Hey there! It's Heli.

If you don't share a Discord with me, it's been a little while since you've last heard me talk about Cruise Planet. It's been a whole year since I started working on this game! A bit more than that, actually, given that I started around June of last year. I wanted to set aside some time to talk about where the project has been going over that year, where it ended up, and where I want to go with it next.

So! Over the last year I've worked on the game in between periods of work for college, and to a lesser extent the job I had this summer. Within that time, I estimate that I've done only two to three months' worth of work on this, so progress isn't as slow as it seems given everything I've got going on. Even then, though, it's still been quite slow.

There are a couple good reasons and a couple things I could have done better. For example, Cruise is my first game in Godot, so I've had to take extra time to learn the ins-and-outs of the engine, improving upon what I had done before. But I didn't have to go so hard on the art assets for the first pass. In fact, I'm wishing I had made a lot more placeholders. I also wish I had stopped sooner to evaluate how much fun the game that I was making was. Some parts of the game have been really enjoyable and others haven't been.

In particular, the dual-wielding cannons mechanic and destructible terrain have both been well received and have been fleshed out elegantly. Meanwhile, the choice to give the game a roguelike structure has created the majority of the work on this project (planet generation, world map, all the systems working behind the scenes to make it work) and doesn't nearly make up for it in how fun or engaging it is.

The roguelike structure has three main problems:

1. The enemy wave generation doesn't feel at home with the terrain generation. What I mean by this is that the two parts of the generation don't build off of each other as much as they clash.
2. I haven't been playing to the benefits of roguelikes. Roguelikes work really well with putting the player in tough situations and asking them to improvise, and making fun reactions between the game's elements that you wouldn't expect. The systems demo does neither of these things.
3. Most shmup players dislike randomness, at least in the quantities that my game would have of it. Don't get me wrong, there are some roguelike shmups that came out recently that have been well received, but most of the community praises skill-based games and sees randomness as undermining that skill. Developing a shmup in America is such a questionable business venture in the first place, with how few players there are! Why would a niche within a niche be a smart idea?

So the solution is, as the title suggests, to revisualize Cruise Planet as a shmup that doesn't have a roguelike structure. It will instead have a set of hand-crafted levels, like most shmups, just with the main mode using a level select to keep the flow of pacing that I think shmups need.

When I first started concepting this game in 2021, I thought that the game being a roguelike-shmup hybrid would give it what it needed to make a big splash in the market. But I hadn't done research on what kinds of shmups are being released these days (word of advice, kids: do your market research early), and now that I've done that, I see people making those all the time. Instead I want to focus on what really makes this game special. Dual-wielding? I've seen it before, mainly in other genres for sure, but never like how Cruise does it. Destructible terrain? Gotta love that destruction. And when was the last time you saw someone making a cute-em-up?

As a reward for reading this far, here's some concepts for what will be the game's first level:

My secret weapon is that I keep a notebook full of ideas for the game - almost anything that makes it in gets sketched out first, and I've gotten really good at sketching. They share space in close quarters with some miscellaneous doodles, but mostly actual college notes. I think these would be fun to include in the final game as some kind of completion reward. Whether the text behind the pages is about game business, Japanese film noir or the supernatural will be up for you to figure out, haha!

In any case, that's all that I'd like to cover for today! I wanna give a shoutout to Broomie, Kollumos and ClassyRaichu, the wonderful three people on my Discord server who have stuck around to give me feedback on Cruise whenever I needed it. What's that? You wanna be the fourth? Get in there... https://discord.gg/g8NtCRj9tm

This has been Heli, signing out!