Hi everyone,

Thanks for sticking around! We're in the final stages of POPGOES Arcade 2020 Edition's development. Things have been moving forward, but the obstacles that I mentioned in the previous dev log unfortunately haven't been made much easier recently. Sian is still having to go to work for full days, and Emil + Garrett have had some heavy tasks to focus on for school.

That being said we are nearly there. I don't have anything to show you today, so I'm not going to call this a "snippet", but rather just a general update on development:

I have been focusing on adding new large props to the environments recently. I haven't been happy with how barren most of the cells (each "screen" in the game) look, so I have designed and sprited objects that act as landmarks in the map, so it's easier to remember where you are. I am not a very talented artist so it has been quite difficult to reach a quality I'm happy with. But this has been finished, and the map looks much better now. Emil will be working on porting these new assets into the game soon.

Emil and I have also been working on integrating the random encounter enemies into the game, like the Corrupt Deer and Corrupt Boar. Each enemy will have unique stats like health, attack, and spawn rate, which I have written into a huge spreadsheet. We haven't run into any major issues with this, so I imagine the enemies will be fully programmed by the end of the week.

The general progression of the game is finished. It's now possible to play the game from start to finish (without the random enemies of course) with no major issues. This is important because the game actually relies on a "task" system, meaning there is a list of things you need to do in order to progress. And this is currently working, really well. So once the enemies are implemented, we will be able to playtest an alpha version of the game, check out the difficulties of the enemies, look for any bugs, and adjust things like dialogue and special effects if necessary.

I don't know when the game will come out, because it's impossible to tell how long the playtesting phase will last. If we run into a game breaking bug, or we've failed at calculating the difficulty of certain enemies, then we'll need to spend more time to make sure the game can be released at the standard we want. I will keep all of you updated though, and of course you can continue to ask questions in the POPGOES Game Jolt Community if you like.

The last thing I'd like to mention is that the development of POPGOES Arcade 2020 Edition has made me quite cautious, worried even, about the prospect of POPGOES 2020 Edition even being able to release this year. We would have never been able to predict the issues that have held us back with PA2020, and prior to COVID-19 and the sudden changes in our lives, releasing the reboot of POPGOES in 2020 felt like an easy task. Now that we're already almost halfway through 2020, the POPGOES reboot being released this year feels less likely, which is of course a huge shame considering "2020" literally appears in the title (at the moment, at least).

Because of this, we have already planned to change the initial roles of the team members quite drastically for P2020, which I will go into more detail at a later date. But even with these changes, it is possible that a release this year will need to be reconsidered for the sake of maintaining the quality of the project, and with that will come a retitling too.

But that is all up in the air right now. It's just something I thought I would share with you guys, as I'm sure it has crossed some of your minds after the delays of PA2020.

Thanks for reading. Not long left now!

- Kane