24 September 2023: Happy birthday! We are 1-year old!
A year has passed since the start of the development of TrappedTogether.
Is a year a lot or a little?
That's an awful lot for a game. A lot changes in a year.
But for one developer this is very little time.
Now I’m actually working on the game alone (everyone has their own worries and not much free time. Only Daria helped me with the pictures), and as I wrote earlier, I have a main job, and I work on the game in the evenings and sometimes on weekends. There were a lot of moves: this year I changed my place of residence 4 times. Besides, sometimes you want to spend time with your family and children, and not always sit at your laptop...
In general, there was not much pure working time.
So, what have we accomplished this year?
- House editor and automatic map generation. This could make unique playable cards with little effort.
- Managed to create a fairly beautiful user interface. I can't speak for you, but in my opinion, it appears just as good as it does in non-indie games.
- Simple zombie intelligence has been made. I don’t really like it, and it can’t be released in this form, but a start has been made: improving it is not as difficult as writing it from scratch.
- I'm very proud of my system of hiding house walls when the character is not visible behind them. I spent a lot of time on it. I have ideas on how to make it even better. And it looks really good and works well.
What didn't work out this year:
It was not possible to create an online version. According to the original idea, I wanted to release the offline version in 2 months, and then start working on the online version, but everything was delayed and changed.
I really don't want to release a completely unplayable version. It seems to me that even the first demo version should be fascinating and not disappointing.
It would seem that we can make a release in another month, but there are a lot of little things that I want to improve: make several variants of houses, implement game saving and loading, improve zombie intelligence, add sounds. Each of the tasks is not that big, but together they add up to several months.
Also, while I was writing the offline version as a demo for the online version of TrappedTogether, the whole concept changed.
I came to the realization that single-player games are also can be a masterpiece.
Yes... an online cooperative game where you can survive only by coordinating with other players is great. But I still don’t have a clear plan for the mechanics of the game itself (what to do when a character is disconnected from the game? Should he just disappear? Or is his body should be left to be torn apart by zombies? For instance, if he suddenly got a call at the most inconvenient moment and he didn’t have time to run home, then the character dies?). So, an online game requires a lot of effort to develop logical mechanics that would be suitable for the players who are constantly hanging on the server, and for older players who have 1-2 hours in the evening. And I don't have such game mechanics that satisfies the both groups.
But with an offline game, everything is simpler: you can still interrupt at any time and continue later from the saved place. This is suitable for both fast, continuous passage for several hours in a row, and for slow passage of an hour a day.
So, everything changed and now I am writing dialogues for the game and thinking about the main plot.
Happy birthday, TrappedTogether!
