Neon Diver release post
The shoot them up I've been working on in Godot since April apparently is finally finished...or at least finished enough where I'm ready to put it out into the world and move onto something else. Game design is always kind of a series of problems with no end so at a certain point you just have to accept you're not going to fix any more things about it. It can feel like giving up in a way, but it's the same with drawing an art piece where nobody's going to tell you that you're finished.
All this to say Cohost closing at the end of September put me in a state where the felt so close to being done and I could probably release it if I rush it and just let the ending graphics look rough as hell. Really this needed a lot more time iterating and ironing out some of the obvious bugs and testing and feedback, but I definitely need practice calling something finished. Even if it's just (beta ver.).
As for the world and characters of this thing, I actually mostly pulled a lot of parts from the idea I had years ago for some kind of beat them up rhythm game hybrid which I long accepted would be too difficult to make. Which means I'm not quite as attached to it all as I am with my other characters. This is extremely on purpose to make me less of a perfectionist about it all, but it also means there's a lot of world and lore stuff that I haven't really thought about to the same extent, and yet there's kind of a lot of it because I did think about it at some point. It's kind of the worst of both worlds when it comes to simplicity and interesting depth, but that's a balance I'll probably be trying to hit for a long time. It's tough! Writers who just make a simple concept are genius.
It could be fun to make another one someday, I set out with the thought of "you know i bet making a shmup is totally doable" and ended up being right. But if I'm going to spend another 5 months on a project I'd like it to be one of these visual novels I keep getting halfway to a first draft state in and then remaining obsessed with. After some of those are done maybe I'll try to rope other people into helping make a more polished shmup, with a much easier to use system of putting enemies in place hopefully.