9 April 2016

Iron's Fundamental Flaws

Lately, I've been looking at Iron and its horrendous development. It was supposed to be done in December but that sadly didn't happen. I have come to the conclusion that the game is flawed from the ground.

Combat in a platformer game is hard to do without having to adhere to strict limits, having you only being able to shoot in two directions is very restrictive and makes for some very poor combat. That being said there have been ways around this. I recently played a demo platform game called Butcher which by the way, is a brilliant game and is probably one of the few so-called "retro-style" games out there that actually pulls off the whole retro theme very well (major praise going out to THD for that.) Anyway, Butcher uses an eight-directional playing sprite while pulling off omni-directional shooting.

Another indie game, Cave Story also pulled off an enhanced platform combat system by opting for four-directional shooting (three-directional when on-ground.) I don't think I need to explain in much detail what Cave Story is - it was pretty much the Undertale of 2004 and is generally seen as the forefather of modern indie gaming.

Unfortunately, Iron can't employ such a system. This simply because I outsourced the sprites to a friend of mine, unfortunately I didn't take combat into account and I was left with bi-directional combat which is pretty shite in a platformer game. I could request for new sprites but this would take a lot of time and I want to get the game out as soon as possible, mid-July would be nice.

That's why I've made the decision to completely overhaul the game, genre and all into something new - an RPG game. This may even result in me using a whole other engine. Sadly no one pre-ordered Iron, however if people had pre-ordered it I would offer them an immediate refund given the circumstances. The Thallium pre-order bonus will remain for the time being.

I have decided to hide Iron's download page for the time being, so you won't be able to access it, unfortunately this will mean that Thallium can't be accessed either although I'll leave that page up. Project Plasma and Project Plasma Mobile will obviously remain up also.

I'll release updates as I go along but I hope that with these major changes, Iron's development will be far less messy than it is right now.

Thallium - https://archangelatom.itch.io/thallium (game currently inaccessible)
Project Plasma - https://archangelatom.itch.io/project-plasma
Project Plasma Mobile - https://archangelatom.itch.io/project-plasma-mobile

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