manapotionstudios

[manapotionstudios]

ManaPost 18 - The Return!

Hi. It's Y. ...Has it been over a year since the last you've heard from us? ...Yes. If you haven't joined our discord server, that is. (Shameless plug) I realized over that time that I really do a lot better without the pressure of making something presentable so quickly! I've been doing a lot of work on Manaport this whole time, and I'm very excited to share it all with you! So... Enough with the serious greeting! This is the 18th ManaPost, and it's stuffed full of nerdy stuff I've been waiting to show off! I'm happy to be back! :D

Switch 2 Godot or Something

Of course, as we explained in ManaPost 14... A majority of our efforts in Manaport's development around the end of 2023 was dedicated to essentially translating Unity scripts (usually C#) to Godot (usually gdscript). This took a lot of time (especially for a rather novice programmer such as myself...) Rewriting what we had in Unity took a good few months alone. Combine this with my last year of high school and burnout... The first iteration of our port to Godot took quite a while.

"First" Implies a List...

...Let me tell you a bit about Manaport's rather turbulent development over the past... Almost 5 years. Manaport started development on the 25th of May, smack-dab in the middle of the 2020 pandemic as an idea I had to take my mind off of the woes of staying in my room all day. I gathered a few of my friends and we started throwing ideas at each other.

This was the culmination of our efforts! I didn't even code this. I had no idea how to code. I had only done the spritework. Manaport originally started as... A Sidescrolling RPG. It was so cool to me to see an idea that I had come to life. I had spent a lot of my childhood making stuff in games like LittleBigPlanet, always wanting my next project to be my next magnum opus or whatever. I dream big, if that wasn't obvious.

This was... after I got my hands on actual programming for the first time. Manaport was now a proper traditional Action RPG. I remember trying to sort through every little bug I found... Giving up practically hundreds of times only to remember how stubborn I am and just keep trying. We had restarted once before this video, however there is a distinct lack in media from that era, unfortunately.

This... This era felt like the start of something proper. I was proud of this title sequence alone, and there was practically no game behind it! I had coded a lot of the stuff from this era myself, and it was the subject of my high school computer science final exam, actually. I did pretty well on that.

Three Dimensional!

Starting from the first ManaPost EVER is the start of Manaport's journey as a 3D RPG. Now... you may have noticed that we've definitely changed the definition of Manaport as a game over the years. Started as a Sidescrolling Turn-Based RPG, then a Top-Down Action RPG, then a 3D Action RPG... What's another change, right?

Fourth Time's the Charm!

This will hopefully solidify this era of Manaport as the last one. Development may be turbulent, but... I've learned not to set expectations. I do this for fun! It's fun to make stuff and see what sticks. Without further delay... Here's a compilation of my work on Manaport from just this month alone. On the Manaport Github repository... you can actually see how much work I've been putting into the game in this stage. Of course... a lot of this stuff is quite technical, so here's the first major change.

Try Taking Turns; Sharing is Caring!

Manaport has returned to its roots as a Turn-Based RPG! Hopefully for the final time... We ultimately decided that Manaport would be better off doing away with all of the feature creep that unfortunately claimed us for the last couple of years... When I, Y, first came up with Manaport, when it was just a little idea in my tiny brain... I wanted it to be a fun, story rich Turn-Based RPG, something akin to Paper Mario and the like. It's been almost like some kind of nostalgia trip going through old ideas I had and applying them with this new knowledge I have about games. I started off by playing a bunch of games that have been on my radar... Honkai: Star Rail, Persona 5, Undertale (if you can believe I haven't even finished the game yet...), heck, even a bit of the Paper Mario series. I wrote a bunch of stuff down, drew up a bunch of design documents, and got to work! This was the first time that I felt like I was doing game development the right way. I always felt like I was sort of... mashing stuff together without any kind of method to the madness, but with 5 years of (hobby) experience behind me, I could properly see what the next step was. I've been planning everything out... Consulting friends for their input... Heck, I even built the game a few times to send it to friends for actual playtesting. The first item on the agenda was getting a battle prototype made.

Finishing this part of development alone was a lot more satisfying than I thought it would be! I mean, these are definitely just A-Posing cats and red beans, but this is something magical! I can build off of this, but it still works so well! Not an error in sight! :D This took about... a month start to finish! You could call this a game, I think! It's great! When it comes to combat in Manaport, you can chose your Basic Move, which will likely be a basic attack of sorts... Two Skills, or use an Item. All three of these acts will end your turn, so sometimes you might have to actually choose wisely. One thing I did see in a lot of modern Turn-Based RPGs is an auto mode... I'm still considering adding that, but for now, this is the basics of battling. Kill the red beans... Simple as that! Next up was the Overworld!

Admittedly, this does look quite rudimentary right now (Mainly because a lot of my work recently has been on bug fixing and refinement), but hey! This is more than impressive to me, and that's what matters! Obviously... in turn based games, the overworld is the space between battles. Nothing major here. You can walk around... with your A-posing trio of feline friends. Oh, and there are Party Formations, essentially defining a way for your party members to follow the leader. With Laurie, they're walkin' single file! With Mirabelle, the others take up a more protective position... And with Winsley, you can find Mirabelle and Laurie standing back. That's it. Not the biggest update, but it gets the job done!

