Considering it's only a week until Zenodyne R releases,
I suppose to celebrate it's upcoming release, it would be
a very fitting thing to write about it's development.
Right from the beginning. Let's go back to the last quarter of 2015.
Just warning, i'm gonna be brutally honest and self-critical about this!
Zenohell was just released, the entire team was excited about the
release however it didn't take long until all the flaws surfaced
that lied at the foundation of the whole game.
Flaws that would be impossible to fix without extra months
of development. But it was too late, the game was already
being sold, it was even being bundled soon after release
because I personally lost faith in it's success because
of how flawed it was.
So what were the flaws that plagues Zenohell you ask?
Here, have my personal list because all of those flaws
were my fault because of bad decisions and mismanagement at the time:
- Complete lack of animation both on the player and the enemies.
- Complete lack of any ACTUAL level design (it was looping backgrounds).
- Lack of consistency in the enemy sprites in quality and looks.
- Obvious lack of enemy AI beyond shooting patterns and sometimes moving.
- Locking the final stage behind the no continues requirement. Because
somehow I thought it would be a brilliant idea at the time. Which is why
only like 20 people max saw it in-game.
- Not including casual testers in the testing team
- Lack of an actual game plan (we were working off vague and random ideas from convos)
And the list goes on, the point is, I messed up big time as the team leader.
I could simply not forgive myself for all that went wrong,
incompetence always bites in the end.
Sure I managed to stomp bugs that originally plagued the game but the flaws
were there to remind me of my mistakes, they were driving me nuts personally.
We were originally set out to do a direct sequel to Zenohell at first called
Zenodeath but... evidently our flaws were still biting our team as whole.
I made the hard decision to scrap the project entirely and go back to the basics,
in order to rework my foundations completely for the sake of quality. Around
the same time emphatic left the team due real life responsibilities that fell on him.
And so, in early November 2015 I decided to remake my first shmup from early 2014
when we weren't even a team yet! Yeah back when we were doing Zenodyne with BP,
that was pretty much all of us, we didn't form an actual team until Zenohell.
Fun fact, the team name Grybanser Fox is an anagram of our nicknames.
Consisting of:
- Gryzor (gry)
- BPzeBanshee (ban)
- Kaiser (ser)
- Samurai Fox (Fox)
Back on track, so originally Zenodyne R was intended to be a straight up
but from grounds up remake because I felt that despite it being a completely
amateur game it deserved a second chance, as a proper commercial product.
However this time I would try to not repeat the flaws that Zenohell had.
I spent quite a bit coming up with the game plan for it while developing
a prototype, the idea was simple, just 5 stages, 3 ships, that's it.
Then there was the issue of having a composer since emphatic left our team.
Fortunately a bit earlier, mid-October a certain fellow nicknamed HeavyViper
posted a demo reel of his YM2612 music in the development subforum of Shmups System11 forums.
BP linked me the demo reel and I was like alright this guy suits the job, so we contacted
him immediately and have shown a prototype with like half of stage 1 done. He agreed
to the whole idea after I presented the entire game plan.
We just wanted to bring the game at least to Zenohell's level, but
as the prototype development went along in January, I was beginning
to discover new methods of doing things including level design.
Then it was beginning to hit me, there was a lot of untapped potential.
I was discovering the said potential by spending a week drawing the entirety
of stage 1 since at this point I WAS not used to the idea of having
actual level design.
I presented the completed stage 1 to the entire team, they were quite
surprised by the end result of it. Then they too, saw the potential of the game.
Fast-forward to Stage 2 being done in December, where not only the level design
was even better but there were ACTUAL ground enemies and the bosses were actually
interesting!
It was at this very moment in December 2015, when we decided to NOT do a straight up
remake but instead make a full fledged product that will go beyond Zenohell and ultimately
correct it's flaws. The game plan expanded, the bar was set much much higher, we had
tons of doubts if we could pull it off however with each next stage, our confidence
grew and we were able to achieve new milestones, in terms of music, visuals and gameplay.
However I need to stop right here and say out loud that our testing team was as important
as any of the game design aspects mentioned earlier! Testers ranged from people who
haven't even played the genre to shmup vets and even other shmup devs (shout out to Final Boss team!).
Thanks to them we were able to ensure that the game is balanced to the point where it's challenging
without being unfair even to the newcomers, with an actual sense of progression ahead.
We had stacks of feedback from them and we proudly implemented all of it. Further pushing
our game higher than we intended.
I suppose as my personal comparison, I can say that while it took Zenohell 4 stages
to warm up, Zenodyne R gets serious in the first 10 seconds of the game instantly
having you embrace the onslaught of the alien invaders
See you soon, on June 1 launch, I hope, we hope as the whole team that you will
enjoy this game!
. Also thanks for the honest post 
.
