Been working on structural stuff along with the plot and game over state. Suffice to say the game over state is complete and fully working. Dying will now simply restart the level after a second or two.
Story stuff is not finished yet but I’ll have something soon.
With some help from the fantastic people on the realm mafia discord server (@Zuzu, @Orsome, @Xaklor, @Ludfru, @HeimoIi) I was able to future proof the save and load system and make it more precise. Not the most impactful thing player side, but it prevents saves from breaking whenever new content is added.
fixed a good chunk of bugs relating to the bonus boss, mainly with pausing and paths.
Everything is basically done, just need to connect story elements together, fix a bug or two and we’re set!
I’ve also added a cap on how many throwables/items you can have, just a precautionary thing that prevents imbalance in game.
At this point I’m shooting for either new years eve or new years but I will take my time, instead of rushing it out for those times. After all, a delayed game can be good, and a rushed game is possibly bad.
After some final tweaks and play testing the Demo is ready to go. Thank you to everyone who’s stuck with this little project for this long, and to those who’ve helped me along the way
For now it’s not on Itch.io but obviously will, and is available through the link below
(Warning: big text wall) My experience(and thoughts) playing the demo(spoilers if you haven't completed the demo yet)
Disclaimer: everything in this, is what I said. so it may not apply to others. keep that in mind.
I guess I’ll start with main menu. well, I don’t know what to say about it, other then it’s fine.
well I guess I’ll touch on the minor things about it.
first off, there’s no option for 1920x1080, and second, whenever I exited settings, exited to main menu,
or one time, even launching the game(I did that for the second time for testing reasons), this would happen.
so yeah, that’s it for the main menu for now. moving on to the actual game now.
for the intro, there was some minor grammar errors, but I don’t mind it.
anyway, here’s my ?summary? of the intro.
now, here are my thoughts on this intro.
what is trostco exactly, and what do they do besides “emote icon” technology?
speaking of “emote icon” what does it mean by that? does it actually mean emotion, or does it mean emoticon?
anyway, moving on to gameplay.
it starts off with the main character in a house. they work for ?gdo? and there’s also greg(who’s a catperson btw).
the agent may have gotten spotted sneaking in this house, and their weapons also got confiscated.
(I’m assuming we’re in the distant nation mentioned in the intro)
there’s brightstone Inc employees outside, who are like “we know you’re in here, get out or we’ll frag you out of here”
(I’m assuming that the agent’s mission is to ?go in the brightstone fortress and kill the boss of brightstone Inc?)
anyway, I go through the tutorial house and get outside. then, I shoot the brightstone Inc guys to death.
(brightstone inc is never mentioned until later in the demo, and even then, that’s in the bonus boss room)
(also, I’m just assuming that the enemies are brightstone Inc employees)
I shoot some more enemies to death and I see some houses. I open the doors to them but then find out that I can’t go in these houses.
(that is such a missed opportunity. if you allow the player to open the entrance doors to houses, make sure that they can actually get in the houses. if you didn’t want players entering random houses, at least make it so the doors are locked or something)
anyway, I go through the levels shooting enemies and looking around for secrets.
also, after passing through the houses and such, I never saw any doors again.
as you can see, I’m at the fortress entrance and my cursor stopped moving on this little conversation.
every time a conversation starts, the ?gameplay feed? freezes, including the cursor.
(that’s my guess of how it works)
I go through the entrance, killing enemies and drones(also exploring). sometime during this, I discovered an exploit regarding the item cap(yes, i abused it so, sorry about that). so here’s an example.
I have 4 armor packs, I find 2 armor packs on the ground, I drop the stack of 4 on the ground, I pick up the 2 armor packs, then I pick up the stack of 4 armor packs. now I have 6.
I enter the fortress, I explore and kill some more enemies. I pushed some buttons and entered the next level.
there was the outside bit, with enemies on bridge posts shooting at me from offscreen.
moving on to the bridge maze.
I don’t know what to say about this part… ok, there was a little area with a red gate.
I couldn’t open it, so I went to the bridge maze.
after some time exploring the bridge maze, the red gate opened.
a dialogue conversation happened, related to the red gate opening.
I fully explored the maze first, then I entered the area the red gate was blocking.
moving on to the bonus level.
as you can see, there’s some display errors in this screenshot.
first, this one textbox has a dead soldier dude displayed instead of greg. I don’t know what caused that.
second, the double digit number display is a bit off. maybe move the number display right next to the item.
side note: this conversation repeated when I loaded in the bonus boss room.
