Ladies and Gents and all those in between. We have ourselves a post mortem. Those who are probably in the know, but on Tuesday 9/12/2023, Unity decided to pull some Major BS with their pricing model, making free games made in the software a Determent.  There is a chance of a walk back, but with their current board of Directors, extremely unlikely. Due to this fact, and other issues which I'll get to in a sec, Walpurgis is effectively cancelled. Which sucks, but understandable.

So, Yes a LOT of work was done on Walpurgis 2.0, No I don't have a functional version to post here. Instead, I'll post Art, cut concepts and such to have SOMETHING for the Portfolio. Do I intend on using these characters plot and all that planned for a future project? Of course, hell these characters weren't even originally designed for this game, I just had them lying around not being used and it was a good jumping off point for the Game Jam. So enjoy the Pretty art.

So Originally the plan for 2.0 was to add all the content I wanted to put in originally for the Jam. This was my first Proper game I've ever coded by myself, and it shows. I didn't really use many tutorials at all while making it, only really for the Math for the bullet path, and spawning. Aside from that all me baby! basically taking what I've learned from other tutorials and applying what I learned. It came out okay. It was missing a lot of key features, but for a first attempt it was pretty alright. At least it looked pretty. as an artist/animator first I'm glad I can at least make something look pretty. A few patches to squash some bugs later, I have the mostly stable version we have now. 1.42. after making a stable build I decided to go into deep production on a massive update. It had all the works, Menus that Worked with Controller, proper volume settings, I-frames, and all that good Jazz, better hit feedback, and new enemy types. It was shaping up to be pretty decent. Then Scope creep happened, as always does, that mixed with getting stuck due to my inexperience and having to do literally everything aside from maybe some rough animation help on top of working a full time job, and general apathy for the project made it a slow roll.

Spouts of depression and all that came and went as well. but I still got some progress done. I had plans for an animated intro cutscene as well to flex my animation muscles a bit more and try and break my bad habit of having issues finishing an animation, while also looking nice for Newgrounds.

It was going to look like a retro 90/00s  anime, I have the means to do it, and I'm obsessed with that era of anime, because I grew up with that and it was so much more raw back in the day. That being said why do I not have a functional build to place here? Well...

So While I was jamming in a bunch of Square boxes in a round hole that was the old Code base, it finally just decided to quit working. There was a Nasty Bug when switching weapons that I caused where you'd be CONSTANTLY subscribing to an event every frame which caused a lock up on switching weapons. My bad on that front. There player also just decided to STOP Moving randomly. Like for no reason... We couldn't really figure out why. So I decided to just take all the ART and restart the Project into a new Unity Project. This time taking all that I've learned and optimizing it. That was causing me to take time away I would have spent animating the intro that was Written, Recorded Lines for, and was in the process of Boarding to do that, but a cleaner code base is better to build off of. I hit a few snags, and it was stop and go for a moment there, but I was finally to really hit my Stride. I added a Tileset and made a scrolling level background. got all but Lightning back in the game (I wanted Lighting spell to act differently then how I did it in the original Build. I effectively cheated in the base game. Very animator mindset of me.) And I was in the process of getting enemies back working in the game, I was having issues with the Movement code, I tried cheating a bit admittedly on that, but I was move all the collisions to 3D over 2D because of how the Character controller worked, and it confused me on the base game, causing an issue with trying to keep the player bound to an area. (Which I did figure out, I did a clamping method back from an old Starfox Prototype I was trying to do) but when I was getting close to strapping another playable version of the game together, Unity Did their announcement. I tried looking into other engines to see if anything met my fancy. Godot and I have a love hate relationship, and I tried Stride out, but it was MASSIVELY lacking a lot of the Tool set that Unity offered, which sucks. Because I kind of liked it, but it also was unorganized, and it's not artist friendly at all. (Splitting a Sprite sheet was like pulling teeth I telling ya) And the prospect of restarting Walpurgis a 3rd time was just not mentally in the cards for me. The project initially was a buggy mess, I already had to restart it from scratch already, and again I'm not big on the Bullet hell Genre. So I'm Cancelling the project. It's been a monkey on my back for too long and it's been taking away focus on the Projects I want to do. I keep telling myself  "I need to do A before I can do C" And C becomes D, the E then so on and so forth. Not anymore. My skills as a Writer, an Artist, animator, and now as a Programmer and Game designer as improved to the Point where I feel confident I can make my Dream project a reality. I'm going to be doing devlogs for the on our Youtube channel, so please subscribe there if interested. Catch you there!

-Elick