It's been a while (oh, a month? Oops) since my last update. That doesn't mean I haven't been working! To Tory L. is 'finished' in the sense that all the enemies and the layout are there, but there are some core game systems it will need to really work. Also, it does literally no tutorializing at this point, which factors into my main concern which I will get into momentarily.
First of all though, wanna see the terrors you will be facing in this game mode? Since it's not a parody of any particular game, I thought why not make it a parody of
all games and have these enemies:
The intent here was to name them exactly what a player would call them anyway. You know, like when you're battling "Caprius, Scion of Living Hatred" and you just call him "the goat boss". As a bonus, this means you can tell exactly what they do as soon as you hear their names! Well, except maybe Enemy and Badguy, but I bet you'd get those right too. There are several other enemies (Champion versions of these - except Badguy, which is the champion version of Enemy), with goofier names that don't really fit this idea, but they're fun jokes! I also have a super groovy final boss for this mode and I won't tell you what it's called, but I'll share a GIF!
So that's all coming along well, except... things have been slow for a couple weeks. Let me get the dumb part out of the way first: Midnight Suns and the new season of Diablo 3 are
definitely factors in this slowdown, as is a general malaise from the fact that next week I am going on vacation for a week. Does that happen to you? The vacation is coming so I might as well start slacking off now? It sure happens to me. Anyway, in addition to those issues, there's this identity crisis of how I want to cram all these weird ideas into the game. I'm getting more and more thoughts of how it can fit together, but I think I'm in that kind of imaginative space rather than development space, where it's just the wild ideas kind of bouncing around and while I can see more of the overall shape, it's tricky. If I were making my usual stuff, like a fun little metroidvania adventure, I'd know what to do the whole way down, it'd just be a matter of getting it done. And maybe some thinking about story beats or special abilities. But with this game it's a more existential question about the overall structure of the entire experience and how it ties together. I'm breaking new ground, at least for me. But I am getting there. And I think this vacation is going to give me just the thinky time I need to really make it good.
This is going to be a weird game and I am excited about that.
