It is that time of the year; the TAGAP anniversary day development update!
However, it isn't the one I originally planned to have when I started to chart the road-map for the Next Game. Far from it.
According to the original 2023 plan, today was meant to be the Big Reveal – showcasing what the Next Game is in a full reveal trailer with tons of gameplay. Instead, I'm here having to basically explain why I've been AWOL for most of the year and why the development has been painfully slow. I hope this doesn't come across as some 'woe is me' post, as the intent is simply to explain where things are at – and despite the troubles, progress is being made.
I hope you didn't think I've forgotten anyone who has supported us and TAGAP over the years. Far from it – and I'm sorry I haven't been able to give meaningful progress reports. That's simply because all that progress hasn't been report-worthy.
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Before we start, as I didn't have the game reveal I intended to have for today, I created a new TAGAP wallpaper for you guys. It accidentally became sort of a 'key art' for this full blog post – hopefully gazing into brighter tomorrow.
For clarification, this is not for The Next Game, but inspired by the original four TAGAP titles.
And since this is 2024 and some 'expert' will surely crawl out of the woodworks telling me AI made this:
Timelapse generated from snapshots taken during the digital painting of the key art.
This year has been honestly the second worst in my personal life thus far, filled with pain. I mean the literal kind.
The pain part I've explained before – it resulted from my non-ergonomic dev station. Updating it fixed it... but I ended up developing different health issues, some equally painful to the ones before. They took three months to subside, so the first five months I was popping painkillers, unable to concentrate on programming or complex design work.
This naturally nuked my schedule. There's been tons of progress being made with the new game – but not the kind that would've been needed for the reveal. As in, I have almost all the non-boss enemies and characters designed and mostly even vectorized already, so I've been shading and rigging them up all this time. No brain work necessary there, just going through the list and working on art – even in painkiller haze I can do that.
And then there was the more metaphorical kind of pain, as I was part of an employee group targeted for a mass lay-off. You know, the average day in tech these days.
All the above are now a thing of the past, apart from the last (and worst) of the health issues. And by the time you're reading this, even with that I'll now what's what.
That's why 'blog key art' is as hopeful as it is.
What this long rambling means is that this year we won't be seeing the Big Reveal for the Next Game, even though I so promised last year.
I can't emphasize enough how sorry I'm for that. I deeply apologise.
Hopefully next year we can shake things up proper over here! Time hasn't been wasted, after all; I've spent all this time creating roughly 70% of all the enemies and lot of the props for the whole game, so we could be hitting the floor running. Flippers crossed!
I've been trying to loop back to the track that would lead to the game reveal – that is, creating the last few missing enemies and assets required to build the first few levels in full, for proper gameplay recording.
So far so good on that front; all but one of the enemies needed have been fully done, only requiring sounds. As for props and textures, everything has been planned and mostly designed, only needing the actual asset creation.
I have already started prototyping levels, but I've kept that on the back-burner so I can get the level to-be-featured in the reveal fully fleshed out first.
After that, some more cinematic art. These will be used for multitude of cinematics across the game, but some are needed for the short cinematic segment that will kickstart the reveal trailer – meaning it is part of the same workload. In this case, it is characters and gear you see in the game and that has been fully created already, but needs variants seen from different angles. The one drawback of working in 100% 2D.
Playlist is a regular feature in our Penguin DT blog; A chance to highlight cool games both old and new that I've been playing. As always, I believe that in order to make games, you need to play them, preferably with a broad scope when it comes to genres, so each day I dedicate at least an hour to actually playing games. The rest of the free time? There is no such thing, it all belongs to TAGAP!
When the lay-offs thing was at its peak and I got the health scare, I escaped to the one thing that keeps bad thoughts at bay; DOOM Eternal. Seriously, it is so fast and remorseless on higher difficulties that you'll suck dirt if your mind wonders even for a millisecond. As a result, it beats everything occupying your mind do pulp.
There's just one problem with DOOM Eternal, though: it is such a masterwork that anything you play afterwards will feel like cardboard, regardless of how good it is. So I decided to play something I knew was excellent but so different (at least in gameplay) that it wouldn't compare.
Enter Warhammer 40k: Mechanicus by Bulwark Studios – a turn based tactical game based on the 'IT support of WH40k'. I already knew the game was good – played it on PC earlier – but I hadn't had the chance to do the Heretek DLC infused playthrough yet. So, I did a full new playthrough on PS4.
Seriously, grab Mechanicus at the earliest possibility it is a magnificent game full of character and has one of the best scores in ages. The sequel announcement was the second best announcement to happen in games all year!
And finally, as of writing this, I've been going through the console (PS4) port of DUSK. DUSK needs no introduction at this point so I won't spend ten paragraphs praising it, but I do have to point out how good the console ports are. When you port a fast-paced PC FPS to consoles, the biggest make-or-brake point are the controls. Even some of the bigger, well established porting studios stumble at this at times, so I'm delighted to report that DUSK's controller controls are flawless – right out there with the likes of DOOM Eternal. Good, smooth stuffs.
On The Next Game; hopefully creating the gameplay reveal trailer level (finally!).
On Playlist; PS4 version of Carrion just arrived in the mail, so most likely that.