(was there supposed to be a different conversation?)
anyway, there was a bunch of robots and stuff, and I shot those things(also did some exploration).
the bonus boss was a gato(yes, that’s what the catpeople are called) who was very angry at the agent for looking around in places where they shouldn’t look. the fight ensues, and y’know, I kinda liked it.
moving on to the helipad.
there was some enemies(brightstone Inc) and some drones on the path to the helipad.
I shot those enemies, looked for items, then i walked to the helipad.
on the helipad, there was agent 94.
basically, the boss of brightstone Inc left and now agent 94 is going to try to kill the main character.
(that’s my summery of what agent 94 said)
well, the fight was pretty good and a bit hectic. also, i like the fact that agent 94 calls the agent “noobie”
after that fight, agent 94 escapes via a portal. a conversation involving going in the portal happens.
I go in, and end up in a dessert(also it’s the end of the demo).
well, gotta say, I liked the demo, there was a lot more than I expected when playing it.
so I’m looking forward to the full game.
that said, there are some things I’m gonna mention.
there were times when enemies would shoot at me from offscreen, and there were times where i would do the same to the enemies.
there were times when an enemy who was chasing me would run into a wall, walked back and forth sideways, then eventually stopped doing that and went straight towards me.
overall, I liked the enemies a lot, their ai worked most of the time, and there was a variety of them.
there was a trend of namedropping, and then not explaining anything else.
(like what/who are they and what do they do?)
there’s also no context ingame(not that i know of) for why gatos exist, they’re just kind of there.
and there’s no context for anything else about them. but honestly, I don’t mind that.
were those two intentional? if so, you could put in some collectables for the clues and stuff.
though, I’m pretty sure that’s a bad idea. so I would suggest not to do that if possible.
might I suggest a dynamic camera system?
make it so the camera moves with the cursor.
maybe make it depend on what weapon you’re holding.
for example, you would only be able to see a little further if you were holding like, an assault rifle or an smg.
and you would only be able to see a lot further if you were holding, say, a sniper rifle.
that’s all I got for this suggestion.
the music was nice, not great, but not bad. so it’s good. that’s all I have to say about it.
well, that’s about it for my thoughts and experience on the demo. so, what do you think?
For the first thing that was mostly intentional. I had little to no experience when it came to adjusting and making window sizes, let alone setting resolutions. So I kinda built it around a specific resolution (bad I idea I know), but I still allow for manual resizing, though that leads to black bars
As for the 2nd thing I’m pretty sure that was a small oversight on my end, it’s supposed to center itself on your screen but probably only did it for me for some reason. I’ll make sure to fix that for future builds
Story Stuff
.Alot of what is said is just simple bread crumbing and set up, it’ll be explained later on (ideally) as the game progresses.
Grammar is my greatest enemy
As for the story stuff I’ll revise that portion as it is weirdly worded.
you’re correct, any time dialogue starts the game “freezes” to play out the dialogue, that’s kinda it.
Bug Stuff
I knew I was forgetting something
I was actually going to make those doors not open but forgot when I had to deal with more serious bugs at the time (softlocking crashing etc). I could see about doing something with the interiors but that’d be something I’d do later on.
Thanks for pointing this out! It honestly never came into my head if I should add a check to prevent picking up stacks at or above the item limit or if people would even try doing that
A misnumbering of an array caused that, I fixed it just now xd
yes there was, it wasn’t too enlightening but the correct dialogue should now play properly
Honestly I’m very proud to see that my bug fixing paid off for the most part. Aside from the exploit, but that’s not game breaking in the game aspect.
The AI path finding is wonky I’ll admit, much better than it was before though
For the future I’ll look into improving it to prevent (or atleast mitigate) the little brain farts it has when it encounters barriers.
I’ll look into adding a max range for weapons. Its probably for the best that you can’t snipe enemies with a pistol
I can definitely look into that, thanks for the suggestion!
Glad to hear (heh) that
I did it myself and I’m not the best at judging whether the tracks were good or not. So them turning out good is great enough for me.
I’m quite happy you enjoyed the demo, flaws and all
it was pretty hard vetting my own work with very little outside scrutiny so I’m grateful for you taking the time to leave constructive feedback!
so I played through the demo again just to see what’s new, and I found some more oddities.