Then... heh. Then was making the game look a little nicer!

Manaport was foretold to look like a PS1 title... so it's gotta look the part! There's a great deal of new customization options for how crispy crunchy absolutely retro lookin' you want your game! From PS1 resolution and the funky looking affine mapping, to crisp, 1280 by 960 gameplay! Stylish. Slay. So demure, I think.

Thought I Was Dead

In honor of this wonderful update... I have prepared an accompanying Demonstrational Showcase video! Of course... tossing a bunch of pictures in your face is nice, but hey, who wouldn't like watching a short presentation! Pretend I am a small child... showing you a silly project on my tablet... Hanging this up on my fridge and saying I did a good job.

And I'm Gone!

Aaaaaand that's it! A short Manaport retrospective... and now a Manaport prospective(?)! This month has been amazing for development, and I can't wait to see what I get done in February! I'm excited to be back sharing my progress updates with you, dear Reader! What I've learned from all this time is that I will no longer overpromise and underdeliver! Expect absolutely nothing from me! But please, do remain support of us in the future. Thank you very much for reading.

Y

[manapotionstudios]

ManaPost 17 [BONUS] - About That...

Hi. It's Y. I don't want to drag this intro for too long, considering personal things will be conversed in today's bonus ManaPost. If you don't want to see that, here's your warning.

WHERE'S PPP!?

As you should know, PPP! was originally created for Ludum Dare 54 back at the tail end of September. I was incredibly sick over the weekend of the event, but I tried my best, and came up with some (albeit subpar) prototype. The team decided we'd just make it a Halloween title, and I took a break until October 20th.

From the start, PPP! was NOT a game we had wanted to make.

I thought I'd be able to adjust and we'd make an amazing game for you to play! Unfortunately, I really don't even want to see PPP! anymore 😭😭

PPP! was a neat game in the context it was originally intended for: Ludum Dare. It would've been nice to release it yesterday, but right now, development is canceled. Apologies from everyone here on the Manapotion team. We didn't want to let you down.

Now, on to the personal bit.

WHAT HAPPENED???

I (still Y) had a "situation" the afternoon of the 27th. I'm not going to get into it here, considering I'd like to keep a (somewhat) professional appearance on our platforms if that's okay.

Usually, I can push through events like what happened the 27th (will herein be referred to as "The 27th" for simplicity). When we wrote and posted ManaPost 16, I thought I'd be able to "lock in" and just get PPP! out of the way. I was starting to feel disappointed in my work though, and that was one of the contributing factors as to why PPP! isn't releasing.

Two days later, on Sunday, the emotions from The 27th just hit me like a train and I honestly didn't want to work on anything. Luckily, I did get to visit most of our team, including a few friends, and it brought my mood up. We had an awesome time 💙

But it didn't improve my motivation!!! I felt like a failure. I don't like to let people down, and in writing this ManaPost for you, I feel like I have. I have my own personal flaws, but I still want to keep up appearances and deliver good stuff! I've been the amateur programmer for our team for three and a half years! I'm only a senior. Sometimes I get caught up in comparison. I hope you can forgive me.

For now, I don't even want to TOUCH Godot!!! PPP! has genuinely drained the life out of me and I want to just take a break.

Thanks for listening to me ramble.

WHAT NOW???

Since this ManaPost covers this week, just know there may not be a proper ManaPost this Saturday. We need a break. PPP! has truly caused a Pumpkin Patch Panic here in the green elixir.

Again, we're sorry for the empty promise. Please forgive our blunder.

We'll have something better for you in the coming months.

See you soon. 💚

The Manapotion Team (C, R, L and Y)

[manapotionstudios]

ManaPost 16 - Spooktune

Boo! Come closer, read this ManaPost if you dare, darling viewer! Y here today, putting the Y in "Spooky" for this weekend's ManaPost! This week has been huge for PPP, and as a result, it will be the main (and only!) focus of this update. So, sit back, grab your favourite candy, and get comfortably fearful as I spin this tale for you.

Pumpkin Patch Panic! (PPP)

As aforementioned, We've been working diligently on finishing PPP on All Hallows Eve, and we're doing really well at that! we're scaring away all the bugs and finishing the game loop.

You'll be in for a (not so frightful) fright this October 31st! By that, we mean, we can't show you anything until that fateful day. It'll be a wonderful scare! We're sure of it >:D

We'll have the Itch.io page up very soon, and we may even make a reply to this ManaPost (or even a standalone bonus ManaPost!) to announce it's launch. Watch your back, it may just creep up on you!

We should also mention the scariest, most terrifying jump scare ever conceived:

PPP Will be free :)

You should be able to just download and play Pumpkin Patch Panic! On any modern Windows computer, and hopefully we can get a Linux and MacOS build working sometime.

Tread Lightly...

That marks the end of our antics this week. Apologies again for the lack of visual aid to represent our progress, but we can't ruin a surprise! Make sure to keep an eye out for the next couple of days for PPP's launch!

