Kit's Blog

I do apologise, but I still have some features I'd like to add to Alpha 0.4 before releasing it, and I failed to take into consideration the 4-day vacation I took recently so I wasn't able to get as much work done as I would have liked. 0.4 will be released on August 30th.

This is a different post compared to my usual updates about game development and my misadventures with technology. This post is an essay on why I consider Half-Life (specifically, Half-Life 1) to be a Metroidvania game. Firstly, what is a Metroidvania? Well, if we consult the Wikipedia page  for the subgenre, we can see that it's a portmanteau of Metroid and Castlevania. When the page lists the characteristics of this kind of game, the first aspect mentioned is its 2D sidescrolling gameplay. This rules out the possibility of Half-Life being a Metroidvania, right? Well, Metroid does have the Prime trilogy which brings the franchise and its iconic gameplay to the third dimension. Castlevania, while it doesn't have any official 3D games, does have a fanmade Doom mod that throws the franchise into 3D, adhering of course to the limitations of id tech 1. The conversion of Metroid and Castlevania into 3D retains their iconic gameplay mechanics and thus, I believe 3D games shouldn'

 Cambria Alpha 0.4 will be released as a public GitHub repository on my GitHub profile on August 27th, 2021. Stay tuned!

Whoa! I haven't posted any updates to this blog since the end of July! To make up for it, here are two pictures instead of the usual one picture or lack thereof. As you can see, I redid the assets again. In fact, I redid them twice but they didn't turn out super well so I have now redone my assets a grand total of three times. One of these pictures shows the Link's Awakening inspired trees that I've added. They're currently without functionality but that's only temporary. The second image shows the clinic. The walls are still a work-in-progress but I think it's coming along nicely. I think I might give up on cross-map navmeshes for this update, but I'll still implement basic friendly NPCs and a dialogue system.

The good news is, I received my second dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccination yesterday. The bad news is I have been aching all day as a side effect and have been barely able to get out of bed. This will unfortunately mean that the Alpha 0.4 update will be delayed to mid-August, and will likely be the final major update for a while as I am starting school soon after. I will continue to work on smaller updates for Cambria during the school year, but development will slow down significantly. The new assets will also undergo a lot of changes before the update releases, as I would like to build a concrete art style for Cambria.

Yesterday I redid most of Cambria's assets (picture below). I wasn't satisfied with the source photography I had taken and edited for most of the textures so I remade them in pixel art. I also slightly modified the player and medic spritesheets so that their eyes are a bit larger. Tonight I've been working on health bars for the rovers to further telegraph the damage that the player does to them. Other smaller things I've done since my last post here include: adding knockback to when a rover is hit, making damage from both the player and the rovers a random integer between 10 and 25 rather than a fixed value, and some general game balance. I've done all this as a means of procrastination. Whenever I have a big complicated feature I need to implement, I tend to add a bunch of other smaller things to the game. This is actually kind of a good thing as I can iron out the little details at times where I otherwise would not have thought to. It's also a bad thing, of c