Hi! Today I want to talk about my projects that aren't being developed right now because the focus is on "Life with the tribe!".

Why am I bringing this topic up? Well… I have problems with focusing on one project, and I think you know that already. Right now my focus is okay, but sometimes there are days when I almost can't work, and then I always go back to my old projects or start thinking about ideas that haven't even begun development. I don't know what it's correctly called, but it's a problem that's hard for me to solve.

And although I understand that focusing on one project is far better than on many different ones, in some way it lets me relax, so it's quite hard for me to always stay focused. But don't worry — right now I'm working exclusively on the DLC and the base upgrade for "Life with the tribe!"!

But let's get back to my projects. Today I specifically want to bring up the topic of the project "This village need help!".

One of these days I decided to check what exactly had been done for this project, and honestly, I realised it was quite a lot. I stopped developing it almost right before the last two bosses and locations!

And even though I understood that, I still stopped development. Why? Well… I started getting bored with the gameplay the game had. Yes, even though the game positioned itself as a mini-metroidvania, there was almost no metroidvania in the game itself apart from constantly running between locations. That was exactly the problem that was hard for me to solve. I tried making changes to the locations, but it all came out wrong, or required a complete rework. That led to me stopping development on this project and switching to the development of a new one that you all know — "Life with the tribe!".

But although I haven't discussed this before, sometimes I go back to old projects and make small changes to ideas, concepts and code. And recently I made changes to "This village need help!" specifically. So what are those changes?

Well… if you don't know how to do it better yourself — copy from those who did it the way you want. Ahem… well… do you know the game "Shovel Knight"? So… I decided to copy the gameplay mechanics from that game. Yes, even though Shovel Knight is itself a copy of games from an older era, it's unique and has quite well-made levels and mechanics.

I'm not talking about creating a full copy — there's no point in that after all. But the mana and secondary weapon system really hooked me. It's the perfect thing for metroidvanias! So I thought about items like these:

Each of the items will be locked behind different locations and bosses in the game. That way the player can decide their own route regardless of where they go, and they'll be able to get an upgrade that lets them open up new paths in the locations. Of course this will require reworking the locations, but with that same bomb you'll be able to blow up a wall that opens a shortcut, or a new path. That's exactly the detail that was missing — upgrades that let you open up new paths.

This small change in the idea and the gameplay concept opened up countless possibilities for how to build the game's world. Maybe add more items, maybe add special items with conditions for activating them (for example: a bottle of holy water that doesn't require magic, but requires being refilled directly at special points on the map), maybe add vulnerabilities for bosses/enemies to different items, and so on. And unfortunately this idea came to me quite late, so when the time comes and I return to developing "This village need help!", I'll already have a ready concept of improvements that will genuinely please both me and you.

So even if it's bad for the current development, returning to old unfinished projects can inspire new ideas that hadn't come to you before. The same thing happened with "Forest Home", which burned me to the ground back then, but now I have ideas on how to develop that project better — though more on that later.