I also understood some story stuff that wasn’t clear before.
though I admit, the grammar could use some polish(the grammar wasn’t too grating).
Gameplay oddities
seems like you forgot to put collision lines on the wooden walls.
there’s a gap in the barrier where the red line thing is.
Addendum to ai pathfinding
there were moments when an enemy would get stuck in corners(reason: unknown).
sometimes when an enemy touches a wall, they would go the long way around.
if they bump a wall that’s in this direction, they go the other way.
Name clarification
I misremembered the names, so I’ll correct them right here.
gdi and pridestone Inc respectively.
(might be a coincidence, but there’s also the gdi from command and conquer)
just wanted to get it out there.
the dynamic camera system might help reduce the amount of times the player would blind fire.
I hope I’m not the only one who’s played the demo, and also giving feedback and stuff.
The only thing that’s really new at this point is just bug fixing. I wanna have this demo (and by proxy this portion of the game) be good to go.
As for those collision issues I’ll fix those immediately, thank you again! The grammar I’ll look into and try to make more bearable.
yeah that’s just the path finding being its quirky self, not much can be done about that currently
Feedback and Future
You probably aren’t the only one, But that’s hard to tell since you are the only one giving any feedback. Which is rather unfortunate but expected since this forum is mainly for Realm. This thing is like a fraction of a fraction of the topics made on the forum (especially in off-topic).
Speaking of. Since this, THING, is officially out now and I am continuing posting here after my break I’m going to change the thread name to something that’s clear about what I’m doing and what I’m making (Spitfire Devblog or somethin). Besides that I’ll work on the itchio page most likely sometime this year (just realized I have academics soon ) and on the birthday of this thread I’ll start development again
More Future Stuff
Just to keep everything consistent I’ve made a ‘universal’ folder on drive for any and all future spitfire demo builds to prevent headaches when it comes to updating it on my end
I keep telling myself I wanted to see what progress you’ve made but then I keep not doing it and I’m not sure why so here’s my offer: if I haven’t given it a try in 3 days you have my permission to start spam pinging me on discord until I do it
alright after getting reminded here’s my thoughts, and they’re focused on the various aspects of the interface because I didn’t finish the game due to how repetitive and boring it felt after a while (more on the later)
first, I assumed given the nature of the game that I would navigate menus using the mouse, so I was immediately confused when my mouse was hidden and never seemed to do anything. I then went to the next obvious implementation that was WASD/arrow keys and found success, but then realized I had no idea what button was “confirm”, which could honestly be anything. apparently it was enter, which also ended up being the “advance dialogue” button which I don’t think is a good idea. the game is built around WASD movement and mouse aim so that’s where the two hands should naturally be resting, but enter isn’t anywhere near either of those locations. in order to press it, I have to move one hand out of its rest area to the barren wasteland that is the right side of my keyboard to hit this one button. it’s best for the user experience if the button that makes this sort of thing happen is easily accessible and doesn’t require much thought to press. this is why the A button is usually used for such things when you have a controller because the thumb naturally rests on it when idle. spacebar or left mouse click would be better for dialogue advancement (or both!), and using the mouse to navigate the main menu would be easier to pick up and understand since it doesn’t require the player to figure out a set of unfamiliar controls.
speaking of unfamiliar controls, I notice there’s no reference for what buttons and keys do what anywhere in the game. so if you miss something that cat says (like how to pick up items, which is what happened to me), you just have to restart the whole game so he can say that bit of dialogue again. how the controls relate to the interface is also confusing because the interface is entirely unlabeled. an enemy dropped a new gun at one point, and I could not figure out how to pick it up for the life of me. another enemy dropped this green box thing and after picking it up it went to a different item slot than the one everything else had gone to and I couldn’t tell why. I also couldn’t figure out how to use it to see what it did because the button I had been told to use items with wasn’t doing anything. I was also completely mystified why my mouse wasn’t showing up anywhere until the game told me I had to right click on things to pick them up, and I also got confused why I had to put my cursor on the item in the first place when I had to stand on it anyway and doors didn’t have this restriction. the interface needs more labels, not just on the various bars and item slots to the left but also it would help if items had their names show up and/or a description of what they do when their white borders appear. it might also help if interactables showed you what button made you interact with them, but that may or may not be necessary if you can quickly establish a universal interaction method. controls quick reference should be also be high on your to-do list, potentially with the ability to re-bind them but that’s up to you.
