Malevolent Planet 2D - Malevolent Valley
Hallo! Over this weekend, I've been playing some Stardew Valley. My main goal was to learn and understand what makes the game so popular.
It was only one person developing it, so they had to make-do with what resources they had on hand which makes the game even more relevant for us. The gameplay flow is pretty cohesive, you always have stuff to do, relationships are a complex but interesting system, the mini quests can be full of hints to what's going on in the village, stories that develop the characters up a bit and many others.
Maybe the gameplay itself and playing it takes a while to get used to, and maybe sometimes the game is a bit too bright (bright colors everywhere can make it a bit unpleasant, at least in the beginning), but... it just shows that you can't do a perfect job at making a game, however if you actually put your own creativity into it you can make an amazing game whose flaws people might not be bothered by.
In the end there's a lot to learn from it, such as the relationship system and the NPC routines system that makes them feel more alive, which also makes the game feel more alive (like when some sellers decide to close shop for the day because they have their aerobic session in that day).
I hope that with time we can achieve a similar feeling, at least on the ship since as I've said before the village and other playable maps aren't supposed to be explorable areas with content that depends on the current time and so on, that works when you have a small map.
My tasks for this month's content are the following:
The Village will be a playable area that should have at least 1-2 tasks for this month, this doesn't include the village intro that has its own content and will also be included.
There should be 2 animations this month (including the xray scene) and maybe an extra static scene, we'll see.
The Gameplay UI should actually be updated this month.
Saves should include more details in the saves UI, such as something showing the save that was made last time to make it easier to load.
New Likurieris Avatars for characters to be interacted with in the Village.
A system that allows me to spawn characters based on presets.
I'd like to make as much progress as I can on the story in these next few months. After the Village comes the Hub, and after the Hub it's interplanetary travel. The gameplay should also be in a readier state so we can get closer to an 1.0 release which will mark at least 5-6 hours of continuous content.
It remains to be seen how achievable it all will be! Have a great week!