Since there's a lot of work to be done yet before my next release, which may not be ready for another week or more, I wanted to keep you posted on the progress I've been making, considering that I've been working literally day and night, for hours on end, to the point that my arm is going numb and my head is swimming from sitting in front of the computer too much (but I don't want to stop til it's finished!). And a lot of it is behind-the-scenes sort of stuff that you might not even notice much, as the player, and it would please me to give you an indication of just all the work that goes into putting a game together (even a relatively simple one like Ascension).
The secret alternate ending that I teased earlier is coming along very nicely. In fact, it's all but finished, and I've moved on to tackling the issue of how to unlock it. I've decided that to do so, you will need to find a hidden item in each of the stages of the game. They only appear on Hard Mode, and it will be a challenge to find/reach them, as I want the player to work for this ending (which is totally worth it). They shouldn't be impossible to find, obviously, but I want to put them in places where the player isn't very likely to stumble on them by accident. Ideally, I want the player to play through the game once and get the normal ending, before attempting the alternate ending (since the normal ending, which is the "true" ending, better concludes the story, and the secret ending is mostly just for fun). I plan on putting a tip at the end of the credits after you beat the game, informing the player of what he must do to unlock the secret ending, because, secret though it is, I do want the player to know that it's there, so he can look for it.
So anyway, while I'm hiding the secret items in each of the stages, this gives me a great opportunity to revisit each of those stages now that the game is in a state of relative completion from start to finish, and evaluate how I feel about them. I can polish them up, maybe add or extend a few things here or there, and complete things that maybe I rushed when I was trying to get the stage posted that week. Obviously, overhauling Labyrinth is going to be part of this process. I went back to Limbo (the first stage, you might remember), and completely recoded the gremlins, because the way I had done it before was kind of clunky, and OCD as I am, I wanted to polish it up a bit. It was a headache keeping track of all the switches and variables and whatnot, and as the player you shouldn't notice a difference beyond a minor change in the way the gremlins move, but as the developer I feel a lot better knowing the code is a bit more tidy. I seem to have the stage working nicely again now, which is a great relief, but certainly after I post the next release you'll have to play it and let me know if you encounter any bugs.
One other thing I've worked on a bit already is an additional challenge to the Chaos stage (as if it wasn't already tough enough!). It involves maneuvering your avatar in free fall to land on a moving platform. And it was actually an idea given by one of my testers. The first time I tried it out, I came to the conclusion that it would be too difficult to implement, and not worth the effort. But I recently thought of a different approach, and seem to have it working now. But I must stress this one caveat: I am working in RPG Maker, not Platformer Maker, and the "collision physics" are spotty at best, so I wouldn't expect too much precision, and for that reason, it will only be a minor part of the stage.
It has certainly been exciting bringing my story to life, and it has also been an immensely fruitful experience, working out all the challenges I have come across, especially in the sense of creating various "arcade"-like stages that don't necessarily run the way a game made in RPG Maker would be expected to run. I look forward to applying that experience when I finally get back to working on Dragonfaith (oh yes, I haven't given up on it). Although I'll probably need a bit of a break after Ascension reaches a stage of more or less completion. And it is towards that end I work, because I don't want this project to continue on indefinitely. I posted the first release at the beginning of June, and so I've been working on it for about two and a half months now. Let's see if I can't have it finished (at least in beta form) by the end of this month!
I better get back to work if that's to happen!
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