as for the reason why I didn’t finish, it felt like things got way too repetitive because the way to dodge every enemy is all the same: back up and move to the side a bit. every enemy attacks by firing a single shot directly at you or just runs up to you and bites you. I can see progression being made on the enemies, but none of it is the kind that really changes how the player reacts to them. the shield guy just takes longer to kill while doing the same thing, the fast shot guy is handled the same was as the normal dudes, and the one that runs away from you still attacks in the same way as everything else. I don’t have any final suggestions on how to fix it because that can be done in all kinds of ways, but I’d try focusing on trying to add enemies that require the player to behave differently to defeat. an example might be that the shield guy has to be shot from behind to damage instead of just having more health, or perhaps add an enemy that shoots to the side of the player. doesn’t have to be those examples specifically, just something that forces the player to react differently. when I got a good way through the hedge maze and then died which sent me back to the start of the map, I felt unmotivated to continue because everything had been the same up to that point and I didn’t feel like going through it all again.
Isn’t enter one of the more common keys in keyboard only menu controls?
the keyboard only menu controls are usually:
wasd or arrow keys for moving between menu options and pages.
enter, z or space to enter menu page or select menu option.
esc, x or ?backspace to go back to previous menu option or page.
Honestly, I have so much experience with keyboard only menu controls that I kinda got used to it.
though, the game could’ve just used space instead of enter. the rest of this, I can understand.
Yeah, there’s no reference to what keys do or keybindings menu anywhere in the game.
also, I wonder how you missed that piece of dialogue.
It probably was either grenades or mines. though I can see how a player would be confused like that.
The cursor was showing up when I loaded in the tutorial house, so I’m not sure why it didn’t happen to you.
There were moments in gaming where a player would find a thing they want, but unfortunately, it’s in a pile of other different things they don’t want. (think 10 different things)
Sure, they could just pick up the other things and move them somewhere else, but that would be a bit of a hassle, wouldn’t it. (maybe the player will keep some of the things as junk to sell)
and sure, the player could do some pixel hunting to try to find the pick up box of the thing they want, but I’m pretty sure that would take a long time. too long perhaps.
Other games have tried ways to alleviate the hassle that comes with these moments.
(with success, in varying degrees depending on how it’s implemented)
things like clicking on names of things to pick them up, things dropping in containers that have slots in them, and other ways that if I mention, would probably clutter up this post more then I would like.
So yeah, I’m guessing that’s intentional because it’s one of the many ways to alleviate the hassle that comes with the aforementioned moments in gaming. (though I could be wrong altogether)
Well, I have some suggestions for the interface in operation spitfire.
How about some icons for the slots, specifically and only if they’re empty.
for example:
maybe the weapon slots can have an icon which is a bunch of different gun parts lined up so it looks like this.
except a lot more scaled down, and perhaps with a different background.
and the throwable slots can have like idk, a still image of a grenade and some other throwables being used.
lastly, I’ve seen games have a thing where if you get near/hover over an item, the interact button appears.
it could be above the item, below it, to the side, etc. I imagine that it would be pretty simple to implement, but I’m just a random schmuck on the internet so it could be like “Extremely hard to implement for some unknown reason”.
yeah, looking back, I was just backing and strafing when I was dealing with enemies.
(then again, my playstyle is mainly just playing it safe and getting reckless.)
when I got to the bonus level, the enemies in there changed up my behaviour, but only by a bit.
and by a bit, I mean like, only back up or only strafe, not both.
lastly, the bonus level was pretty empty, just the floors, walls, enemies, buttons, and items, that’s pretty much it.
no background decorations, nor anything else like it.
Final thoughts and Notes
first off, this post took way too long to write, partially because It got deleted once due to power outage, mostly because I was lazy.
I’ll rephrase what I said about the music.
the music is ok, not good compared to what I’ve heard before, but not bad compared to the possibly countless worse examples out there(I’ve not heard the bad music tracks(only a little) and I don’t plan to listen to them).
I’ve played a wide variety of games and thus heard a wide variety of music.
2 things these soundtracks have in common are
they fit the tone, the theme, and the area, in the games they’re made for.
they’re good to listen to in general.
sure, some soundtracks have only one of those things, but *sigh* you get what I’m saying(hopefully).
well, I guess it’s better to have the music when you’re playing spitfire than none at all.
