Development Update: April 2024

Hey everyone! Development is still going super well. I’ve been meaning to make a new post for a while, but the posts I want to make just can’t be done in a timely manner. So, at this point, I just want to put out an update so that people know what’s going on.

Firstly, let me explain the two posts I’ve been working on:

The Design of “DemoCarry”

This is a long post, covering the entire creative process behind Cherry Carry Flavor… and it’s been a long time coming too. I started writing this in May 2023, right before DemoCarry released. I originally wanted to get this post done at the same time as (or shortly after) the release of DemoCarry, but a long post like this is low on the list of priorities for finishing Soda-Powered Penguin.

I stopped working on this post some time in September 2023, but picked it back up in February 2024- and intended it to be March’s post, but that ship has already sailed. This post needed a ton of research, images, and editing, and it’s almost ready… hopefully for real, this time!

New Teaser / Preview for Cherry Cascade Flavor

It turns out I never actually announced this: ‘BonusCarry’ will have entirely new level visuals! This new preview post was intended to show off those visuals, but there’s a chain of dependencies that have delayed doing so.

The work for this post is entirely on the game development side, rather than on the writing side. All of the visuals and effects are show off worthy. However- I want to show off a room that Magi has decorated, and Magi’s waiting on me to finalize the level design of large chunks of the new level. I haven’t been finalizing the level design quite yet however, as I’ve also been working on creating tools to seriously streamline level design & decoration.

For me, it’s important that Magi decorates rooms in this level because he’s designed every visual asset related to this new bonus level. I love all of the new art & effects, and I’m super excited to show these new visuals once you can see everything on screen together!

Development Breakdown Since The Last Post

With those two posts out of the way, I thought I’d also explain how development of Cherry Carry Cascade is progressing: directly through how the past two months have been allocated. I went back through my planner, added up all of the hours I spent working on various tasks, and created a breakdown of where development time has been spent.

I went back and got a screenshot of my own Pikmin 2 save data for this image.

• 10 days on new level visuals

  • The new level visuals implement a lot of shaders & effects

  • There is a high up-front cost for implementation; we intend to heavily reuse some of the features of these new shaders / effects in the future

• 7 days on level design

  • ‘BonusCarry’ now has over 120 rooms

  • 2 large sections are nearly done

    • These large sections just need a few extra rooms & some playtesting

  • The other 3 large sections have had their mechanical “arc” figured out / planned

    • These large sections will need a bunch of extra rooms, largely towards the end in order to fully explore the design space of their mechanical interactions

  • Expecting nearly 150 rooms for the final level

• 4 days on tooling

  • Editor tools speed up & streamline the level design process

  • This was also a necessary prerequisite for getting Magi onboard for decoration

• 3.5 days optimizing the editor

  • These optimizations might get their own post in the future

  • In short: with 120+ rooms, the editor started to get really slow any time:

    • A room was saved (really annoying for quick / small adjustments)

    • Tilemap / collider data was refreshed and cleaned

    • Rooms were moved (would warrant running the code for the above)

• 3 days organizing / refactoring / planning / etc

  • Messy projects are hard to work in, so there’s a fair amount of time spent keeping everything neat & tidy.

  • This also includes refactoring; keeping the code maintainable & making parameters easily adjustable

  • Also spent time setting up & implementing a new naming convention for images & animations, ballooning the time spent on this task

• 3 days working on a patreon post

• 2.5 days implementing new art, audio, & effects for existing objects

  • There’s a bunch of new visuals / animations / audio / effects for things like crumble platforms, balloons, toll gates, tires, etc

• 2.5 days working on the visual design & effects for a new mechanic

  • This mechanic is included in Cherry Carry Cascade

  • I’m still keeping this a secret for now

• 1.5 days on a new offscreen indicator

  • The offscreen indicator can now be used by other objects- might be used for the new mechanic

  • There’s a new offscreen arrow pointing to any objects the penguin has thrown

  • Still needs some additional work in the future

• 1 day on fixes for a bunch of misc issues

• 1 day on a bottomless pit indicator

  • The new level utilizes some secrets below the current room, finally justifying prioritizing this feature

  • This feature required mapping and serializing out all room connections in a given level

• 1 day on reworking some of the collectable system / separate subsection ID from its name

  • The initial implementation of subsections was very quick & dirty; the subsection ID is reused as its display name

  • This means that if I ever wanted to rename a subsection, it would no longer be marked as found in the save file since this subsection would have a new ID & the save file would only have the ID for the old name collected

  • Since I kept renaming the subsections for the new level, I realized that it was a good time to solve this problem

• 5 days being sick

Remaining Development for Cherry Carry Cascade

Since I have a bunch of data on how development for this build is progressing, I feel like I can break down future development time costs as well.

• ~20 days of level design

• 2-3 days on new level visuals

  • More effects need to be adjusted & implemented

• ~2-3 more days on tooling

  • Loops are annoying to work with right now

  • Magi’s in charge of some of the speedy & safe rooms

• 2 more days working on the ‘DemoCarry’ postmortem post

• ~1-2 more days for organizing & planning

• 1 more day for offscreen indicator & bottomless pit indicator combined

  • Both need a little more time in the oven to be a little more visually refined

• 1-2 days for updating the collectible display

  • The current level has so many collectibles that it doesn’t fit in one screen width

• A few more days on… I don’t know yet! 

  • New problems always show up during game development.

With all that added up, I suppose Cherry Cascade Flavor is still 2 months away. This also doesn’t include the time that magi will spend decorating rooms, but this should take up less time than what I have left to do / will be done while I’m still working on other things.

Unpausing the Patreon Again

Patreon billing was originally paused for two reasons: Cherry Carry Cascade vastly increased in scope and was delayed out of February, and I wanted to ease some of the pressure I felt from running the Patreon a bit since I could now afford it. After receiving feedback from patrons, I’ve decided that I should unpause the patreon. After all, I’ll be sending Cherry Carry Cascade to anyone who subbed to the $5 tier in December.

Ultimately, the pressure I feel from running the Patreon comes from myself; I’m trying to meet the unreasonably high standards I set myself to. The reality is that I cannot send out a new level every 4 months. So, I will be updating the schedule; it seems like biyearly is the best balance between developing important game features / main game levels & delivering levels for a patron build.

Thanks for reading and supporting this project! And thank you for being patient while we’re busy cookin’.