Or else...

The Manapotion Team (C, R, L (Previously M) and Y)

[manapotionstudios]

ManaPost 15 - Better Late Than Never!

Hello everybody! Apologies for my tardiness! Y here today for your Weekly ManaPost Mana-scoop! This week we spent preparing to get back to work, after a little break. Continue reading to see just what we got up to!

Pumpkin Patch Panic! (PPP)

Yesterday we started to finish our development of Pumpkin Patch Panic! Not too much work was done on the game, rather we properly wrote out the game's purpose, the mechanics, and various other fun bits that we can't show you just yet.

Right now, the game's prototype is in a sorry state, since the weekend it was coded was one of our worst. The codebase is a mess and desperately needs time to shine. This upcoming week and the last couple days of October will be great for PPP development! Expect a LOT more on ManaPost 16!

Project Delaney (PJD)

Project Delaney, or its acronymized form, PJD has been coming along swimmingly, and last we worked on it we were just starting on porting the dungeon generation to Godot 4. Unfortunately, we haven't touched it much. That's alright and pretty common for us, since we have little experience.

Rest assured, we'll get through it.

Manaport (MP)

Manaport has been placed into a nebulous state. We haven't touched it since the last ManaPost, but we do intend to get back to working on it full steam ahead once things have settled in the holiday season.

To Close...

Thank you for reading, dear reader! We have lots of plans that need to be planned out, and we appreciate you sticking around to see just what we create. Pumpkin Patch Panic! Will hopefully be released on October 31st. just in time for you all to try out before trick or treating.

See you all next weekend!

The Manapotion Team (C, R, L (Previously M) and Y)

[manapotionstudios]

ManaPost 14 - WHAT'S HAPPENING?!

Er... Hello, everybody! It's been a while. Just about two months. Y is here to break the silence! The time we spent quiet was definitely a Time. Of all time, even. I don't even remember how to write these things...

Weird writing styles aside, today we're here to break the silence on just what has been happening this whole time. We made a lot of promises, some we're still working on delivering, a few we had to reevaluate. Let's just get to the point:

WHAT'S HAPPENING?!

The major hit to our development cycle was actually school. We weren't lying! Most of us have extra-curricular activities and it just doesn't leave much time after (or even before) school to work on Manapotioneering. School for us started on August 28th, and we haven't posted since August 12th. Massive gap. We're announcing that we are still alive, but our availability to develop is limited all the same.

However... On the personal side of things (for Y :D), I will be graduating in 2024 (Instead of 2025)! I will be taking a gap year, meaning I'll be spending a year getting my bearings in the adult world. That also means more dedicated Manapotioneering time for yours truly! The team here have done so much artistically (and I have as well!) but my programming skills are not quite tip-top. I plan to improve more than I ever have this upcoming year.

Personal events aside...

Unity - Or not?

Both of our games were developed with Unity. As of the events of their pricing model change, even after they made (a) revision(s), we decide to drop them entirely. Manapotion Studios is a small indie studio without a game yet and we simply do not trust Unity after their antics. We're working with Godot now, a free, open source game engine that's just plain cool. That does mean rewriting everything. All of our assets, specifically scripts, were written with Unity. Of course, since we have some scaffolding to build off of, it shouldn't take too long to get back to where we were (in fact, we're about a third of the way there).

It's truly unfortunate that Unity's error made our absence last longer than expected. We actually planned to make a comeback ManaPost several times through September, and we even had something going on this month of October.

-

Ludum Dare 54! We tried!

We actually "participated" in Ludum Dare 54! "Participated" in quotes because we didn't end up finishing the game on time. It was terrible timing for all of us here in the green elixir. One of us was terribly sick, the others were busy with school and life. However, our game is still planned to be released on or before Halloween!

Pumpkin Patch Panic!

Pumpkin Patch Panic! Is a game about growing as many pumpkins as you can before the Intergalactic Pumpkin Festival on October 31st! One small quirk; your pumpkin patch resides on a shrinking planet! Every so often, the planet will shrink, shrinking your growing space in turn! It may seem easy to grow pumpkins, but space-pumpkins are a little pumpkin-spice-ier than you'd think! Some grow, some shrink! We're very excited to release PPP and we're even more excited to see what everyone thinks! Even though it wasn't released on October 2nd as planned.

Pumpkin Patch Panic! will be our FIRST EVER GAME!!! All made with the magic and love of our team, C, R, Y, and L (Previously M). We plan to participate in more game jams in the future (and hopefully finish them on time :P), so that we can become Manapotion Masters of our craft.

-

During our extended absence, we thought and thought, with our thinking hats. We're all high schoolers, soon to be young adults, and we've learned a thing or two about making games even if it is very surface level. So, let's set the records straight.

Life Will Change

Making games is hard! We've made a lot of very ambitious promises and we can proudly say they were quite silly. Very silly, in fact. Ambition without action is but a fantasy. So, we're going for a soft-reset this time 'round.

Going Forward...

