Fracturis Games

Reborn is on Steam! A lot of time and development have gone into the last couple of months as I've gotten the game prepared for this moment. There's still SO much I want to do, but for now, I'm very excited for this moment, and I'll appreciate the amount of work I've accomplished so far.

Well it's been quite an eventful month! I've gained a following of over 100 playtesters on Discord, testing for bugs and giving feedback and suggestions on the various features. I've been hard at work to keep development progressing, and it's been really thrilling to have a group of people behind me now.

NPCs and buildings have been added, as well as several QoL updates after getting lots of feedback. I'm excited about the storylines I've developed for these characters, all delivered though dialogue which gets randomized every time a player comes back from a cave run. I still have SO much I want to do, with setting up a quest system, crafting with potions and gear, farming, and companions, but I've made great progress so far.

After a few weeks off to enjoy the holidays, then moving back to the US, and getting the flu, I've finally released the "early access" version of Reborn. I've already received some great feedback and have released one update.

Plenty more to add to the game, but this should be decently playable for now.

I think I should be able to get a base, playable game by the end of the year, which is what my original goal was, though I'm definitely behind on a quest and potion brewing system.

I still need to add bosses on every 10th level, a game over process, and a way to level up using the gained experience, but all of that seems quite doable in the 10 days I've got left of the year. January will be focused on potion brewing and NPCs with dialogue and quests.

After that, February will be focused on the farming expansion, and March will be for companions. I'm hoping to wrap up development by June after working on feedback from playtesters throughout the releases.

I've worked a bit more on the inventory, including making the Gear, Tools, and Held sections all work and be limited to item types. I've also added a health bar.

But most importantly - I finally added a save feature! This was by far the hardest task so far, and it definitely seems like this is an area where using Godot instead of a more well-constructed platform made life harder, but I figured I way to do it, and it should be adaptable for future updates so that people can start a game, download a new version, and keep their progress.

I was planning on implementing a quest system, but I might wait until the new year to work on that. For now, I want to create the bosses, a game over function, and a way to level up stats using the Exp. Then I'll at least have a playable game that people can test play while I work on things like NPCs, quests, recipes, potion brewing, farming, companions... and anything else I can think of!

I've continued to work on Reborn's UI system, adding in in-game labels for damage, items, and experience. I've also added labels to inventory items, which should adapt depending on the type of item to show different stats, though the base ingredients will just show the name. I've also moved the gear to the top right with inventory spots for each.

I've been watching a loooooooot of tutorials for different ways to store and load save files, something I haven't attempted before, as well as designing a quest system that will be able to track the progress of multiple quests, which is what the bottom left part of the UI is left bare for.

I've got a basic menu for autoplay, though it could certainly use a graphical overhaul when ever that can become a priority. Today, I focused on getting my inventory system working - something I've been hesitant to tackle. But 4 youtube tutorials later, and I got it adapted and working for my game! While there is still SO much more to do, I'm really excited at how much progress I've been making.

I've finished with the cave progression system, for now, with 25 layouts that will load randomly on each floor.

I will need to create boss floors for every 10th level. I've moved on to creating a basic menu for when autoplay is turned on.

Development is speeding right along now. I've developed an auto system that can target and differentiate between enemies, ore, and gems in the ground. I've made a battle, stat, and mob drop system. Now I'm going to work on making the cave levels increase as they're beaten, then work on an inventory system.

It's been an unproductive couple of weeks, but I've finally finished the town map, and today I added character movement. I've decided to make this game completely mouse movement based instead of using any keyboard controls. Next up is to add layers so that I can move behind certain objects like rooves.

Stay in the Light is on the shelf, and I've moved on to my next project: Reborn. This will be a semi-idle RPG with lots of ambitious parts - auto battling, sprite layering, battle system, stat tracking, pet taming and training, farming, and quests... And probably more. I'm giving myself 2+ months for this, to at least get something playable. Things like farming, potion making, and beast taming might be "DLCs" released after the new year.

I finished Stay in the Light late last week and shared it with a few people to play test. I got a lot of great feedback, including parts that were too easy/difficult, bugs, and suggestions for improvements.

One of those suggestions was a pause feature, which I thought was going to be immensely difficult to implement. On top of that, I wanted to add in sliders for text speed and sounds. Come to find, it was very few lines of code to make it all possible, and took me only an hour or two to get it all made up and working well.

I'm going to continue receiving feedback and working on this game until Thursday, and then I'll take a long weekend off to visit the US for a wedding before starting on the next project, which will be some type of idle dungeon crawler. I want to learn how to create save files, and possibly look into multiplayer functionality, at least to share high scores.

Another week gone by, and I've been working on finishing up Stay in Light. I just have a couple cutscenes and half of the last level left before I send it out to be playtested.

I've definitely hit a wall, and am lacking motivation to finish, but I think a lot of that has to do with my surroundings. I'm in Tuscany and dealing with an infestation of stink bugs in my clothes and bed, and the smells of decomposing mice in the kitchen. Two weeks left here before I have a quick trip back the US, and I'm hoping the trip will rejuvenate me. I have a list of potential games to come after. I want to try something with only mouse clicks to simulate a mobile style game, so we'll see what I come up with!

