I finally created a simple discord channel for the game. The research involved was looking at other discord channels for indie games and took what I thought was important and relevant for my channel. I took a bot that could moderate the server well and I created rooms to help keep it organized. Hopefully all this will be enough for now. If it does grow then I will change whatever needs to be changed. The bot has a great feature that requires users to react to a message in order to get a role. I made sure that people need a role in order to interact with the rest of the channel. This way it will help filter the people who actually want to be there.
I did very little work in the game. I spent most of the day continuing the course on how to build a steam page and looking online for artists who can make me official game art. While looking through the character movement I found the setting for minimum analog walk speed. It did bother me a little that you could walk as slowly as possible if you used a joystick, but by putting a number on this setting it will set the speed to that number even if the stick is tilted ever so slightly.
The heartbeat sound when the player’s health was low got irritating to me. I originally put it there to add suspense to the game, but I think most people will find it annoying and if I build the atmosphere well enough they will hear their own heartbeat anyway. So I removed the entire logic of the heartbeat sound. It was a nice idea but eventually it became more of a nuisance.
Through the free course I learned about steam capsules which are the images that steam uses to display your game on the application. There are different sizes and the teacher recommends I find a specific capsule artist, but I believe I can figure out another way to do it in my own way, in a manner of speaking. I still need a logo for the game which I will be using on the steam capsule eventually. After studying some games I see that they usually use the same art and just resize it, making sure that the logo fits well within the context.
As part of the course I am learning more about how to identify the core gameplay loop of my game and what similarities it has to other games because this will be important to marketing it and letting steam do its magical algorithm.
I will probably be able to finish the course by the end of the day. I’ve also reached out to some artists and sent them some screenshots of the character to see if they are interested in creating a piece of art for me.
Tomorrow I may start writing out the story for the fourth stage.
GoldenGratus Games 