Just to get the easy part out of the way, weekly ManaPosts will be making their return, as per the schedule outlined in ManaPost 05, only with a the removal of the "occasional" Sunday postage. You can expect a ManaPost centered around anything Manapotion every Saturday at 12:00 EST. The weekly schedule frankly offered much more discipline in our development cycle than the 2 months of NOTHING!!!

Now, Manaport was a fleeting dream. Unfortunately overblown and very desperately needs some rethinking. There's a LOT of unhandled story and lore and purpose behind the game that just needs a restart now that we're not just a handful of tweenagers. We almost kind of know what we're doing, and we want to still make Manaport into a hit. For the next few months, we will be essentially reworking the game's story and maybe even the characters from the ground up. More about that in a separate ManaPost, though.

We plan to be more public with Manaport's new development and what things will be changing or removed outright. Hopefully this doesn't add another 2 years to our 5 year development cycle. :)

As for Delaney... Delaney is fine. Switching to Godot has been a breeze for Delaney and we plan to get back to posting about our Anarchic Adventurer very soon.

With Pumpkin Patch Panic!, we have the gameplay loop complete, and should be released no later than Halloween 2023. If not, we'll let you know why that happened.

-

With a Heavy Heart,

It's time to wrap this behemoth of a Manapost up for this weekend. Things have been rocky, but we're ready to get on the right track! Fingers crossed we show you all something really amazing.

Within our abilities, of course.

Thanks for stopping by. We'll see you next week!

The Manapotion Team (C, R, L (Previously M) and Y)

[manapotionstudios]

ManaPost 13 - It's a ManaPost On a Saturday So That Means Something's Up

Hello everybody! Y here once again for this week's post. Today I'm here to update you on some personal matters that will unfortunately decide the fate of these updates.

First Thing's First

Aforementioned in ManaPost 11, the first day of school is nearing, and since I take extra college courses... That first day is this upcoming Monday. Along with my job, the amount of time I (or we) can dedicate to our projects is way lower each week. Unfortunately as this school year starts (and likely into our senior years,) we've decided that it would be better for us to do Monthly or even Bi-Monthly posts. This all sucks but we're finishing up our final years of high school and for the sake of progress (and for the sake of our sanity!) it's best if we lengthen the time between these updates.

Second Thing's Second

For those of you on our Discord Server, you may have seen some new lime green faces, and that's we've added two new friends to our crew! If you would like to learn more about M and R, (and even see what C and I (Y) are up to as well) check out our OFFICIAL Manapotion Studios Community Discord Server! Third Thing's Third

"There hasn't been a Manaport ManaPost in so long! What's up with that?" Unfortunately, I haven't felt the necessary inspiration to work on it alongside Delaney. Hopefully these next few months will have more Manaport development updates though!!!

Last Thing's Last

Thanks for sticking by. We hope this reduction in frequency of these ManaPosts aren't to gut wrenching! We plan to get them out around the last Saturday of every month, at our usual time (12:00 EST). Stay Hydrated until then because that heat is killer...

See you next time!

C, M, R, and Y

[manapotionstudios]

DelaneyPost 05 (ManaPost 12) - The Title Matches The Date

Bonjour tous les gens! Welcome BACK to your #1 ManaPotion Information Station! This week was full of some great developments! From Movement to Monsters! Stay tuned for today's debrief.

Schmoovin!

You May have felt a sort of stiffness in the videos that we share with you all. Controlling The Laney was a little stiff and not super rewarding to control. Well, to remedy this, we've added two brand new moves!

The Swing Recovery

Introducing the Swing Recovery! Simply push the spacebar while Delaney is in her attacking animation to get a burst of speed in the direction of her swing and get 2x movement speed for 1 second. Useful for quickly getting around The Manor, or tossing some lighter enemies all over the grid!

The Launch Recovery

Also introducing the Launch Recovery! If you're skilled enough to keep up with Delaney's ludicrous speed during her launch time, you can hold your control keys in the same direction she is traveling as she ends her launch to get a boost of MORE 2x movement speed for 3 seconds! Really helpful in a pinch!

More General Improvements

We've also added a few "Inertial" mechanics to Delaney's controller. For one, we've added Autotargeting functionality to some hammers. These hammers will make Delaney face your cursor as she swings. Hammers that don't have this functionality will instead use Delaney's current facing angle to give her a push in the right direction!

We've also given Delaney a small bit of velocity towards the cursor while she's spinning her hammer! All of this was thanks to a Major refactor of Delaney's Character Controller script! brought down a third of the size of the last one, and runs way faster! Yeahoo!!!

With the minor improvements out of the way, lets talk about the heavy hitters of this week's post:

Monsters! (Eek!)

Delaney isn't quite right without some monsters to interact with, and this week we finally started on those little critters! We decided to focus on the gimmick monsters first to give you all a taste of the fun movement mechanics you'll be able to play around with!

Pause Ghosts

You've seen these silly spectres before! Although they were in a prototype-y state, they're now complete and looking better than ever! Simply fling Delaney into one of the three variants: Slow, Normal, and Fast! See for yourself what they can do.

