Finally, somehow, Avis and I have started to plan working on a game!
We've settled for an isometric tower-defense game and have started brainstorming for ideas. In fact, we already found one that's pretty awesome, and I am very excited to start working on expanding that rough concept of ours.
More details in due time, we are secretive folks c;
This'll be a fun one!
I set up the random generation for the game for LowRezJam. I decided to make it a grid of chunks each with a single platform inside. I had never done something like this so I'm happy with how smoothly it works. I also fixed a problem where when you hit the side of a platform it could disable one of your controls. Then I submitted a streak 2 hours late.
Seems I accidentally submitted to the daily DJ streak and the monthly one. Can't submit a new post, so...editing time!
Original Post:
Rust learning picks up again after an unsuccessful Ludum Dare weekend (thanks, health). Going to aim for steady progress going forward on both learning and developing new things.
April Review:
A lot has happened this April, though I have little concrete to show for it.
A vastly improved knowledge of Rust and engine building has made me interested in using Rust for many projects. Most of my streak posts have been about Rust, and I've enjoyed it greatly.
Ludum Dare went poorly, in part because I attempted essentially constructing a Rust engine on top of two frameworks that I barely understood. I'll be taking some time away from jams for now (Decade Jam aside), and I expect I'll be heading into the next several only with tools I'm fairly solid on.
The real victory this month has been using Anki to learn Rust and Toki Pona (a tiny conlang). Rust in particular has been a nice surprise - my health is now less of an obstacle with the knowledge so well embedded in my head through spaced repetition and so frequently reviewed. I need to apply the same treatment to C# and GDScript, as well as algorithms, design patterns, and more. Game design itself I can do to a decent degree of success all the time, thanks to years of constant thinking about it, so it's a matter of being able to implement what's in my mind.
Productivity is my goal for May, with an emphasis on product. The Decade Jam Community Project Task Force is ~~steadily lengthening its acronym of DJCPTF~~ hammering out the final details of our game and I am even now working on early code for it. Test projects for a custom engine are underway as well, and I expect to have multiple test games to show off in next month's summary post.
While I expect to continue to focus on Rust and Godot, I am not opposed to a return to Unity or Phaser as well. I hope to construct a strong portfolio over the next two months, and while I think my skill in game design, mechanics, and AI are solid (always worth improving, though), I think my generalist knowledge is another strength. I'm trying to be a T-shaped person, as some say. Being able to work across several engines and frameworks will not only improve my skills, but make me more likely to be available to help with a particular task or job, plus help others cross such divides.
Here's hoping for plenty of productivity next month.
We did some good work today with the physics of the game. Before if you touched a platform with any part of your body you would jump, but now that's only the feet hitbox, and more hitboxes were added for bouncing off the platform like a solid object. I also added a score in the top left-hand corner to tell you how high up you are. The problem is that with the low resolution it can be a bit hard to read, especially when it goes fast, but I think it will work well. The game now feels a lot better and we're on a good track for the end of the jam.
I spent the last week on vacation, and away from computers, hence why I didn't submit anything during that period of time.
Today was an exciting day, I submitted my first pull request on GitHub! As soon as the main man commits it to the master branch, (if he does) you can see https://www.raylib.com/cheatsheet/cheatsheet.html with new styling and a dark theme! Hoo rah!!
Have a joyous rest of your day, or a restful night's sleep! Peace out.
Got two hours sleep this morning after the jam deadline, and then spent the entire rest of today trying to make my game demo actually work as intended!
It's not quite there, but people are managing to play through it ok so that's the main thing. The jam community are great and everyone is very supportive, and some of them are incredibly talented too judging by the submissions list! It's gonna take a while to go through and play all the ones that look interesting.
There's still a lot of polish and bugfixing to do before even this basic demo is up to scratch, and then I've had a couple of requests to make more levels so that'll be first on my list.
Then, finally, back to my actual main project for a bit! Phew.
I've been squatting on a personal domain for about a year now, and I keep meaning to put some of those sexy Hs, Ts, Ms and Ls up on it, but never got around to it. Now I am. Mostly just implementing the functionality right now so there's not too much to show, but I'll post my link and screenshots as soon as it's ready. In other news, my pull request still hasn't been accepted, and the dev hasn't said anything about it yet either. I'm assuming he's pretty busy, he did get an Epic Mega Grant and everything.
