One year ago on this date, I stated that I was making another game. Now it’s a year later and it still isn’t done, so that’ll tell you how good I am at making games. I have no idea how long I had thought this game would take to make when I first started it, but I don’t think it was over a year. So if any of you out there were looking forward to playing it, I’m sorry it’s taking so long. Allow me to explain why.

Remember when I said this game was chaotic? Such an understatement can hardly be rivalled. That’s because, in addition to being more story-focused, this is also a game about fighting in battles with soldiers and monsters. The original idea was to have two giant armies fight each other in some kind of battle simulator game, with you playing as a wizard that can heal the soldiers on your side, keeping them alive and winning the battle. Soldiers and monsters alike would use an AI to seek each other out and engage in combat, where they would roll damage values to deal to their target based on stats for the attacker. There were several soldiers and monsters of different types, all duking it out in a big warzone.

But there were so many problems with this idea. There’s no way a web game would function correctly with all this stuff going on, not without lagging or breaking somehow. With several actors on and off-screen, calculating target distances and damage values, it was just too much. And that also impacted the gameplay experience, because I slowly realized that I had no idea how to make the game fun and playable out of such madness. There was far more chaos than I had intended, and despite this, it just wasn’t very interesting.

So I ended up reworking everything. Now, your party consists of ten people, and in battle you’ll only ever be in combat with that many monsters, bringing the maximum number of combatants down to twenty characters at a time. Also, damage is no longer rolled or based on a character’s stats. Instead, damage is dealt based on collision, and if an attack hits a target, the target takes one point of damage. With these big changes, lots of other aspects of the game needed adjusting as well, like the max health of actor types and the size of battle scenes.

This new combat system works a lot better, but it still needs lots of adjusting before it’s finished. I need to carefully refine it, not just to fix as many bugs as I can, but to make the game fun, playable, and balanced. And with it’s running theme of pure chaos built into both it’s story and mechanics, you can bet it won’t be nearly as hard as my other games, because there’s no way I’ll be able to fix every bug that exists.

That’s the reason why I didn’t want to say much about the game before. I had no idea what I was doing with it at the time. But now I’ve made a lot of progress since figuring that out, though I still have a lot of work to do before it’s done. My personal goal that I’ve set for myself is to release it before the end of the school year, and that still seems feasible, but I still can’t promise that it’ll be out by then. In hindsight it was definitely not a good idea to start making a game like this after having only made one other game, but that doesn’t mean I’ll give up on it. One day it will be done, and when it is I hope you’ll enjoy it.