Launch Dolls

You haven't seen these stuffed bunnies before! These are Launch Dolls. Swing your hammer and they go flying! As simple as that. They come in two variants; Soft and Hardy. Soft dolls explode to a pile of fluff once they're done launching. Hardy dolls do not explode! You can just keep swinging at them for as long as you please!

These wont be the only monsters, rest assured. We have one more in store that didn't quite finish development on time. You'll see more of him in the next DelaneyPost!

We spent a lot of time prepping for AI during the latter half of this week, so the other half of our work today is quite technical, and we'll leave it up to you to look into A* Pathfinding, the tried and true algorithm we'll be using to base our AI off of.

Thanks for tuning in this weekend! We have some big stuff planned to close out this summer break development period! Keep your eyes peeled, your T's crossed, your I's dotted, and stay on your P's and Q's for next week's DelaneyPost!

Thanks for reading!

C and Y

[manapotionstudios]

ManaPost 11 - Weather Update!

Heyo everybody! You may be wondering why there's a normal ManaPost on a Saturday, or why this post is named "Weather Update!", or why this post seems a little lackluster. Your questions will all be answered soon!

Welcome Back!

C! Is back! Yeahooo!!! With them back we can get back to full speed! Now this leads into why this post is rather low on the game content. Together, we decided that this ManaPost would function better as a general update post and should give us enough time to get back to Manapotioning.

Where's that ManaPost you promised???

Yeah... Admittedly I (Y) fell short of that one. My Personal life have been a little... Aggravating. To say the least. HOWEVER!!! We plan to get better at managing Manaport and Delaney together, but we should make one thing clear to you:

School.

School starts soon, and unfortunately that does mean that the frequency of these updates will dwindle. Rest assured that we're still doing our best work during these coming months.

That's land!

To wrap this slightly bleak ManaPost up, we plan to work our hardest to have at least a bit of content surplus in order to keep spirits up. School usually takes a lot out of us, (especially now that we'll be in our 3rd year!) and our personal lives sometimes don't allow for further development. Game development is difficult when you're run by two highschoolers!

Thanks for the heart-to-heart. We'll see you soon with some hopefully exciting news on Delaney! Stay tuned next week, and again, welcome back, C!

C and Y

PS: Sorry its late 💀

[manapotionstudios]

DelaneyPost 04 (ManaPost 10) - What is a Kilometer???

Heyo everybody! Welcome BACK to your #1 ManaPotion Station! Today we're celebrating our 10TH MANAPOST!!! yeahooo!!! We've got some really nice stuff for ya today, And though it's only me (Y,) C and I have been making some huge developments! Read all about it down below!

Paint the town a bunch of colours that may or may not include red!

As promised, I have been working on fleshing out the different areas you will come across in Delaney. For example, This is a work in progress version of the 1st area; The Courtyard Overgrowth. Home to lots of foliage, weathered bricks and decrepit greenhouses, the Manor is sure to make an imposing first impression!

Take a look at some of the pictures we took!

SMASH SMASH SMASH!!!

But that's not all! We ALSO added breakable statues, and in turn, we added breakable objects! Now you're guaranteed to be able to break EVERYTHING!!! Do NOT go through a room without breaking every object you can. It may just be worth it!

Heads up! (Display)

Have you ever wanted to know where you are? In space? at any time? Let me introduce you to the Minimap! We plan to make these floors quite large, and it's easy to get lost. So it's time to reveal the heavy-hitter of this DelaneyPost! The Minimap! (Working Title)

Now you can KNOW where you are! At ANY time! and possibly seeing enemies with a hypothetical upgrade! This is the start of our GUI Journey! We're liking the style of this element, and excited to work on the usually tedious user experience/user interface.

Lets wrap this up!

I (Y) got a lot of work done this week! 'Was feeling really bad about not showing much last week, and worked as hard as I could to make our 10th ManaPost nice and full for you all today :)

Thanks for sticking around! See you all soon with something even cooler!

C (In Spirit) and Y

[manapotionstudios]

DelaneyPost 03 (ManaPost 09) - Inch by Inch

Heyo everybody! Y here again. I'll keep this update short, since there's not much to put here. This week has been slow and busy with outside things. I haven't made much actual progress on Delaney since DelaneyPost 02, but that's okay. I'm working on a major update to the environment of the game so that we do impress once it's finally revealed! Hopefully it doesn't take too long.

Thanks for your patience, as always. See you all soon.

C (in spirit) and Y

[manapotionstudios]

ManaPost 08 - Punk Tactics

Heyo everybody! It's Sunday! That means it's Manaport ManaPosting time! C is still away, but as mentioned before, we have such a surplus of content that needs to be added, their absence shouldn't affect progress.

This ManaPost is... Actually also quite short. We're working on getting the attack system fully implemented and unfortunately there's not a lot to show since most of it does not work. That's okay though! I'm doing my best 😭 BUT it's not all so bad! We've been preparing to build the world of Manaport! We drew up some concepts, did a bit of practice modelling, and we're excited to finish up main gameplay elements and actually show off something that looks nice :) For the sake of surprise though, I don't want to show you just yet. Once things are more finalized, for sure, but things are so amorphous and unfinished it's probably better to show things off when they're not half broken.

