Introduction

Hello, I'm zleze, I'm writing this devlog! This is the first devlog for the Klackaroo Post-Jam Update (Remake? I dunno). We took a short break after the jam ended to rate some games and gather ourselves, but we're back! This post will cover some changes we're making from the jam version, as well as brand new things we plan to add.

DISCLAIMERS: Not everything we have planned will be covered here, and some things may be reworked, changed, or scrapped altogether.

Because our code in the jam version was so sloppy, we decided to completely start from scratch in a new Godot project. This blank slate let us come up with ideas that we wouldn't have been able to implement in the older, bloated, and downright unmaintainable project. We're not too far into development right now, but we do have some things in the works that I want to share.

Maze Editor

What you're looking at right now is a VERY early version of the Maze Editor. This is a feature that was originally planned to only serve as a development tool, but we realized that it would have been a missed opportunity to create a level-editor and not allow players to make use of it.

This is what I personally have been pouring the most development time into. I've been working on the Maze Editor while a friend has been occasionally working on other things. It has been quite messy, I honestly suck at this, but I've been improving as things go on, there's just so many bugs popping up. I initially questioned whether I wanted to make an editor to begin with, but I got flashbacks to how unfun it was making the mazes from scratch in a 3D environment using Godot's GridMap tools and made up my mind. The tools themselves are fine, but there was a lot of weirdness that made it annoying to edit the mazes directly.

I decided that it'd be better to take an approach where we create a representation of what we want our maze layout to be in 2D, objects and tiles included, and then write code that takes that and generates a 3D maze out of it. The way we're going to do this is still up in the air, there's several approaches we could take, but we want to do it in a way that makes it as easy as possible for players to share mazes with each other. Why?  I thought it would be cool, that's why!!

Because of the way we're handling this, it might take more work to get multi-floored mazes working, but I'm not sure if we wanted to add those anyway. That's kind of where this originally being a development tool starts to show. My intention was to just generate the mazes and then do a bit of manual work to blend them together in a single scene, which would allow me to merge two mazes into one multi-floored maze if we so desired, but obviously players wouldn't be able to do this. This is still something I'm thinking about, it's unclear what I'll do about it for now, as this system is very much built on the assumption that a maze will only ever be 1 floor.

Ok, that's enough about the Maze Editor, moving on!

New Story

With a completely new game project comes a new story. I'm not going to reveal anything big obviously, it's best to experience it once the new version is out, but I'll talk about the game's writing in general. I knew going in that I wanted to redo the story. In the jam version, the story was honestly an afterthought. I spent time writing dialogue, enough that I had a few dozen lines of scrapped dialogue and even used the wrong ones in some places (whoops, should have been more careful on which ones I deleted I guess), but the story did not have much substance. It had a sort of cool meta thing going on with it, but it wasn't much more than just "some cool ideas."

That is why we're completely redoing the story for the post-jam version, so consider the jam version retconned. The new version will assume you've never played the jam version, so don't be surprised if the few things we keep from that version reappear in the post-jam one. As we rewrite, I've been wondering whether or not to tap into those meta elements shown off in the jam version or maybe taking the story in a different direction. I'm more inclined to say that those meta elements are what made Klackaroo stand out, alongside its typing-focused gameplay loop, but things may change.

Quality of Life & Misc. Improvements

The biggest thing we knew we wanted in a post-jam version was some quality of life features. There were also some systems that we needed to rework to create a smoother gameplay experience.

First off, we decided that difficulty settings are probably a requirement for this game. People's typing skills vary, it's just a fact, and we can't design a game around a real life skill without accounting for the fact that some people are better than others. We decided that most likely, we will recommend a difficulty based off of your WPM typing speed. If that doesn't work out, a basic question asking for your proficiency in typing will probably be asked to determine it.

I completely remade the typing prompt system. This new system uses Godot's TextEdit node, with some modifications. This should make it easier for people with AZERTY keyboards and other keyboard layouts to play the game, but some testing may be required.

We want to add to the atmosphere and make it a bit easier to navigate mazes by increasing the amount of decorations. This should create "landmarks" that players can use to navigate around a maze more easily, if they're observant enough to pick up on them.

100% we are going to add saving and probably autosaving. The game is going to be longer with some added content and levels, so it's necessary that you don't get sent back to the beginning every time you die.

We might randomize prompts on each playthrough. This could make things a bit more interesting for repeat playthroughs, which may be necessary for some of the things we have planned.

End of Devlog

That's it for now! Any feedback is appreciated, suggestions are also accepted, but obviously not guaranteed to be implemented. I'm excited to work on this game for the next few months! I'm not sure when it'll be done, I know for a fact that unless it gets cancelled I don't want it to take any longer than 4 months, which will require limiting the scope a bit if we want to stay on-track. Of course, things could change, and if we decide we want to make the game bigger, we might rethink our scope. Take care, byebye!

- zleze