Devlog?

Hi! I have been developing this game for the past year and a half or so, and I have decided I should start writing a dev log here! Maybe it’s weirdly late considering where I am in development, but I’m feeling impulsive. And I feel I might as well make a log talking about my game!

The Past

SO! I have built FireFly into three distinct hub-like levels, with a handful of collectibles to search for, and setups for cool jumps.

• Created Flyph and tried to give him fun movement mechanics.
  • A focus on designing the movement to reward sustaining your speed, while trying to ensure there is always an option for keeping your speed.
  • Heavily using additive velocities for things like wall jumps and boost jumps, instead of fixed launch velocities, in order to give the player a feeling of momentum. Even though this sometimes makes the player feel out of control, I think this is part of the fun.
• Made three levels:
  • Forest Level, meant to be more of a romp around to see what’s here
  • A dark explorative cave level with winding tunnels and crawly things in the dark
  • And a mountain level that begs the player to climb to the top.
• And on top of this, I have been building all the infrastructure to support such a game,
  • Settings Menus built dynamically at runtime following JSON layout information in order to streamline the addition and potentially make hooking into the settings menu friendly for modders (modders? Who said that? It wasn’t me)
  • Modular Multi-threaded Level Loaders that manage dynamically loading in each UI component needed by levels and handling the different viewports between the high-resolution UI layer and the pixel art resolution game layer.
  • And then every other thing under the hood that enables a game with a variety of mechanics such as this.

So honestly, I’m pretty happy about what I’ve accomplished.

The Present

Now, what I am currently working on. I have a few elements I really like that I have in my dev build or even hidden in the current live build. And even the beginnings of some of these features.

A Structure to the Game!

• That’s right! The game won’t just be dumping you in a world anymore and telling you nothing… Ok, it probably will still do that (blame NES Zelda). BUT, I will be adding more observable goals for your playthrough! Currently, you can even see in the current build GG is there to try and prevent you from rushing to the caves right off the start by asking you to fess up some Jars.

  

  GG has a lot of things to say and ponder. He likes finding spaces and keeping them safe from… Well, he keeps them safe. I don’t think there is any threat really; he’s just kind of particular for some reason. But before he trusts you with his space, he likes to check how many jars you’ve found. See, for some reason, this guy thinks that the more fireflies you’ve freed, the more trustworthy you are. Which, to be fair, I’d believe that.

  GG is sectioning off parts of the game in order to help encourage players to explore and search for more of the hidden jars around the map. And in return, you get to see some cool spaces.

  Right now, not every spot is ready to be actively explored. But you can feel free to talk to him, and I’ll say there’s at least 1 secret area in my game right now, with another spot well on the way.

  

What This Means

So from here, I feel I finally have some vision of a structure for my game. Already, I have numerous ideas and spots selected for hiding secret areas, and I am excited to get to work. I am almost done with one titled The Tunnels which might either be just a quirky level or the most hated one. I can’t know things such as these.

The Future

So from here, I have built up quite the to-do list of things I need to tweak, fix, debug, or add to the game.

Wild Woodlands Redesign

Biggest thing among those is probably a complete redesign of The Wild Woodlands area. It has remained for the most part unchanged since I first made it for our first playtest in 2024. And I think it needs a completely new design that benefits from all I have learned since then. This will make the level more sprawling and full of secrets than it has been as of now. And I am really looking forward to working on that.

GG-ify Caves and Mountains

From here, I intend to begin implementing GG-zones within the caves. This will mean segmenting off certain parts of the level gated behind GG, and adding secret areas where GG will ask for Jars in order to allow you to cross. This will hopefully give more exploration incentives to this level, and just fill these levels with more content.

Story(?)

And finally, I intend on placing a small touch of story in this game delivered by NPCs. I have a secret sprite and dialog scenes that are too buggy for much more than screenshots. This will honestly be a much simpler and lighter story than I was planning. There will be some small ways of informing the player of their motivations behind exploring, and some expository dialog from a ladybug. But I plan on adding some more motivation to the world!

The Sad (ish) News

So all that said, I think I am nearing a space where I have a ‘pre-release’ demo ready. What this will mean is that the current build of FireFly will be replaced with a limited ‘Demo’ version that restricts player access to the rest of the game, and in order to access the remainder of the game, I will begin charging $5 to buy and play my game. I know this sucks, but I have worked nearly full-time on this project for quite a while, and I do intend to try and build a career off of the work I am doing on this project.

All-in-all, in conclusion

I am both proud of how far I have come and apprehensive about the amount of work I still have to do. But I will continue doing it, and honestly, I love it. So look forward to more updates, maybe play the game if you haven’t, and let me know what you think either through reviews (hopefully nice haha) or comments! Thank y’all for reading! When the next update releases, I will probably write another one of these. Or maybe I’ll start going more technical with my blog posts, who knows. Regardless, see ya!