Apologies for the lack of progress! Still adjusting to working on these at the same time. Pinky promise I'll have something better for you next weekend.

Thanks for reading as always, C and I really appreciate your support and love getting these out every weekend.

See you soon!

C (In spirit) and Y

[manapotionstudios]

DelaneyPost 02 (ManaPost 07) - Putting the "Fun" in Fungeon!

Heyo everybody! Y here again for today’s opening! Just for a little background, C is currently on vacation! We still have a huge surplus of content to add to the game, so their absence wouldn’t affect our progress, but please do wish them a happy and entertaining vacation! We’ve been cooking up a lot of good things for both Delaney AND Manaport, so stay tuned for the ManaPost tomorrow!

This DelaneyPost will be a little short, since admittedly we ran out of time to finalize all of these things before today… But we hope you enjoy the slightly hack-y nature!

With that out of the way…

Similar title to the last DelaneyPost so that means this one relates to that one

We’ve been focused on polishing the dungeon generation system mentioned in our last post. It’s almost production ready! But there’s a few smaller bugs that we need to work out before we can call it truly finished. However, this new update means that we can define custom rooms instead of relying on truly random generation.

But what does that mean?

Say we take a manually defined area of tiles, organized into layers. As shown here, this jolly fella here is one of the areas we’ve used to test this system out.

We send this area to a RoomDefinition that we can add to our Floor Generation Parameters, or the set of data that defines how a certain floor will be generated. Then, when we generate a floor, we just randomly pick from all of the Room Definitions from the generation parameters and place them instead of randomly deciding a room’s size. You can see the results of this change here!

As you can see there are a lot of repeated rooms, but that's only because there are 3 random rooms to choose from! Once we’ve finalized this generation system, we’ll finally show off something that's aesthetically pleasing! Yay!

Other than this though, there’s not much left to show… This was actually quite difficult to figure out! We were also working on Manaport a lot this week but that’s neither here nor there. We’re very close to making the game actually fun, and we’re optimistic to release this game sometime early next year or maybe late 2023. Keep your eyes peeled!

Thank you for sticking around to read this short DelaneyPost! We’ll have something more substantial next week. 

See you all soon!

C (in spirit) and Y

[manapotionstudios]

DelaneyPost 01 (ManaPost 06): Fungeon -- Clever Wordplay!

Heyo! Y here for today’s Mana-welcome! Except it’s not the usual ManaPost… This is the first DelaneyPost! Ever! Yippee!!! Strap in for the long haul, this one’s a doozy.

Since you all haven’t seen anything about Delaney since the teaser, it would be nice to learn about the protagonist, yes?

THE Laney

Introducing Delaney! The protagonist of Delaney. Yup. This stoic, havoc-wreaking, hammer-wielding anarchist leads the venture deep into a cult’s mysterious manor responsible for the assimilation of everyone near and far to their twisted status quo. She’s slinging herself through every pile of flesh and bone, bashing through any wall in order to destroy this cult from the outside in!

Where did she come from?

Delaney actually stems from an interesting interaction with a close friend, Denise Tranglong, who had shared a character concept with us. Naturally, it was a very cool concept, and we immediately inquired for permission to use this character, and since you’re seeing this post now, she had granted said permission. Of course, we’ve taken a few creative liberties, but her core design and personality stays true to the original creator’s intentions.

Where did she go? Originally, we took the initial hiatus from Delaney due to a flood of new ideas and inspiration for Manaport! Since we try to keep a fluid and open mindset when it comes to what we want to work on, we tend to bounce around from time to time. This ensures persistent focus on getting at least something done each week, and it’s the reason why we can get these ManaPosts out every weekend!

Where did she come from, Cotton-Eye Joe?

Delaney’s origins in canon are unknown. She clearly has some hatred towards this cult, but it isn’t clear if this is a personal gripe. She’s not the most talkative, probably focusing on the task at hand. We’re worried to question her anyway — she’s quite heavy-handed when it comes to her trusty hammer.

Incredibly stretched subheadings aside, Gameplay! What’s it gonna be like to play the game?

The Fungeon

Delaney is a spin on the run-of-the-mill dungeon-crawler roguelike formula! That’s just it, you spin!

In order to navigate these endless rooms of clicking bones and armour, spin and fling delaney in ANY direction you choose! Get anywhere without the inconvenience of WALKING! Don’t you just HATE walking sometimes? This is the solution for you!

Of course, since this is also a hammer, you can bash anyone and anything with it. This has its own range of abilities that we plan to add, though not shown here. Rest assured that your screen will be filled with beautifully vibrant damage numbers and repeating sounds of the screams of the damned.

Violence aside, how does it all work?

NOT The Backrooms

Here be dragons! This section of the ManaPost is quite technical! We encourage you to read up on these concepts/algorithms if you’re interested. The reference used for a majority of this implementation can be found here

First, we generate a fixed number of rooms with random size within a circular area. Rooms that are larger than a set threshold, we label as “Hub Rooms,” or rooms where you’ll find most monsters.

