Cobalt Encore - Released!
I made a word puzzle fangame and it's available now on itch.io
Cobalt Core is one of my favourite roguelike deckbuilders of all time, up there with Slay the Spire and Wildfrost. Towards the end of last year, I was sitting around brainstorming puzzle ideas when I was hit with inspiration for a Cobalt Core-inspired word puzzle, and now it's out!
Cobalt Encore is most directly inspired by the way the original game lets you pick a crew of three each run (causing your deckbuilding drafts to draw from three pools, one for each character). In my game, you select your three crew, then need to come up with a word that satisfies all three of their requirements.
I figured I'd go into a few challenges I found interesting during the process, in case anyone finds that interesting.
Puzzle Development
Coming up with 8 orthogonal requirements a word can satisfy was a fun challenge, especially given the requirement that all 8 had to work for one specific, special word (Max's requirement is still kinda cheating, if I'm honest). Several of the requirements had to go through some workshopping after being too easy or difficult to meet, or just counterintuitive to explain.
Peri's requirement was originally "Letters with holes must be evenly spaced" (the imagery of a ship firing, strafing a constant distance, then firing again, came to mind), but was later replaced with the significantly better "word must have at least four holes" (which had the dual bonus of incentivising words with the letter B, which is a less common property). Max went through a lot of iterations regarding 3 letter scrabble words, substrings and all sorts of nonsense before finishing on the elegant "word must be able to be split into two smaller words".
It was also a fun challenge designing semantic requirements that could also be verified by a computer. The two requirements I chose - "words that are rocks" and "words that are colours" - seem to end up being pretty intuitive using the word lists I chose. That said, it was a bit of nightmare extracting all the rock/gem/metal names from Wikipedia (I used regex on the HTML, and got several surprising bugs - I also had to account for the fact some links go to articles by a different name).
Game Development
This is my first full end-to-end project in Godot, which it feels good to have experience in.
I've grown to really appreciate Godot's signal system. When I'm firing off a series of asynchronous events across multiple objects it's excellent that I can initiate some event of indeterminate length then await a return value or signal to know when I can move on. A lot of good opportunities for synchronising event systems there.
This came in handy when making the dialogue system, which was a delight to get working and really adds a lot to the game. I think it'll be the basis for any future dialogue systems I design, especially ones that chatter away automatically rather than being manually triggered.
Building Assets
Obviously a lot of assets were pulled directly from Cobalt Core (a blessing, if I had to make them all from scratch I'd have taken months of extra development time), but a lot of them were also made by me.
I think a real standout is the custom speech noises for all the different crew members. I really enjoyed building a basic system for generating randomly pitched noises then finding SFX which makes satisfying noises when mashed together. I particularly like Isaac's occasional pneumatic drill buzz, and the contrast of Peri's morse code blips having no pitch changes.
As someone getting started with pixel art, the interface and floppy discs were incredibly fun to make (note to self: floppy discs get inserted into computers the other way around). At one point I thought it'd be a fun stretch goal to let you unlock multiple interfaces based on the various ships in the game, but that's been left by the wayside until I'm motivated to give it a makeover.
While not an 'asset' per se, I was quite happy with the overall UI design. I think the way the text you type smoothly transitions onto the screen is really satisfying (and obeys my #1 rule, put effort into the things your users will use the most) and I think the animations that play when you obey a rule are punchy.
I do have to give myself demerits for my constant use of mixels, however. I was relieved to discover that my game works fine in full screen on a standard 16x9 monitor but in future I'll be taking far more care to choose exactly what dimensions my pixel art and viewport should be in the future.
What's Next?
I've done a bug patch or two for the game, and I'll likely do one more before the year's over (I think there's a chance the Confounding Calendar will bring some more views to my page in December, so it'd be nice to have it polished and ready by then).
But other than that, the project is done and I can move onto other things! I'm currently midway through porting a bunch of puzzles and mysteries onto itch.io so it has a more complete catalogue of my work. Then I want to work on my entry for this year's Confounding Calendar (I think I have an excellent idea, but it'll take a bit of meddling to get right), start a side project I've discussed with a friend for a while, and begin work on a game I'd like to announce at Steam NextFest next year (more news about that soon!).