Well, it's been 4 weeks since my last update - we'll see if I can behave better and update this more, as I'm certainly making progress. Over the last month, I've... (I just looked down at two updates ago and realized I started it in almost the same way - whoops!)

Well anyway, I've been working on putting all my learning into actually making games. Fracturis' story and games are on the back burner as I test my skills on unrelated games. My first was a little Pac-Man style game called Stay in Sight where a player has to navigate a maze of points, power ups, and enemies while staying within view of the independently moving camera.

These past couple of weeks have been spent in making its sequel, Stay in Light, keeping some of the enemy and power up types, but reimagined into a 2D Platformer type of world. I've also added a storyline, cutscenes, more complex graphics (Well, more complex than the circles and lines I had before), and sound effects.

The game will have three levels, of which I've created one so far.

I've been moving all of my notes to an app called Obsidian and put together a presentation for some friends about my work so far, and one of them suggested that three fragments would be better than four, and I've barely been able to sleep. Cerebra has always felt like a mental block to me - I can't imagine the world, or the stories it has to tell. Additionally, with 9 less games to make, I could make the larger story much more cohesive and approachable.

Cerebra might just become the world that could have been.

Well, it's been about 3 weeks since the last update... I've spent some of it continuing to practice sprite animation, which I'm still extremely shit at. I've also started learning Godot, having abandoned Flutter&Flame.

Today's animal was the cat. I spent about 3 hours on the dog, which is ridiculous for how simple it is, but we all start somewhere! I also spent time working on world development and game design for the Terranetic world. Considering a slight name change to Terranetia...

I found a 30 day challenge from one of the tutorial creators I've been following. The original challenge was just to create a 16x16 1-bit list of animals, but I decided to animate them to add an extra layer of difficulty.

Continued to watch tutorials about pixel design and animation. Tested out how limiting to two colors on a changing palatte could be used to show changes in light.

After watching a few more tutorials, today's assignment was color theory and putting together a palatte. In reality, I'm sure this palatte will change many times as I get more experienced, but the goal is to use the same palatte across all games to help keep the art style recognizable.

I experimented with adding frames for a simple animation using some of the new palatte I put together, and I'm quite please with how it turned out.

I redid my schedule to account for the 2 missing weeks, redoing tutorials, and deciding to space it out a bit more so that I'm not cramming so much information in my head each day. Hopefully this will give me the energy to do more practice instead of just watching tutorials.

I've lost interest in the tutorials I was following, so I decided to just try to create something without a tutorial or guide, and just figure it out myself. This is the beginning stages of a Blackjack game.

The tutorials for Flutter are getting much more complex, and I'm definitely not following as well as before, but I'm hoping I'll absorb more once I actually start doing in a few weeks and stop just watching. Also started learning Aseprite and basic sprite design. Here's my first attempt at making my friend, Shelby.

Continued tutorials for Flutter and started learning color theory. This is the first draft of the Fracturis colors.

Worked on the Spirelem Era One cross-game synergies. Will work this week to come up with more story elements.

Also took a few additional tutorial lessons on game development within Flutter.

Completed more tutorials on Dart/Flutter and game design. The game design videos have been particularly helpful in coming up with ideas to apply to my games.

Game dev on the Idle RPG has almost been completed. The goal is to have four well thought out game designs at the end of the 8 week schedule I made for myself, one for each Fragment. I added elemental strengths and weaknesses, base dmg, and elemental combos with criticals.

Continued the new tutorials for Dart/Flutter programming and basic game design. I'm enjoying these new courses so much more, and feel like I'm learning a lot.

I also continued to work on the idle RPG game design, and came up the the core game mechanics.

Today I did more of the Dart tutorial, but it was just painful. Vandad Nahavandipoor might be a great teacher for some, but he was too repetitive and still didn't cover everything he was doing. I also found a new course on Game Design, as the Coursera course was just "make games" - not very helpful. I've doing a couple of the new tutorials, and updated my schedule, and I'm feeling optimistic about the new direction.

I also changed a couple of the game genres and started working on an idle RPG.

Finished the first four tutorials on Dart, mainly relearning basic programming fuctions like variable declaration and operators.

Started a Game Design course on Coursera, where the first assignment was to design a simple game that could be played on a single piece of paper.

Finished 8 week plan, encorporating two small game projects for the last two weeks to test out new skills on non-Fracturis games.

Created 8 week plan to learn various skills in programming, game design, art, and sound design.

Purchased Rain World to investigate game play, ecosystem, and procedural animation.

Worked on game design and mechanics for Terranetic's 2D Platformer.

Finished Flutter tutorial app.

Wrote out and presented overall plan for Fracturis Games' transmedia approach and set a three decade timeline to complete.

Purchased web domain and started dev log.

Started learning Flutter, following the first half of their tutorial.