I’ve seen some games that have the tutorial as it’s own level, and some games that did, put a boss in it as well.
if spitfire gets it’s own tutorial level, I honestly would be pretty happy about it. if not, that’s fine.
and lastly, the controls. I’ll talk about the controls for a little bit, so I’ll just show you how the controls work.
here are the controls, shown in no particular order.
WASD to move around
SHIFT to sprint
CTRL to slow your movement
LEFT CLICK to shoot(if weapon is equipped)
1 and 2 number keys(not the numpad) to switch weapons
E and T to use and drop items respectively
G and H to use and drop throwables respectively(G for grenade, wasn’t that obvious?)
RIGHT CLICK to interact with things(use buttons and doors, take things, it’s the universal interact button)
I gotta admit, some of these controls are a bit odd, but they weirdly fit. for some reason, they just fit.
well, I guess that’s it for me… for now.
if anyone manages to read through all this, well I gotta say, I’m impressed.
yeah, I didn’t add it partially because of wanting to get the demo out and thinking the intro would be enough to make sure people knew what to do.
Not sure either, unless Xaklor meant the actual mouse cursor, which in that case I disabled it for the custom cursor.
pretty much, and before this current iteration of picking up stuff it was E and had a large pickup radius. That resulted in the not fun situation of picking up a ton of items you may/may not want an having to drop them far away, which I really didn’t like. So this is pretty much the final form of the pick up mechanic
I did want the player to learn what things are as they go but if its a big enough issue I can look into adding names on top of items when you hover over them.
I can look into that
that’d be useful imo for differentiating the slots, as for adding interaction sprites I dont see why not, the pickups should be easiest as well.
I know I said I wouldn’t until the birthday of this thread but I couldn’t help myself, not like that’s a bad thing anyway. I’m actively working on improvements for most of the enemies for chapter 1 already
here’s some expansion I’ve done for one of the Chapter’s Bonus enemies:
I’m still working on the others currently.
As for the emptiness of the Bonus Area I’ll create assets for it. I’m happy with the layout but I agree there needs to be more stuff and detailing in it.
I think? are you saying the current tracks in Spitfire have one or both of the two traits in common?
Also that last bit hurted Joking aside I’m glad the music is atleast decent enough to have in the background (I think?) and I’m no skilled or talented individual, obviously.
And from what I’ve seen from games that inspired me in the first place is that they’re made with small/medium sized teams who already have experience in those areas (and a budget ) so what you see/hear is what I’m basically what I’m able to do, unfortunately.
well, you’re right about the fact that a lot of soundtracks are made by people who have experience and money.
while you on the other hand don’t have much experience and probably not spending money on the game.
so yeah, I can understand.
(well, as much as someone who has no experience in making music and probably not the best judge for it can)
I’m not sure whether the music in spitfire has one or both of the traits, but what I do know is that it’s decent.
honestly, it could’ve been a lot worse, so with that, make it as best as you can, and don’t screw up.
who knows, maybe in the future, you decided to remake some of your old games, possibly including spitfire.
(assuming future you is a game developer who has more experience and therefore made more than one game)
Seeing as its the first anniversary of this thread, I wanted to celebrate with more info on the updates regarding my progress with QoL stuff and polishing the first chapter of Spitfire before moving on to chapter 2.
First off
I’ve updated a majority of the first chapter enemies to have a higher variety of behaviors (atleast 2 to be exact), though a few enemies have been left unchanged. On top of that, I’ve lowered the bullet speed and fire rate of almost all enemies to be less punishing and overall less hectic. Bosses have been unchanged.
Second,
I’ve officially added a controls screen to the menu (For now!), This will hopefully help those of you who might be confused about which button does what and so on. Along with that I also coded in highlights for interactable doors and a button prompt for them.
I’m adding in and spiriting more props for chapter one to make it more vibrant and not as empty. Along with balancing overall enemy placement to not be clusterfucks And looking back on some item placements and making them more or less plentiful to prevent previous and future levels from either being too easy or too hard due to artificial reasons.
That’s all that I’ve worked on so far. Planned stuff I’m looking to add is a snap-on/off camera for a bit more extra range, along with some polishing for the player UI.
) so what you see/hear is what I’m basically what I’m able to do, unfortunately.
