Hey, it's been rough for me recently in terms of game development as you can probably tell from the title of this thing.
It was a hard decision to make but Project Origins, secretly known as Mafia Factory is canned.
Commissioned Logo by @MukkyWaffle
To explain why I made this choice it mainly come down to the gameplay loop.
The game was heavily inspired by an old Flash game I played a long time ago called Sitekick Factory, based on YTV's Club Penguin clone "Sitekick" which I was very fond of as a kid. It was a very simple game (Almost Game and Watch levels of simple) where you played as a little factory worker having to assemble robots in the right order under a time limit.
Around mid 2023, I rediscovered the game and ideas popped into my head for how I could put my own spin on the gameplay established. Mainly turning it into an arcade platformer, and this was where the main problem with the gameplay loop came in.
Platformers are a very movement based genre and you weren't doing a lot of movement in Mafia Factory which lead to gameplay not feeling very satisfying. It was mostly just going up and down pulling the right levers. I tried putting some other mechanics in place to encourage the player to keep moving like enemies and a power outage system, but it took me way too long to realize that what I made wasn't fun, and that I would basically have to redo almost everything from scratch.
I've decided to upload an unfinished build of the game for the sake of preservation and to give people an idea of what could have been:
https://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/05ad705a62c5c9d08b6e7ea7f116a341
This doesn't mean I'm done with making games though, I wanna take what I learned from making Mafia Factory and make something even better with said knowledge. Though I'll be taking a long break from game development for the time being and won't be posting about my next project until it's in a state I'm satisfied with.
That's basically it for what happened and what I'm planning for next, I wanna talk about ideas I had for the game so they're at least out there somewhere even if it isn't in code form. So If you aren't interested in that, you can stop reading now.
The story of Mafia Factory would have been you were a robot built by the head honcho of the robot mafia, and he wanted you to construct an army of Robo-Goons to spread crime through out the city or else he'd "scrap ya".
It was mostly a throwaway plot for the sake of establishing a setting and there wasn't very many mobster motifs in it because of that. It was more so a way for me to do something different from the typical evil scientist trope.
I designed the enemies to be bugs because I wanted to think of something that would slip into a factory undetected and those were the first things to come to mind. Very early on I wanted an exception to this where there would be a monkey that appears very rarely and does absolutely nothing, but I ended up scraping that idea.
Some other ideas I had for enemies that weren't coded were a bomb enemy that knocks you away very far, a literal water bug that would short circuit the levers, a mosquito that would charge at the player if they were in their line of site and a pill bug that could only be defeated by knocking other enemies into it.
A mechanic that never got implemented was "Crunch Time", where when the timer was low you would receive a speed boost and have your points doubled as a sort of risk/reward type mechanic. Thinking about now, it's probably for the best that this wasn't implemented.
Lastly the game was planned to have an ending.
If you got a high enough score it would have unlocked a secret credits screen showing that the mechanical hearts you were putting in the Robo-Goons use water as a bloodstream for them and that one of those same hearts is the one my OC Nova wears for her water cape and that would have been a teaser for something Nova related to happen in the future tying Mafia Factory into the same universe as her.
Anyways, that's it for real now, see you next game. Whenever that is.
Game Credits:
Logo Design: @MukkyWaffle
Stage Artist: @ScepterDPinoy (With cleanup by me)
Music:
Your Mum Shops at Hyper - CabbageClock
All music was included in the game with artist's permission.
Special Thanks to the GMS Discord for coding help