Hello everyone, the month of June is ending so that means it’s time for another update on the progress of Mole Maiden. Currently I am trying to figure out where to post my updates. The last one I did was on my YouTube channel, but not my company channel. Then I thought about staring a blog on my company website, and then I considered using the Devlog feature on the game’s itch page. So what I am going to do is this. Since Mole Maiden in it’s current state is my senor capstone project, I will update the Itch page’s devlog, then when we start ramping up development for the two years after this one, I will probably move development updates to a more accessible location. Ok cool, let’s get into the meat and potatoes.

The Addition of Playmaker:

As a state in my previous dev update, Mole Maiden’s goals are to create a character who moves incredibly fluidly while making a world that is stuffed to the brim with personality. A big way I planned to do this was to make a cast of diverse and memorable bosses and characters. So, you can imagine my worry when I sat down to program some of these bosses and found myself completely stumped on how to do so. I had worried that I over scoped the project and would have to change some of the design of the game to fit something that I could wrap my head around. However, a beacon of hope shined when I was researching how other small indie teams where able to make big, complicated bosses I discovered a lot of these small teams used assets that did a lot of the complicated work for them. One of these assets being Playmaker, used in such famous games as Inside and Hollow Knight.

The majoring of my time last month was spent figuring out how to use this new asset (and continuing work on Penny’s controls). And let me say, Playmaker is the sniz! In a weekend I got some semblance of a boss logic fully functional, then some basic enemy AI. I was so cool to have enemies move through the level (all bit it, very broken) and to have them die after taking hits. The more I work on Mole Maiden the more it feels like the game I have envisioned.

So after all this, what’s next for the month of July. When I am happy to say that all of Penny’s abilities that she can used in the V-Slice are programmed and I won’t be making any more abilities for the time being. That means that all the moves Penny can have that will affect her traversal ability will be useable in the V-Slice. So now, I just got to polish everything like a Diamond.

See you all in July!