Then, we run — not joking here — a Delaunay Triangulation algorithm on each Hub Room, creating a sort of graph that connects every Hub Room to each other.

Then, we use Kruskal’s Algorithm to find the Minimum Spanning Tree of the aforementioned triangulation graph.

Then, we add a few edges back from the Delaunay Triangulation. 

Lastly, generate the hallways connecting these rooms, and remove the rooms that aren't necessary (labeled in red,) and boom, fungeon!

This is a very simplified explanation of this generation algorithm, and again, if you would like a little more in depth “tutorial” once again, the reference we used for this system can be found here.

With the 🤓 out of the way, we finally have the makings of a decent gameplay loop! You can finally pause and exit the game! A Manapotion first :)

We don't have much else to show since we're still working out the kinks in this new system, but know that we're doing our best to make these DelaneyPosts as content-filled as possible, since it's a very simple game in contrast to Manaport.

To bring this DelaneyPost to a close,

Thank you very much for sticking with us this past month. We've made lots of great progress on our two games and we love to share these tidbits with you every weekend. We hope you've had a great pride month!

See you all next week!

C and Y

[manapotionstudios]

ManaPost 05: Tricks of the Trade

Heyo everyone! Y here for this week’s ManaPost Mana-welcome! Despite what we touched on in the last ManaPost, we’ve made some great strides in development on Manaport, and even our latest project, Delaney, will be making its first debut in our schedule! Here are today’s updates. Grab your glasses, it’ll be a long one!

Double Trouble So! It was a little strange of us to announce Delaney and then go on a hiatus. However, now that summer break is in full effect for us, and to keep ideas fresh and creative, we’ve decided to break that hiatus! Delaney is coming back to the center stage! Yay! “But what does that mean for Manaport? Will it be left in the dark AGAIN, for SEVERAL MONTHS???” No no no, dear viewer! Manaport won’t be going anywhere. Of course, it won’t be our priority, but it will be a close second to Delaney! We plan to adopt both at the same time. A big ask of two plucky high-schoolers, but we rise to the challenge like we have so many times before! Now, to clarify what this means for the future of our ManaPosting.

New Schedule

Delaney-centered ManaPosts (Will be herein referred to as “DelaneyPosts”) will be posted every Saturday @ 12PM EST.

Manaport-centered ManaPosts may be posted on Sundays @ 12PM EST.

This new posting schedule allows us more time to get out these posts, since, let's be honest, all of us sleep in during breaks. No harm in it, but we’ve noticed we rarely ever get everything prepped on time, and as a nice bonus, you won’t have to wake up early (or stay up late!) to see our latest updates in real time!

The schedule also allows you to sometimes get back-to-back Manapotion Action on the weekends! Pretty sweet!

With that out of the way,

Dress Up!

One thing that we really wanted to add in Manaport is Costumes. Costumes, things that you can wear to cosplay, go trick or treating, maybe just to scare your siblings. In Manaport, you can do all of those things! Maybe minus the scaring your siblings part. 

Costumes take the place of your Vanity slot, and they usually consist of a full-body outfit. We’ve improved the Equipment System to accommodate this huge task.

First off, any character can wear ANY armour or vanity!

Previously, our equipment system was handled in such a way that made this functionality very time consuming. With a recent blunder causing the deletion of many assets, we decided to just redo it! Bigger and better than ever!

To get technical, each piece of equipment is now modeled separately from the base character model. This allows more control over where the equipment can show up at (or on!) This also allows each piece of equipment to dynamically place itself on the character’s body depending on its predetermined section.

This ALSO allows for a little thing we call “Costume Styles.” You will soon be able to change your Costume’s Style at will! Whenever you want! It’s like an on-demand Drip-Selector!

While we’re focused on the visuals today, it’s time we made formally clear what visual style we’re going for.

Manaport is intended to look like what you would imagine your early 2000s games to look like when you were a kid. Bright colours, blocky-but-smoothed-over models, charming visuals and UI, all with the extra visual distortion and glitchiness. However, this doesn’t mean this is ye olde PS1 styled game. We’re not holding ourselves to that limitation. Manaport doesn’t have any kind of polygon or texture size restrictions, so expect things that a PS2 could never dream of, let alone a PS1. We just like the charm. Simple as that.

To bring things to a close,

We’re in the midst of finding a good “stopping point” for Manaport so that we can continue to make decent updates without spending too much time away from Delaney. Next weekend will likely include a Manapost, and after that, updates are unknown for Manaport. Rest assured we’re still working though! We have some great plans for Delaney now that we’re back on it with fresh eyes.  This is the last ManaPost of pride month 2023! We hope you've all had a great time being yourselves, and even if not, we hope you'll have your chance eventually.

See you all very very soon!

C and Y

[manapotionstudios]

ManaPost 04: Slow But Steady

Heyo, everybody! Y here for this week's ManaPost. Things have been a little slow, as addressed in the previous ManaPost, BUT, that doesn't mean things have ground to a halt!

