The Future of Battle Khromatica (aka why did this build take so long to come out?)

Hey everyone!

When I made the original build for Battle Khromatica for Mini Jam 111, my plan immediately after was to quickly make three additional levels and a final boss to use all the music that Jude (our resident composer) made. I thought this wouldn't take too long.

I was wrong.

From the additional growth in scope, to the large amount of spriting needed for bosses and ESPECIALLY backgrounds (which I thought I would never draw in the first place), to me just developing on and off due to a lack of motivation / life issues / etc, the newest build has taken nearly half a year... WAYYYYY off my initial metric of "just another week". To be fair, that is how it almost always goes anyways.

Anyways, the takeaway here is Khromatica is here to stay.

The tentative plan is to develop and polish more of the game, have the wonderful audio team re-record audio, and rebalance the game a bit. Unfortunately the difficulty is a bit high -- it's playable and surprisingly fair due to the multiple protections put in to save the player (bullet cancelling on color switch, much smaller hitbox, slightly smaller hitboxes on bullets than expected), but also balanced for me, not the general population at this point which is a failing.

Another question that begs to be asked is: "How do you plan to get the game recognized?" Shmups are a very niche genre -- I could probably write an entire book on this point as to why this is and how to remedy it, but honestly, Khromatica is probably not the sea change the genre needs. The game was designed in a very short period of time and wasn't built from the ground up to address the problems the genre has. Besides that,the feedback I've gotten is "Yeah, this is fun... for a shmup" from my friends who aren't into the genre: a compliment indeed, but proof that this game is likely not going to find any unexpected breakout success.

On the flipside, shmups have an extremely dedicated and ravenous fanbase clamoring for more games. My hope for Khromatica is that it can be a game that superplayers will take to! There are a lot of elements added in the build (formation bonuses and perfects, midboss dismantling, funnyman milking, colorless runs, rank, etc) that I believe make solving the puzzle of how to obtain the best score in Khromatica interesting. The name "Battle Khromatica" is an obvious pastiche of "Battle Garegga" anyways: a game whose philosophy of intricate scoring coupled with the indifference and encouragement to death I hope influenced Khromatica in a good way. (If you haven't played Garegga by the way, I'd check it out -- it's an excellent game that I admire very much)

So, my plan is to share the game with superplayers / the shmup circle at large once its polished enough, and hopefully it will be enjoyed -- but this block of people aside, I want to focus on making the game more accessible. It is indeed too hard! Not everyone wants to play an arcade-difficult game... in fact, I'd reckon few do, so making it more catered to a home audience will likely be my next steps. Whether it's reducing the rank gain, or simply adding more lives, I have the tools. Hopefully then, Khromatica can be enjoyed by all, while still having the challenge in for those who want it.

Stay tuned for more Khromatica! In the meanwhile, I'm a bit burned out on it, so I likely won't touch the game for a week or so -- maybe I'll enter in a jam or two :)

I will guarantee another build later -- it's got too much momentum for me to stop anyways.