As always, I'm making letting you all in on what I'm doing here on Newgrounds, Every Two Weeks. So be sure to check in on just what the heck is going on.

So Project Honey is coming along very smoothly. I've given myself a month to prototype the game. So far I have the basic nuts and bolts of this game down. Making a game, any game take a lot of time and effort and a lot of that effort goes largely unnoticed by players. Really we only really notice the lack of effort on these parts, (Your character falling through the world, T-posing NPC, DEAR-GOD-WHAT-HAPPENED-TO-THEIR-FACE moments.) I wanted to make sure that I put in all that leg work early, doing the kinda boring, kinda of tedious work of making the game actually work.

Everything has to be made from scratch, this is the case with just about any game you make, for example Unreal does not have a default title screen for you to use, or pause menu, or loading bar, no it does not.

You gotta make that stuff. Along with things like pickups and ai, figureing out how you are going to load and unload levels, lighting, physics. That's not to say it doesn't have tools to make these things easier but unreal has a lot less canned anything then one would think and between you and me that's how I like it. Working in unreal feels a lot less like working with a game engine and more like working with an API. It's bare lumber used to build a home, not a set of pre-made rooms.

With all that said I feel I have really strong foundation for the game, I know how I'm going to do everything I would want to do in the game. But now comes, what is in my opinion, the real challage. What exactlly is the game about?

This is my current goal for the game figuring out exactly what everything is going to be. Story, Characters, setting that sort of thing. Or at least a rough Idea of all that noise. I already know how the game is going to play but I don't know how it's going to play out if you catch my drift.

Where I currently am at the moment is trying to figure out what kind of enemies there will actually be in the game, how do they behave and interact with the player any each other. A great example of what I mean are these two rough concepts for enemies. Bees and Flowers.

Bees and Flowers!

Bees and Flowers are a combo of enemies that I think is a fun idea. Flowers are a fairly tough and rare enemy, they fire projectiles at the player while trying to keep their distance, Flowers are actively hostile to the player and attack on sight. Bee and the other hand are a fairly weak enemy that hang out in packs of 2 or 3, when attacking they rush the player to sting them while making themselves hard to hit. Bees are not hostile to the player on sight, instead they only attack if provoked and one thing that provokes them is attacking a flower.

I have a couple Ideas for enemy interactions, like an enemy that actively hunts down another type or something like that. I want to make enemies more than just obstacles in project honey, because they aren't obstacles, they are the goal. They are the thing you are even playing the game for.

That being said I'm also trying to figure out abilities for the player to unlock over the course of the game. Something that's really easy for me to do now because I put in the effort to really nail down how the games handles the players and character actions. Every character runs two state machines, one that is for the overall state of the character, things like are they alive, are they dead, are they ｈｏｒｎｙ. The other state machine controls the actions they are currently performing, such as jumping, shooting, using an object. picking something up, ｈａｖｉｎｇｔｈｅｓｅｘ, that sorta stuff. It allows me to easily add new action by simply creating a new states and adding new connections and conditions for those connections between states rather than creating a huge unweildy web of elses and ifs. for example, I can add a "light a match" state that handles all the logic of lighting a match, I can make it so a character can't light a match underwater because in order to get into the "light a match" state in the first place they need have a match ,not be in water and be in the "not doing anything special" state, so the player can't defy logic by being able to light a match under water by shooting a bazooka at an off bit of geometry because you can't go to the "light a match" state from the "shooting a bazooka" state...

If any of that made sense to you, you deserve a high five. That's where I stand right now, next time I should have something more visual to share with you guys.

But that's if for now.

See y'all again soon