SE7ENGOKU is currently in development, and the current demo, codenamed Spiral 2, represents an intermediate step betweenProject D759 and a fully realized SE7ENGOKU. If those words made zero sense to you, read on. This devlog is mostly for those coming here from Improve My Game Jam 28, but it does explain the history and current status of this project for anyone who isn’t familiar with it.

n-goku, or Taking A Joke Too Seriously

The genesis of what would become SE7ENGOKU began as a literal joke someone made in the Magical Girl Game Jam Discord: hey, if there’s Tengoku, is there also one- through nine-goku?

Tengoku is a series of (mostly) top-down shooters that makes an appearance in almost every Magical Girl Game Jam, created by Dogtopius. It’s not actually meant to be read as 10-goku, it’s one word, but someone was going to make the joke.

And then we decided, hey, what if we actually made the joke real? Plans were quickly drawn up and numbers divided up. I chose 7, thinking I’d do something revolving around the seven deadly sins.

To be honest, after the initial burst of interest it’s been pretty slow- I think a lot of people were eager to make the joke but less eager to buckle down and build a real game. I’ve been trying to forge ahead but found myself putting the whole thing aside to focus on just about anything else for long periods of time.

How (Not) To Design A Fangame

I settled on a general design pretty quickly. It would be a 3D space shooter, which I guess is a variety of rail shooter, with a janky 3D style composed of whatever I could scrape together, upgradable weapons and equipment with a store between missions, and at least some story bits delivered through interactive dialogue. Mostly hard science fiction except for the literal magic, set an unspecified period after the canon games though with a very tenuous grasp on canon at best.

In many ways, SE7ENGOKU is the spiritual antithesis of Tengoku, but that was deliberate. I wanted to make something distinct from the original series rather than just an inferior clone of it. While Tengoku is heavily Touhou influenced (I think), SE7ENGOKU is Tyrian, Terminal Velocity and StarFox, in a world that bounces between The Expanse and Spaceballs.

That being said, there’s a lot that isn’t locked down, especially in regards to the narrative direction. In other words, I haven’t decided if I want this to be an absolute shitpost or to take it slightly more seriously. I also still haven’t quite figured out how big the scope is going to be.

First Attempt: Project D759

I’d been poking at SE7ENGOKU a bit since its inception, fighting with Blender and MakeHuman and hacking together a fancy splash screen, but it was for Magical Girl Game Jam 7 that I actually started building out the game itself. I called it Project D759; Demo of SevenGoKu. It was mostly a mechanics demo, and I implemented the flying, the shooting, the enemies and even a boss. What little narrative there was is a total excuse plot and more for playing with a new style of portrait than anything.

It was slapdash and janky and it did not do well in the ratings.

Even though I knew it was flawed, it was pretty dispiriting to see Project D759 score as badly as it did. It was doubly disappointing to see that people seemed to hate the new 3D style I was playing with, because that was kind of test run not just for SE7ENGOKU but also other projects. Between all that and that MGGJ7 was just a stressful jam in general, I was burned out. I set D759/SE7ENGOKU aside for the time being, thinking I’d come back to it later, but at that point I just didn’t want to work on it anymore.

Spiral 2 (You Are Here)

Eventually, I did drift back to SE7ENGOKU. I knew what I wanted to tackle next; a lot of little things, mostly to do with the core mechanics, some that I had in mind for D759 but didn’t have time to do and some that came from testing and feedback.

The biggest issues were with the visibility of enemies and projectiles and that shooting at enemies sometimes just didn’t seem to work. The former issue was addressed by adding bright auras to some objects that didn’t have them and tweaking the colours of the enemies and projectiles.

The second major issue was harder to solve because it didn’t have a single cause and I didn’t fully understand the issues right off the bat. One known issue was that there is a “deadzone” behind the player but in front of the camera and it’s hard to tell when an enemy ends up in this area; this was addressed by moving the camera much closer to the player. Aim assist wasn’t implemented in D759 and that made hitting enemies difficult, but even after implementing that, enemies still didn’t die consistently when aiming close enough to them. It turned out there were several issues with collision detection and bullets were passing through enemies or disappearing before they could hit them.

With those issues fixed, it plays much better now. This is really the game it should have been months ago. Although I’ve abandoned the D759 moniker (which was really only ever going to be a one-off), this release is really Project D759 fixed more than a full slice of what SE7ENGOKU will eventually be.

Other improvements include making difficulty and game speed actually have an effect on the game, adding some decorative objects to the Ganymede level, stripping out the (kinda temporary) story bits, and changing the dragon at the end of the level to a magical girl angel as originally planned.

Stepping Stones

I really like the general approach I’ve been taking with this project: relatively small but clearly defined milestones that I pick up when I feel like it. Dividing it up and tackling things at my leisure has really helped this project becoming dreary slog like some of my other projects in the past, or ending up as something I tackle at a jam pace to the detriment of everything else.

The next planned milestones are tentatively codenamed Economy Update and Story Mode. Make of that what you will. I don’t know when I’m going to get to them; I’ve got a lot of other irons in the fire and especially with this project I’m not keen on forcing myself to slog ahead. But when the inspiration comes I know what I’m going to work on next.