Hades Complete, Rhythm Quest work start

On being "finished" with Hades

Just last week or so I finished my 32-heat run in Hades -- this is the hardest achievement that the game really has you doing -- so I'm pretty much done with the game.  There's a bit more dialogue that I haven't seen, grindy optional achievements that I haven't gotten, and stuff like that, but I've certainly completed all of the main plotlines and feel pretty satisfied, having gotten through the final challenge of sorts.

I completed a total of 83 runs throughout my Hades career (the game conveniently keeps a log of all of them).  I reached the final* boss on run #4, which is extremely early (was carried by the strategy of staying away from enemies using the bow w/sniper shot, and also full refilling health between areas thanks to Strong Drink), though it was not until run #17 that I finished a run successfully.  Run #19 was the last run that I failed -- Runs #20 through #83 were all part of the same 64-run clear streak.  Admittedly I did quit out on a botched run to maintain that streak, but I think that one was a cast build which really didn't pan out due to my RNG with boons, so I don't particularly blame myself for that one.

The 32-heat accomplishment was surprisingly easy (I didn't expect to hit it on my first try), with the right build -- using the Shattered Shackle with Arthur sword, as recommended by some online guides.  This allows you to just do a bunch of damage with your normal (dash)-attack, and basically not really care about boons very much, which is great as it means you don't really have to have good RNG for the run.  Though certain boons and (more importantly) hammers can really help.  I happened to get the double dash-attack hammer, for example, which was a great boost to my damage, as well as Hermes' boon that gives you extra money per room, which turned out pretty useful for buying HP-replenishing items.  You have a 50HP bonus to start with from Arthur aspect, and you can liberally get Centaur Hearts since you hardly care about boons and/or money, so I ended up with a whopping 422 HP in the end, which is another strength of this build (allows you to make mistakes and still be OK since you're so tanky)

Most of my completed runs were actually not going for raw completion, but instead trying to farm for metacurrency resources -- which means saving up 1000 or 1200 gold to spend on the final area, which of course makes the run a bit harder as that money could have easily been used to afford other boons and other items.  I got "used to" playing the game in this manner, so when I went for my 16-heat run for example (with Chiron Bow), it really didn't feel that bad as I "took off the weights" and went for straight completion for that run.

I may try a few other 32-heat runs, just to see how other builds fare, but for the most part I'm ready to shelve this game and move onto other things.  I can safely say that this was wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy more fun to grind out than the higher difficulties of Dead Cells, and my motivation for trying to clear 5BC on Dead Cells essentially vanished now.  Don't think I'll bother to return to that.

Next up I'll move onto something different, like perhaps SotN, or Mega Man X2, or Freespace.  Or, actually, it would probably be a good idea to play through Rhythm Doctor (early access!) first.  Speaking of which...

 

On starting work on Rhythm Quest again

I felt a bit restless (yet unmotivated?) this weekend, so somehow I found myself starting up on Rhythm Quest stuff, a bit earlier than I anticipated for myself.  Never too soon to start, I guess.  So I guess this is my first "work week" in earnest on my own indie game.

For the time being, most of my tasks are logistical and ramp-up related, so nothing super exciting.  I've been filling out some initial forms for Steam storefront distribution, registering in preparation for submitting an application for a Switch devkit, and looking into where I should post my devlogs (right now there are 3 main places -- on my website, on itch.io, and on tigsource.com).  I also waffled around a bit looking for a decent yet simple task tracker.  I was halfway towards just using a text file (hey, it's worked just fine for the rest of my life...), but in the end I made a board on Trello and have been using that.

Other than that, I have been doing...well, ramp-up work.  I haven't booted into the OSX partition on my personal laptop in ages (I had been living off of the windows partition, since my work laptop was almost always booted into OSX), but I'm going to need to use it to make iOS/OSX builds and the like, so I set up Unity/VSCode/etc/etc on it and got everything up and running.

I decided to also take this time to work on some very boring yet essential devops work -- nailing down my automated build pipelines.  Generating new builds of your game is a royal pain in the butt if you have to do it manually across a billion platforms (Windows, OSX, Linux, iOS, Android), each with their own requirements and extra steps (particularly iOS and Android, which have their own storefronts, code signing, and testing distribution programs).

Thankfully, we've come a long way since the days of yore when you had to do all this stuff by hand in XCode/etc.  I've been integrating a tool called fastlane (https://fastlane.tools/) which handles the bulk of the iOS/android stuff for you, and even has a unity plugin for triggering unity builds.  It even has some functionality for capturing app screenshots (though I haven't tried it out yet), which will also be useful.  While I could invoke the fastlane builds from the commandline directly or via script, I'm going even further and using a local install of Jenkins (https://www.jenkins.io/), a continuous deployment/automation server.

The end goal is that I can click a button and then have Jenkins spin up 4 processes in parallel, one for each of iOS, Android, Linux, and OSX, each with their own separate working folders, and go through all of the steps required to build a new version of my game, including deploying to TestFlight for iOS, etc.  I've actually made quite significant progress towards that (lofty) goal today, which is pretty exciting.  Unfortunately OSX can't make Unity IL2CPP windows builds right now, so I'd have to either use Mono or (more likely) use my Desktop for the windows builds, but that's not too much of a problem.  If I =really= wanted to I could even set up a Jenkins agent on my Windows machine, but Windows standalone builds aren't particularly slow to generate (the iOS and Android builds are really the killer), so we'll see if I end up going that far or just doing those manually instead.

I'll be continuing work towards that, but for the rest of the week I also want to record some gameplay footage and start setting up my devlog stuff so I can get into a good rhythm and cadence for that.  Exciting stuff!