Dev Log 7 – Crop and Claw

The past two weeks have been more slow-burn and content grind for Crop and Claw. A small trailer was made to replace the minimalist trailer, showing a bit more going on. The general four-split-screen look came from some quick mimicking of an old Dragon Quest 2 commercial which did similar. It’s already difficult enough to market an NES RPG and make it look “exciting” and “eventful.” The impression both made the screen seem more active than it is due to having multiple screens with variety displayed, and it resembled the horrendous social media “short video” trend that is so popular as of writing in which it is a sensory overload to make the viewer think less about what they’re really looking at, especially when scrubbing through the video.

Two dungeons in the swamp region were added. One of which even has two entrances in the overworld. I’m making a note for the future here: when I took Argil’s early tileset for the swamp region and melted a map together, he hadn’t intended me to make the treetops leaves walkable. I was just throwing random ideas together which made half of the swamp dungeon take place in treetops. He had since polished and improved the tileset, factoring that use case into effect. Just a small funny story that it’s sometimes good to try unintended use-cases.

Among all of this, there’s also more items, and various items and features have been getting recreated to stress-test the infrastructure. Such items include Final Fantasy 5’s Chicken Knife and a spell that operates similar to Oracle’s job in the same game. More specialized AI for certain enemies are also being added with very low effort, such as an enemy that fills a similar role to Final Fantasy 1’s WarMech as a hidden “boss enemy” with more behavior awareness. As of writing, there are 12 unique enemy designations, with a handful of recolors and reskins. Enemies use a trick similar to Mother where sprites are layered on top of enemies, with different sprite layers for some enemies to change the sprite just a bit. Not too many enemies use this, but there are a few cases. The initial infrastructure has been mostly finished, so we’re mostly starting to see focus on ‘stuff’ to throw at the player.

A demo is still possibly in the works. Most likely, it will be a “Shareware” edition that will be available on the main site. A Steam demo may eventually drop, but it is more likely to drop after Crop and Claw releases.

Ironically, possibility space grew far beyond the initial project’s scope just because some features were not difficult to stack on top. Initially, there was no support for elemental immunity or absorption, but it was trivial to add. This even includes adding gear that give the player immunity and absorption when equipped, which was barely more than a couple lines of code. The feature support is actually greater than the design space and balance initially intended. It is easy to forget the original scope was supposed to be between Dragon Quest 1 and Final Fantasy 1/Mother. Balance and rewarding exploration and experimentation has become more of a barrier than the actual feature implementation for most things. I cannot complain too much though. That is far more preferable to “I can’t get the game to function.”