CheesiMoon's Dev Talks

Welcome back to Dev Talks! Dev Talks will be a time to talk about my thoughts on the current game being developed and anything else that's potentially relevant. This is the 4th episode, but each episode is self-contained, like a slice-of-life show. Recently, the name of the current game project I’m working on, previously known as “Hallegen: Starset Glaze”, was just changed to "Astropods: Starside Glaze". This is a pretty big deal, as the name of a game (or any piece of art in general) is incredibly important not only for identity's sake, but also to somehow describe the experience and vibe of the game. Keep in mind, this is very, very in-depth, so a TL;DR is at the end if you don’t wanna read through all 3000+ words, which is very understandable. I’m also gonna try to section this one into subcategories as well for the sake of readability, so bear with me. SEGMENTS: Why change the name to begin with? Rules for the new name to follow The processing process Why a subtit...

Welcome back to Dev Talks! We are now on a new site, one dedicated for stuff like this! Once again, Dev Talks will be our time to talk about my thoughts on the current game being developed and anything else that's potentially relevant. Inspirations are everywhere. We are constantly surrounded by the past and the present, and works of arts like games and film are no exception. That being said, what has Hallegen: Starset Glaze been inspired by? This may be obvious to fans of Hallegen's inspirations, but I figured I might as well share for those curious. These are only gonna be the major inspirations, as there are too many minor inspirations to count, but I would love to compile a list of the minor inspirations one day. Anyways... First up, Kirby!  Kirby, Kirby, Kirby, that's the name everyone knows! The fantastical setting, the gameplay style, the character designs, all inspired by Kirby. For those who may not know, I am a huge fan of Kirby, because of how much joy and fun th...

 (Archived from @hallegengame IG, 8/11/2022) Welcome back to Dev Talks! It has been a while since last time. Dev Talks will be our time to talk about our thoughts on Hallegen, and anything else that's potentially relevant. For today, I wanna go over two things: 1. Why updates have been slowing down 2. Why have there been many significant changes to the game itself compared to what it used to be. The reason for the somewhat slow updates lately are mostly due to me revamping the engine. A lot of old, ugly, inefficient and iteration-unfriendly code were inside, and thus I had to touch it up. I havent finished going through all of it, as that would take an extremely long time, but I'll leave it as is for now, since now the player character code in particular is a lot nicer to work with. As for the game itself, there were always features I wanted to implement, but didn't have the finesse to pull them off in a timely manner. One such mechanic was character swapping. Character swa...

 (Archived from @hallegengame IG, 1/1/2022) Happy New Year everyone! Dev Talks will be our time to talk about our thoughts on Hallegen, and anything else that's potentially relevant. 2021 has been a tumultuous year for Hallegen, as the team's been shaken up twice throughout the year. This page might be new, but this game and its Twitter page has been around for a while, so bear with me a bit. I used to be very passionate against programming, so I would spend a lot of time trying to avoid as much of it as possible, which was my main motivation for forming a team with others in both instances. However, that's not how teams should be made, and I found out the hard way what happens to the game and people when that is the primary motivator. Everyone suffers. Through these experiences, I'm slowly learning to embrace and appreciate programming, as it gives me utmost control over how the game works, which is something I will never want to give up anytime soon if ever. This is a...