In September of 2024, I started making Comet Rogue. I had just sold my car to do so. Was it worth it? Despite commercial failure, I’d say that it 100% was. (I’m not just trying to cope, ok???) My goal was to make a better game than Void Wizard, my first commercial release, and I’d say that Comet Rogue is a much better game in almost every way. I say this despite Comet Rogue performing much worse than Void Wizard. Comet Rogue sits at only 7 reviews, while Void Wizard is at 41. Comet Rogue has sold 62 copies, while Void Wizard has sold 1,517. I know it’s been a whole year since Void Wizard released, and only two weeks since Comet Rogue did, but I don’t think it will catch up.

In this post, I’ll go over many aspects of Comet Rogue’s development, starting with…

Marketing and Concept

Here’s why I think Void Wizard (VW) did better than Comet Rogue (CR):
Appeal. When I made VW, I just started making something that I thought sounded cool. With CR however, I made several mechanical prototypes and picked the most fun one. This is likely why VW is more appealing (born from fantasy) and Comet Rogue is more fun. (born from mechanical testing) For my next game, the plan is to start with the fantasy, figure out how appealing it is, make mechanical prototypes that will work with that fantasy, and pick the best/most fun one. I think that how appealing/marketable a game is determines 80% to 90% of it’s success. So this time, I’m going to spend more time in the concepting phase. An analogy I thought of is that your concept is like aiming a bow, and execution is how hard you can pull back the string. If you’re really strong but have bad aim, yeah, you’ll shoot your arrow far, but you won’t hit your target. I think CR strengthened my muscles, but my aim was way off. Oh, I also want to make even smaller games in more viral genres, which is why I’m gonna focus on horror games for a little while.

VW also had more coverage. No big youtubers played it, but several small ones did, some pulling a few thousand views. It was also accepted into the Steam FPS festival right after launch, as well as the endless replayability fest. It did pretty good in the first one, getting roughly 2k withlists, but it didn’t do too great in the second. CR on the other hand was only part of the Steam Next Fest, and only got about 100 wishlists from it. It did get a couple videos made on it, and a couple streamers played it, (shoutout to them) but none of them got many views. I also launched CR with no discount, which was a big mistake. Launch discounts being a standard practice was something I wasn’t aware of. Oops. Another thing that I think I got wrong was having a separate store page for my demo. Players can leave reviews on your demo, and all of my reviews were positive, but the problem is that people don’t want to leave two reviews. The full version is basically just a longer version of the demo, so why bother giving your thoughts on both?

Design

I feel that CR has greatly strengthened my design skills. The biggest design “problem” I solved was that players kept on digging down as far as they could, and then dying. Repeatedly. The goal is to collect as much money as possible and escape, which is typically done by staying near the top. Solving this was a nightmare. It took me months before I figured it out, and this was after trying several ideas. The way I solved it was by just making the levels really shallow. If you dig down as far as you can, you’ll hit the bottom of the level pretty quickly and realize that there isn’t much down there, making it clear that digging down isn’t the goal. While I am pretty happy with the outcome, I can’t help but wonder if I should’ve embraced players’ desires to explore.

A pretty big technical design mistake I made was the decision to render the whole game at a low resolution. I should have figured out how to display the game world in a low resolution and any text in a high one. The game’s low resolution causes all the text to be pretty big because if it was any smaller, it wouldn’t be readable. While it did turn out pretty good, if I wanted to localize the game or make the text more legible, it would be pretty hard.

Earlier I said that CR is a better game than VW, and here’s why:
1. It’s a better roguelike. I had to rebrand VW as an FPS with roguelike elements because it’s procedural generation wasn’t very good and it didn’t contain any real upgrades. CR has much better procedural generation, it has many more items (that are actually interesting), and it has more content in general.

2. It has more depth. I think that VW’s movement and combat feel really good, but it gets old pretty quickly because there isn’t much complex decision making. CR on the other hand lets you manipulate your enemies with the environment, has more micro goals, and the upgrades you get often make you think about how to use them.

3. The mining is addictive. It just is.

4. CR has a push your luck mechanic, which can make the early parts of the game challenging for skilled players that want to push themselves far, keeping them from getting bored.

5. CR has controller support, better menus, lite meta progression, and an online leaderboard.

Art

I think that the art of CR looks competent, but doesn’t stand out. This is another reason I want to start doing first-person horror games. If there’s a closeup shot of a scary monster, it doesn’t matter as much if it’s high quality.

Back to CR. I decided to make it a pixel art game and give everything a thick black outline. The color palette that was used was the one from the Pico-8 fantasy console, including the secret colors. Those were basically the to main rules for the art. Oh, I did deviate from the palette quite a bit for the backgrounds though.

Audio

My audio abilities didn’t improve much during this project, but I think that’s alright for now because I think they’re pretty decent, at least for more… game-y games. I may have to improve them a bit for horror games though. Something I might try is recording a gameplay video and then creating the sound effects in a video editor. That way you can instantly see how it will all look and feel.

Programming

In general, I think the code of CR is much cleaner than VW, but I still want to improve it quite a bit. I’m just gonna rattle off a bunch of technical stuff. Most of this will only apply to Godot, since I used Godot 4.3.

I exported a version of the game that uses Godot’s compatibility rendering, but I don’t think I’ll do that for the next game since most computers can handle Vulkan just fine.

Vsync caps your game’s frame rate at the computer monitor’s refresh rate. For some reason I thought it just limited it to 60FPS, which led to some confusion when people with faster monitors had some weird physics and timing issues that I didn’t.

Frame rates above 60FPS led to the player teleporting upwards by large amounts at random. I believe it was due to the code I added which lifts the player up if there’s just a small step he has to climb, preventing him from getting stuck. There were other issues too. Some were resolved simply by moving some code from a _process() function to a _physics_process() one. Timers also seemed to run down slightly faster at frame rates above 60FPS, and this seemed to be fixed by setting their process_mode to “physics process.” Weird.

I want to start adding proper loading screens to my games because right now the game just freezes until a level is loaded in. This isn’t too bad for small 2D games, but for 3D ones I think it may be an issue.

Spawning in things for the first time sometimes results in the game freezing for a second. I may have to add everything to a bank/vault scene, load it when the game starts, and then unload it quickly. This should keep everything from lagging the game when spawning for the first time. I’m not sure if I’ll have to bother with this tho because Godot 4.4 has a feature that’s supposed to fix that.

I had set the project name of the playtest to “Comet Rogue”, but that was bad because the full version can’t have that name. (it’s called “Comet Rogue Full Version”) I couldn’t have the full version and playtest share a project name because of how Godot stores save data.

Conclusion

Thank you to everyone who has supported me during the development of this game. While it didn’t make much money, it was a fantastic learning experience, and I’m very proud of it. Now, on to new and better things!

-Vincent Poteet