Toaster Launcher Dev Diary - Week 00 (May 22 - 28, 2023) - The Start of Something (re)New

    Everything is set. The development phase of the Toaster Launcher remake has begun. In the coming weeks, this new dev diary series will update on the progress on the game.

    Recently this week, I was salvaging the resources from the original Toaster Launcher. I have recovered the sprites and remade them. The significant improvement compared to the classic sprites were surprising, and there would be many more to come as new enemies and objects would be added.

    So the first milestone to cover is to recreate Toaster Launcher's classic playstyle, Endless Mode, as the levels of the Campaign would be manually designed, which would require much more time. As the first weeks of June starts, before I would begin recreating the player's mechanics, I would also need to figure out the orientation of the playing field, whether should it be landscape or portrait. 

    This has yet to be solved and it is an important decision to make. The classic landscape was the orientation of the original game and it seemed that I was able to play the game comfortably that way. However a portrait playing field is now considered. The side-scrolling would still be vertical, and the player would also be able to move in all directions, not just left and right, so the orientation would balance the maneuverability and allow more anticipation for the raining explosives. The biggest reason is that this kind of orientation for a vertical side-scroller would be ideal for mobile, should it one day be ported there.

    What is holding me back is the comfort of playing it on the PC. Should a portrait playing field be used, fitting it in a landscape screen would end up creating ample free space and I would need to figure out how to maximize it besides filling them with stats and other UI. Even in mobile, there would be changes. There would be no space because the field would fit, meaning that I would need to create a separate UI for it. Another reason is that these differing views felt strange to me. I value cohesion and having to adjust UIs differently is not what I am aiming for. If the landscape orientation remains, the player would lose the vertical maneuverability and would have to cope with the demand for horizontal maneuverability in a vertical side-scroller, meaning that the field must be larger (or in other words, the objects must be smaller) to allow anticipation for the enemies, and in mobile, the gameplay would be less comfortable.

    I would decide by the end of the following week.

Make sure you stay tuned for updates on the game's development! 🍞💣

- Arolf Delano Santos