ALPHA 1 - Itching for Content

Welcome back to the train of the afterlife!
For this game I have a whole road map I'm keeping to myself because I'm not 100% if it's going to pan out. But I want it to! Historically my life has always been chaotic and these passion projects get dragged out too far; then I have to drop them to focus on my persona life. With my life being super different, and being the sole developer currently of 8 Bit Simple; I think it's time for a change in that pattern.

The game has gotten alright reception, honestly getting plays is really hard even in a jam; and the game is really short right now. I didn't think it'd do well at all honestly, my confidence is always wavering when it comes to level design, art; and any form of audio. However! Most people said that the game was great in terms of art style, atmosphere, message; and overall the game is just frustrating due to no checkpoints. Which is really expected since it was designed as a rogue-lite.

So! I am beyond excited to announce!

Falling Chairs are Back!
Falling chairs were removed due to a weird bug in the last few hours of the jam. What was happening was chairs would just fall when a door closed. No idea why, but it was happening, even after fixing I still don't get it; but if it works it works right? Right! So, now the first main car has its falling chairs back.

Health System!
Yes I've heard your concerns of difficulty, and while I don't plan to add checkpoints since that to me hurts the experience as a future rogue-lite (I MIGHT BE working on run modifiers one which will add checkpoints as an OPTIONAL experience). I do understand taking a single hit and losing everything without warning does kinda suck. So, I added a health system! This way you get more than one hit but the difficulty and tension is still there.

Variable Jump!
Originally I wanted to implement a variable jump system but time wasn't on my side; and I'm not a Unity pro yet. So, it was easier to just stick with the classic press and jump system. BUT! For this new update since I had to rework the player controller; I just added the variable jump in.

New Working Title!
Originally the game was called "The Lost" and I had other names such as "Soul Train", "Souljun"; and "Beyond the Veil" . But I wasn't really attached to any of them. The game only ended up being called "The Lost" due to me not wanting to spend too much time on the name. Introspective however was the name of an older game I was making that was inspired by Persona 4 and Undertale. It dealt with looking into the characters with their fears and mental health. Right now this game deals with the death of a child/teen going through the stages of death after dying on Halloween. BUT! Why does that have to be it? Why such a small and shallow message? I plan on making a lot more content that deals with the theme of looking into each character and playing out their own stories. These will all (as planned now) be on a procedurally generated rogue train with diverse cars. But with each character having their own car variations as time goes on.

Project Maintenance
I restructured the project files, the scenes in Unity and prefabs as well as the code within the scripts. This was a decent sized undertaking but well worth it! 

I also reduced prefabs, scripts; and reduced everything as much as possible. Some scripts were doing too many functions, and others were just repeating what other scripts could already do. I also set up the game to be more procedural for a future rogue-lite experience which was super important.

The game is running more smoothly and generally a better a foundation to build onto. It's something as a player you won't notice; but later on if I hadn't done this you would notice as the game would feel unstable.

Spawner Object Pooling
Object pooling is where you take x amount of objects and place them in one container. Then you activate and deactivate them as needed. This means the game isn't constantly deleting and creating new object instances but rather just recycling them. It's a super basic system that works really well and smooths out the game performance. Not everything can be reasonably object pooled, but things like the background buildings and red goo drip hazards; those all can be pooled easily.

Player Controller Rework
I used this super nice asset to get a head start in the character controller department. And I use this asset for any 2D project I do in Unity that has a character; because it's a nice foundation. BUT! It doesn't exactly work how I would make it work, things don't exactly fit my thought process which means it's harder to add onto. So, I just customized it to my personal fitting to where it's now not just some asset I'm using; but rather a tool that's fitted for this game.

What's next up for this game?! Let me give you a quick preview!

And that's just a start! But you should grab your copy for FREE right now! After ALPHA 2 releases the game will increase in price each update until it hits its final price point!

After all ALPHA 1 is out RIGHT NOW!