It's been about a week since the first Cubic Void progress update, and I feel it is a bit early to tease anymore features until The update is further into development. Only a small amount of work on the update has been done since the last progress update, but development should speed up from here. On a different note, I want to talk about the thought processes and different things to do with game design in Cubic Void, and also talk about some features that were scraped or haven't been implemented it.

When I first created Cubic Void I didn't expect to turn it into a full game. I had not yet really gotten into gamedev and the only game I had created and sort of finished was a flappy bird remake which I had only purposely made for a school project. For most of that game I had followed a tutorial and only made a few of my own adjustments. When I finished it, I didn't feel any sense of accomplishment or reward. Then the idea struck me that I would create my own game without following any tutorials whatsoever and write all of my own code, which eventually turned into Cubic Void.  When I first created and opened up the project, I just defaulted to making a platformer game without any thought, it was probably the easiest sort of game I could make and I didn't really want to make anything else. After probably hours, I had set up a player, and made it able too move. After that I sort of just forgot about the game for a few weeks because I was testing out 3D stuff and I got angry because I couldn't figure out how to make the player jump properly. I eventually came back a few weeks later and spent a while working on jumping and fixing movement, but other than that the game was pretty boring, so I decided to mess with different types of ground platforms. I wanted to make the player be able to jump over larger objects or up to a higher platform, so I messed with the code a bit and made a green jump platform that makes the player jump really high. I also created the pink platform that made the players jumps shorter. Originally I wanted the green platform to make the player larger and the pink platform to make the player smaller, but I couldn't figure out the code so I gave up on that idea fast.

I suddenly realised that I could actually turn this game into a real platformer, and eventually release it on steam. Although the steam thing never happened I started working on a a few more features for the game. At first, the tutorial level was level one, and the level would extend onward to level two. I had planned to have every level in the same sort of game view. Once you got to the end of level 1 / the tutorial level you would keep going until you touched and empty gameobject which was a trigger and it would activate a fixed camera with level 2 showing. This was my idea for the level layout but as I came closer to the first official release I scraped it and got rid of the level two layout and made level 1 the tutorial level. Once I had fully finished v0.1 I decided to release it on itch.io because it is free and it's very popular.

Now we come to v0.2 which only really took a week. I wanted the game to have a proper main menu and more levels and maybe even a pause menu, but I rushed the update and only made the early version of the main menu, which was disgusting and not thought through. I regret releasing v0.2 in such a bad state and promised myself that I would add more the the next update, which I certainly did.

For v0.3 there are a lot of features that I added, didn't add or couldn't be bothered to code. When I was coding v0.3 I believe my actual gamedev skills increased a lot. I challenged myself and most of the bugs took real brain usage to fix. One feature I wanted to add, but didn't was simply being able to hold down the jump button too keep jumping, but at the second I though of it, the amount of stupid bugs it would make with the jump height and the gameplay issues it would create with tight spaces put me off it instantly. Another feature I wanted to add was wall climbing, which I only stumbled across because of a bug when fixing the groundcheck radius of the player. But at that point I had finished the layout of level 1 and I didn't want to adjust every platform for any potential skips so I told myself I would come back to it another time.

Now we come to the present time, where I am working on v0.4 and trying my best to make up some basic sort of lore so the game actually has purpose. The journey of creating Cubic Void has been amazing and I can't wait to show you guys what I have planned for v0.4, so please stay tuned, and I will see you in the next progress update.