Dev Log 4: Beginning of the End

This is the fourth and likely final development log on my project Mechdivers, a top-down twin-stick shooter mecha action game with linear level progression.

It’s been roughly 16 months since I started working on this game. I’ve put nearly 500 hours of work into it after work, on days off, all the usual. I planned for this to be a short, small scoped project that would ship sometime around March 2025, after a year of development. I’m very proud of everything I’ve accomplished, learning so much and further refining so many skills I’ve built throughout the years I’ve been doing this, especially on the gameplay programming and level design sides. Unfortunately, as a bit of a twist on the optimistic third dev log, I’ve decided to cancel the Steam release, scale back significantly, and release for free on itch.io instead. For what was intended to be my first commercial solo project, I put a lot of thought into this decision and think it’s absolutely for the best, but let’s get into why I’ve decided that, what I’m committed to completing in the project for its release, and what I’ll do moving forward afterwards.

WRITING ON THE WALL

I’d been continuing work pretty well for months, but I knew there would be a massive amount of art needed soon before it became a huge bottleneck. While a friend of mine was able to help out for a bit, he could no longer find the time outside of paid jobs, which I completely get and knew would potentially happen. This alongside a growing apathy for the project despite progress being made, and coming up with ideas that I was more passionate about, I decided to take a week to make a small game and reevaluate where I wanted to take Mechdivers. Nine days later, SPACEFIGHT: an ‘asteroids’ clone was published on itch.io, and that was the final nail in the coffin, really cementing that I needed to work on something new. But I couldn’t just abandon this project that I’ve been working on for so long, so let’s touch on what I’ve done since the previous update and what I’m still going to do before releasing this.

MORE PROGRESS

One of the main things I knew I wanted in the game was a ranking system for completion of each level, something that the biggest inspiration, Armored Core VI, and other games I’ve been playing a lot lately, Bloodthief and Ultrakill all have. Drawing heavily from all three for the design of it, I put together a post-game stats screen that included ranks for time elapsed, enemies destroyed, and damage taken, each with level-specific values for the associated ranks. It worked out great and I’m very happy with the implementation as it is right now. Along with that, I updated the sortie menu screen, making a lot more information available from a glance to the player, like the loadout and a description about the mission.

However, arguably the biggest update to the game was a full rework of enemy AI, making them more reactive, more optimized, and more difficult in ways to play against. This rework included adding proper vision cones and line of sight for better player detection, and a “cast awareness” trigger that alerts nearby enemies when one sees the player. This detection system was based loosely off of a design I had thought through for a stealth game project, but simplified for a top-down shooter. This all feeds into a state system, taking them through Idle, Spotted (primary combat state when the player is in line of sight), and Searching (secondary combat state when the player was in line of sight recently). There is a timer that resets the state back to Idle if Searching for too long without spotting the player again. The enemies also have staggered functions, with movement pathing and some other functions being called every 20 or so frames to optimize a little better when there are many enemies at play all calculating new paths.

Sound design was another big update, adding firing sounds for the player’s burst rifle and heavy missile launcher, additional ambiences, firing sounds for the turret enemies, firing sounds for each of the three variants of the biped drones, including a pre-fire sound for the most powerful of the three variants, and energy shield sound effects. All of this really helps to elevate the gameplay in the way only audio could.

Here’s a short clip of the very much work in progress soundscape.

THE FINISHING TOUCHES

Naturally, with all of that progress in sound design, there’s still lots left to do. I’m definitely going to try to be economical with the remaining sound events, cutting what doesn’t need to be there, and reusing what I can to push it towards release. In that sense, there’s the music as well, which I plan on composing three loops, one for each of the two levels, and one for the main menu. Those will likely come towards the end of the project. With the first level pretty much wrapped up by the previous dev log, I started work on the second level shortly before deciding to cut this project short, but since one level doesn’t quite satisfy, I’ve decided to finish this new one for the launch. It’s been entirely blocked out and is in the process of adding environment art at the moment, with enemy population soon to follow. Mechanically speaking, it’s almost complete, only missing the final few touches to give it an interesting conclusion. Once that’s all done, then comes the time for cleaning and polishing up everything that’s left, removing any placeholder assets (looking at you, main menu background), and if I have time, adding additional weapons to the player weapon pool for variety, and adding more mech models, but I’m not holding my breath for those. Worst case scenario, they have the same models and sounds but just have alternate values or different colours. Currently I’ve got my eyes on releasing sometime in August, which would be a perfect time to wrap up, so let’s see if I can manage all that in two months.

ONWARDS AND UPWARDS

Working on Mechdivers this past year has been a really good process, as I’ve really been able to not only show myself that I’m capable of every aspect in game development, but also growing my skills in the areas that I really wanted to delve more into on past projects. The initial plan was to use this game as a portfolio piece, my first solo developed commercial project, and while the latter will come at a later date, I think it still serves well as the former. After this project concludes, I’m taking a break the only way I know how: prioritizing some of the many other creative projects I have. I’ve been a member of the development team for the ambitious Skyrim mod Skywind, a mod that aims to bring the entirety of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind into the engine of Skyrim: Special Edition, and I certainly want to ramp up the amount I’m able to contribute as a sound designer to that team once I’ve shipped Mechdivers. Alongside that, my indie rock band separator has been working on our third release, a full-length album. We should be entering the studio for that sometime in August or September, so there’s going to be lots of guitar work going on, as well as my desire to revisit a lot of solo project songs I’ve written over the last year and a half that I intend to release as an album by the end of this year. And of course, I couldn’t forget going back to school for my sound design and post-production program, which will start in September. In the meantime, I’m going to keep playing games when I can, brainstorming ideas for small games, and just overall honing my skills for the next time around. When I do release Mechdivers in a few months, I’ll be sure to write one last dev log as a postmortem when all is said and done, talking about what worked, what didn’t, and the various things I’ve learnt from this project that’s taken up a good chunk of my life.

On that note, that’s it for now. Thank you for reading, I’ll be back in a few months!