taizen, and we came up with some solutions to that problem, as well as other ways to make the scoring system more engaging.

• Throwing out empty abilities had to go. Building combo now requires you to use each ability for its intended purpose.

• When you reached a certain level of combo, the timer for losing the combo would go down very quickly, leading to dropped combos when the level was delivering a set piece. The timer for losing Synergy was slowed way down to make building up a steady combo easier, even in slow sections.

• One of the lessons from the leaderboard challenge at MAGFest was that the boss clear bonus shouldn't be tied to a multiplier. It puts far too much emphasis on building to max combo on the stage's final boss pattern.

• Gem Power was introduced to give even more reason to use special character abilities. The value of score pickups can now be increased by successfully using character abilities.

Since this collection of changes drastically changed the meta for scoring, and since I'd been toying with the idea of running leaderboard challenges as an event in the Discord (Come say hi if you haven't already), I decided to call it the Synergy Update, and treat these changes like a major update.

The leaderboard challenges didn't really turn out the way I'd hoped, since the game's audience isn't huge yet, and the amount of players interested in scoring is apparently even smaller. Still, it was a fun experiment, and Taizen got to show off how much of a beast he is. Check out this run from the day the "Pulling the Strings!" Update came out.

Junkyard Puppeteer

After the Synergy Update was out, I decided that October 27th would be the date that the third and final demo chapter would come out. October 27th was the one year anniversary of the Typhoon Unit Demo launch on GameJolt. It might not have been important to anyone else, but it was important to me.

Maggie's initial design and aesthetic was meant to be a cameo from a game I made for a game jam. Here's the final boss of Arcane Rivals. (Link, if you're curious)

Here's what she looked like in Typhoon Unit.

However, I ran into the same problem I had with Maya. How do I write this character to be fun and interesting. Not only that, but where does she fit in to the lore? Maggie is presumably human, but humans can't cast these kinds of crazy spells without cost in the world of Typhoon Unit. That's why Gale has all those gadgets strapped to her.

And then it clicked.

Maggie became Gale's counterpart in the story, and brought with her all of Gale's insecurities about being a human with limited ability in a world of magic and monsters. Which had the added bonus of making Gale a more interesting character. (And doubling the amount of dialogue expressions she has.)

I also thought it was important to show that Maggie was incredibly ambitious despite her limitations. You'll notice that in the second phase, where she's controlling the big and impressive Grand Arcane, Maggie's healthbar goes down passively. If you wait long enough, she'll wear herself out. Again, strong magic takes a toll on the human body without the proper helper devices. She's definitely trying her best though.

With this new design and visuals, I decided to move her stage's setting to a scrapyard on the outskirts of Asteria. This would make the stage flow better from Chapter 1, and also give her a place that suits her powerful but janky machine puppets. Also I grew up watching Junkyard Wars on TV, and have a soft spot in my heart for the scrappy mechanic archetype.

With a third level now in the game, the demo is feeling pretty meaty. I think there's more than enough content to show what the game is gonna be like. I hope you like it!

What's Next?

The rest of the game, of course. The demo is now content complete, although you can expect more updates as the overall quality of the game improves. Chapters 4-7 are going to be done in 2021, and then I'm gonna work extra hard to refine the game for a full release sometime in 2022! It's gonna be quite a year.

Thanks for reading all of this. I know it was a long one, but there was a lot of cool stuff that happened this year. Enjoy the end of year demo update, and here's to a better 2021!

-GhostlyFeline