Will It Blend? Yes. The answer is yes. We are officially moving to Blender, a free, widely used 3D modelling software. This is in response to recently running into some limiting factors as I (Y) had used Blockbench (another free, low poly 3D modelling software) for our cutesy, stylized models made by yours truly! However, since yours truly is still learning, I think it's best if I learn a more standardized modelling software. This doesn't actually mean what you think it means; we won't have to remodel all of our friendly felines. This is a little technical, but since we export our models as .FBX to work with unity, we can easily import them into Blender, along with all the textures and materials. So, no time wasted. But now you may ask:

What's the point? Blender has a very impressive animation suite. We can do a lot more things with animations if we use Blender! It comes with a large learning curve, though. Loads of keyboard shortcuts and menus, it's a lot to learn, but I think it's the best course of action while we take this short intermission. The animations will have to be redone, yes, but with support for Inverse Kinematics (or IK) and various other animation helpers, things should be smooth sailing once we get back to full speed.

What does this mean for you? Unfortunately, there's pictures or cute GIFs for us to show you all, we're still in a motivation rut, however, C has made some great strides in worldbuilding and though its in a pretty draft-y state, we think it's great to share such events with you when we can. Just keep in mind, everything shared about such things is subject to change!

To bring this YanaPost to a close, Thank you very much for joining me this sunday! C and I appreciate your patronage, big or small. Happy Father's day to all who celebrate! See you all next week!

C and Y

[manapotionstudios]

ManaPost 03: Amplifying Arsenals

Hey everybody! C here for today’s little intro. This ManaPost is a bit on the short side, but man, is it a sweet one! Here’s the new-news:

Show Me Ya Moves! (Encore, buddy!)

We're back to weapons AND moves, both mentioned in previous ManaPosts; they've gotten a lot more fleshed out since then! Allow us to explain. Attack Moves (Will herein be referred to as just "Moves" for simplicity) can now be attached to the aforementioned Equipment Definitions from ManaPost 01! As long as that definition goes and defines itself as a Weapon. This little system ensures that characters can only use Moves that their weapons define, and makes development a little sleeker by letting us easily change what weapon can do what :]

Arcane Attackers

Though still early as of now, we're working on designing weapons for our Kittish crew! There will absolutely be more to show in future ManaPosts, but here's a peek at Laurie's spelltomes!

With important news over for today,

School officially ended last Friday for us, and though that's great for development, I (Y) have been seeing the start of burnout!!! But, instead of doing what I normally do, I intend to keep an internal balance with this project, my personal life and my own job. That doesn't mean there will be another hiatus though, C and I are braining up a storm on the worldbuilding front, which you will hopefully start to see more of once functionality is out of the way! Just bear with us, there's a lot that goes into this as beginners, and the project's scope is indeed quite large. But we rise to the challenge!!! Nothing is impossible if you try hard enough!

Sappy-ness aside, We'll keep working on Manaport, Delaney, and all things Manapotion to make them all the best they really can be. Weekly updates won't be going anywhere, so that you all can stay updated, as promised. Thanks for tuning in this week! See you all next Sunday :)

C and Y

[manapotionstudios]

ManaPost 02: Working In Progress!

Heyo everyone! Y here for the welcoming message :) Here's this week's developments.

Show Me Your Moves! Moves. You've likely heard of them before, dancing, acting, etc... But these Moves are sooo much more technical, especially magical, and fun all the same. The way this system works is pretty simple to follow. Each entity -- usually a character or a monster -- can have a component tacked on, called a 'Moves Manager'. This 'Moves Manager' makes it easy for this 'Move Doer' to 'Do' some 'Moves', with the help of a 'Move Definition.' 'Move Definitions' are like the Item Definitions mentioned in the previous ManaPost. (which you should totally check out when you're done with this if you haven't already!) 'Move Definitions' hold the name of the Move and some of the functionality of the Move. If you’re still a little foggy on functions, or just don’t want to think technically, a simple way to think of it would be how you can teach and assign a set of moves to a Pokémon. Now, the interesting bit. Some Moves can be separately defined as 'Attack Moves.' 'Attack Moves' are just Moves with extra functionality, but man are they cool! They can spawn projectiles for a ranged attack, play animations for a melee attack, etc etc. This new Moves System makes it very easy to quickly create basic actions that characters and enemies can partake in, without requiring it to be hardcoded, or defined explicitly in the code of the entity in question! This will also make it easier to polish the attack and targeting system, which should be the topic of ManaPost 03!

Up next: The Woes (and Pros) of Eye Contact As previously mentioned, this targeting system is a work in progress, so you’ll get the progress-ed bits today, and the real deal in next week’s ManaPost! Essentially, this system allows for the player (that’s you, buddy!) to focus on one enemy at a time while still moving and acting efficiently, with the option to switch between enemies as well. You won’t be able to switch party members in this state, but taking a breather to swap and re-target won’t be long at all anyways. Here’s an example of it below!

That's all we have this week.

Thanks for tuning in this weekend! happy pride to all of you, and though things may be tough if you're in the US, you're never alone. You matter to so many people around you, and never be afraid to express yourself in ways big and small. Stay safe, and again, happy pride 2023! - C/R and Y