Warcat Parade lives!

Hi, good people.

Well, here we are: 2023, December 8th. This project started during October 2021. I was all alone with no budget and no support. And guess what? It's over. The development has ended, the last bugs have been fixed and now I feel anxious cause I don't know what the future has in stock for me.

First things first, Warcat Parade was originally a one-month project for the Crunchless Challenge game jam held on itch. I have two things to say about this fact.

First one, it's not a lie when they say the development of a game takes always ten times longer than you plan in the first place. However, I don't think I am actually teaching you something
Second one, years ago I made Last Neko, a free bullet hell for a game jam, in three weeks time. Of course, I lacked of experience and it was way too ugly to be sold. So I thought the development of Warcat Parade would be short as well.

Developing this bullet hell has been hell

Never give up, friends, never give up. As stated before, I started the project in October 2021. Then, there are two things that almost aborted the project. The first one is that during Summer 2022, my apartment got squatted. Luckily, the police managed to evict her, but I ended full of cockroaches all over my stuff. Yuck! Cockroaches are disgusting and I was about to overthrow all my stuff without making a backup.

The second one happened in September 2023. Not only I made an emotional shock, but also Unity took a bad decision. I won't detail here, but basically, they removed their last update and the development of Warcat Parade has been able to restart.

For those who don't know me, I am HIP and I have Asperger Syndrome and mood swings due to a past trauma. I'm not even supposed to work and my lifetime is 18 years shorter than a common h00man. I worked like a madman, so let's jump to what I have learned.

I am a solo dev

Chiptune

To be honest, I was a sound designer in the first place so I didn't learned a lot when it comes to chiptune music. Okay, let's jump to the next chapter. Also, for those who are curious, I shamelessly recycled two tracks of Last Neko. But this time, I used DefleMask and I know how to use the DPCM channel properly when making chiptune music for the Famicom. Youpi !

Pixel art

That's here that I progressed the most. Last Neko was ugly and I can clearly affirm that Warcat Parade is way cuter. While developing the game, I was taking, and I am still taking a course about pixel art, cause that was clearly my "black beast". I iterated the design many times, the most flagrant example is the first boss. Eeeeh.

Mathematics

You know what? No "make your own danmaku" plugin have been used. So say hello to trigonometry my little friend, I don't even dare to share the scraps I made on paper just in order bullets to aim properly. Every boss pattern has been coded by hand, for each difficulty. In the beginning, I wanted to code each boss in one day. Finally, imagining patterns is harder than expected so I took the rhythm of "one pattern per day". It's not rush and now patterns looks better.

Management

Oh gosh that's boring. I don't know how to be organizated. I'm a messy nekopunk. I tried to use Trello, I really tried, but that's not for me. I have organization troubles and I know it. All I do is improvisation and for a next project, that's something I have to work on.

Conclusion

Well, before launching the game on Steam, I will have to improve stuff, starting from the introduction. Then, maybe I'll start to move forward to a brand new project, maybe a sequel in another town or something completely new. What I know is that I'll say goodbye to Unity and use Godot starting from now.

Developing a game is not a game, but developing this bullet hell has definitely been hell.

Hefka