--- DevDiary ---

<Back>

- 2023/07/22 -

This week, I started brainstorming bosses.

Last week, I took a rest after publishing the game on itch.io. When SD2020 was put up on itch.io, I was naively expecting some traction by default, which I of course did not get. This time I am completely fine with SDR not getting any significant traction, and I think that is both because I am more mature than before and that I am more happy with how the game turned out. I have a much clearer and more comfortable picture of what I can and should do with the game project, and there are no palpable regrets in my lack of skill so far.

Even though Sunrise Doll R has all the mechanics and tools for building levels for the campaign, it lacks special stages that contain boss fights. These are big events that take entire stages to themselves and feature their own mechanics. Essentially, they are more sophisticated enemies, and I expect coding them to take an appropriate amount of time.

The original plan for SD2020's campaign was to mimic the campaign of the inspiration game: dividing the campaign into evenly sized chunks of four stages and one boss each. However, after publishing the trial version with a mock-up of the campaign with no bosses included, I feel that just four stages between bosses is too few. The new plan for SDR is to have nine stages between bosses. This will visually make the boss stages more prominent: 5-10-15-20-... is slightly less obvious than 10-20-30-40-..., and 4-9-14-19-... is even less so than 9-19-29-39-...

The original plan was to have five bosses, and I plan to keep it this way. The identities of the bosses were somewhat established during the development of SD2020, except for the first and the final bosses. All other bosses had varying degrees of completeness of design, and those I plan to preserve for SDR. This week I managed to come up with the first draft of the first boss, and I will spend time implementing it into the game.

I plan to keep each boss in secrecy, so unfortunately there will be not much to include in the upcoming diary entires.