It's been about 5 months since I last touched this project. Without the looming deadline of a game jam, and with a lot of major refactoring in front of me, I just found very little motivation to actually work on it. Specifically, I stopped working on the game in the middle of reworking the pause handling for freezing the game while messages/etc are on screen. I wanted to move away from using my own "state" singleton to using Godot's built-in pause mode. I now think this move was a mistake, and I intend to roll it back.

The game has a lot of issues right now.

Art

The art isn't good. I know it's not good. I don't want to collaborate with anyone else on this, so I need to get better at art. Maybe I should get back to practicing daily. Heck, that could be something to throw on my twitter.

Bugs

The game has some hard to squash bugs. Sometimes it randomly stops detecting inputs after switching floors. I think it thinks there's still a message box on screen or something. Sometimes it's possible to trigger your climax attack when there's nothing in range of it, which shouldn't be allowed. The particle effects for the climax animation sometimes act strangely. 

The fact that these bugs are so intermittent makes it very hard to tell if I've actually fixed any of them. I think I need to do a big code clean-up, and maybe reimplement some of these systems from scratch.

Progression and balance

The gameplay is poorly balanced. It's impossible to get very much progress on a single run. With how the stats are balanced, you're lucky to make it 2 floors further up the tower each run. And if you ever take a shortcut, you'll be very short on cash for your next run because you didn't get a chance to farm the early floors. It's a trap of a choice.

Resetting your equipment at the end of a run and taking your unspent gold and experience points away at the beginning of a run is just too punishing. It makes it very hard to get a foothold in the dungeon. More of these upgrades should be permanent. Maybe a system where upgrades purchased in town are safe, while additional upgrades found in the dungeon only last until the end of the current run?

Gameplay and premise integration

But the biggest issue, I think, is the very poor integration of the plot/premise and the actual gameplay. The narrative objective is "train yourself to become a better lover for your partner", but the gameplay is just a generic roguelike. There need to be more systems that actually tie into the overall objective. The game Help! I Need to Stretch Out For Valentines Day! coincidentally has a very similar premise to Taking the Tower, but it has gameplay that actually supports the premise! It's a fantastic game and you should go play it right now. Seriously, it's one of my favorite games on Itch.

My original plan for Taking the Tower was going to be a lot more simulationist in how the butt stuff was implemented. You'd gradually wory your way up to bigger plugs, and you'd need to take time to get used to them. Larger plugs would allow you to develop more quickly, but would also cause greater discomfort, limiting how much time you could spend in the dungeon in a single run. Obviously, none of that made its way into the current build of the game. Right now there are only two plugs, which are both living magical guardians of the tower.

I need to spend more time thinking about just how this all fits together.

There are a lot of other flaws I could point out in the current design, but I feel like this is already too much self flagellation. I know the game isn't in a good state.

Future of the project

This is what I'm going to do.

• I'm going to get back into practicing art every day.  If I make something worth sharing, I'll put it on my twitter account.
• I'm going to review the current code-base to remember how the project worked. I'll take notes of things I want to rework.
• I'm going to come up with a new design document for the game. I'll work to address the premise and gameplay integrations I mentioned above. I won't be afraid to toss out stuff I don't think worked very well.
• I'm going to get a new build of the game out by the end of September. I make no promises of how much progress I'll actually make, but I'll get something pushed before October first.

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