Not Dead Yet

I was distracted for a while with work and stuff, but I started working on the game again over the last month. I had sort of hit a wall at one point. I felt like there was just too much to do, but then I had a brilliant thought - cut the game in half. I had planned 50 characters. One per level meant 50 levels. I still had a bunch of attack animations, a huge number of pieces for levels, and various other content - not to mention the testing and polishing. I was losing motivation and it just felt like I would never ship.

So I stopped working on new animations, cut the number of planned characters and levels in half, and started working on fleshing out what I had. I figure that I can release a second game with all the cut content later if people enjoy this one. In 15 minutes I went from a concept project that will likely never ship, to something that actually resembles a game.

So recently I've been playing with the AI, creating new levels, and balancing the game a bit. I'm actually really happy with the results. The game plays really pretty well.

I'm a bit concerned about the learning curve and difficulty. I don't want players to be able to breeze through the levels using the same characters, but I don't want to overwhelm players. I don't really want to do a tutorial, so I'm hoping I introduce new concepts slow enough for players to pick it up as they go. This is probably a bad assumption. So I think I'll have to bribe some co-workers to test it a bit this summer. The statuses and buffs might be slightly confusing, or it's quite possible I've made the initial encounters too difficult.

Tl;dr: still alive, working on game, worried about the difficulty.