That's all for now folks. G'night.
Had a few busy days, with much less time for game dev than I would like.
But, finally, things are falling into place one by one; the game states are implemented, half of the initial UI is in. Still brainstorming for expansions of the basic concepts we currently have, the well of ideas has not yet dried up.
I also had around an hour to play around with a first music loop. I'm not yet happy with it, but there's something good in there. May be able to work on that a bit more tomorrow, ~~if~~ when I grow tired of programming.
There should be some small benefit to being active on streak club, so I will further deter people from joining the streak by secretly and silently posting WIPs here q:
Taking a break from the Rust Book, today I started work on a roguelike, learning about the tcod library and the lovely things it can be used for. Slow progress, but ongoing.
But there are now nude sausages to jump on in our game. That's all I got done today. :( Good night and good luck tomorrow folks.
https://ratstail91.itch.io/chemistry
Tonight I implemented the dialogue system using YarnSpinner. You can see the sign in the opening area, which has some dialogue attached to it.
This system uses external .yarn files and can even support localization, so I'm happy about that.
So after successfully stealing the 100th post for the Decade Jam streak, where can today's post even go?
I continued my experiments with 2D lighting in Unity today, and understand a bit more of what I'm doing with it now. Then onto my main project, which has a big unanswered question right now about a certain aspect of the gameplay and I'm pretty much avoiding answering it, so instead I spent some time on speech styles.
The game involves managing a team of people, and I want them to seem "real". So I'm assigning each of the randomly generated characters a speech style and then characters saying essentially the same thing as each other will do so in a completely different way.
Not completely sure if it'll be worth the effort, but it's a fun time anyway!
That's about it for today. This is your 100th streaker, signing off.
Today was spent organizing and preparing the sprites that Avis made and whipping up a small little demo level with a good amount of the logic in. This will allow me to integrate and play around with the basic mechanics, and plan the next few steps. I have also been brainstorming Music and Sound for the project, although nothing tangible has been produced in that department, yet.
Oh, I also refactored and fixed a few things that bugged me, found a better way to handle the tilesets and fought vividly with some grass tiles (they have bested me... for now Òó).
All in all, today was a day of stepping back and taking a calm look at the project, laying things out in front of us and getting ready to get the demo done. I am still pretty positive that we can show off something cool this weekend.
Instead of getting more gameplay mechanics in, I spent today working on some procedural house generation. Which was also good fun, and will allow us to make some serviceable levels to test around with and demo the gameplay.
Mechanics... will follow tomorrow. With the addition of some new (fantastic!) sprites by Avis, and with the prospect of getting the first pass on core gameplay done tomorrow, we should be able to show off our work this weekend.
Our perpetual spitballing and brainstorming is also still producing good results, and we have accumulated a fairly solid collection of concepts, which should allow us to transform the basic gameplay into something... else c;
Tomorrow will bring new cool stuff!
So I had a spiral into madness today.
So with two weeks to go until my next definite game jam starts (though, let's be real, I'll probably join one by accident in the meantime) it was time to take a step back today and look at all the things I've learned since getting into game dev a month and a half ago.
I want to spend some time looking at things that gave me trouble and learning more about them, for example Unity's 2D lighting caused problems with one of my jam games, but I also need it in my main project so that needs learning about.
Also managed to fit in a quick experiment with point-and-click movement, but most of today was spent dealing with the silithid invasion of our realm in WoW Classic! Priorities.
I missed yesterday's streak, which is gutting ;_;
Too busy and caught up with my other work, that I completely forgot typing into this (virtual) echo chamber q:
Today, good progress was made. Tilesets, navigation, some enemy spawning and camera movement are all in and working fairly well. Really getting to enjoy Godot, which is also a positive.
Tomorrow will bring a first foray into setting up the UI for the game and getting a first layer of interaction in (because apparently players want to actually play video games. Crazy, I know...).
Avis and I are still waiting for a good point in time to actually show off our work, if things go smooth that day might just be tomorrow, too. We'll see. Definitely (probably) this week. Maybe. I think.
Until then, keep on jamming c:
People lied.
It's Sunday so not a huge amount of time to work on anything today, but I am piecing together a sort of "what I need to learn" list for the 3D prototype I'm working on for Rainbow Jam (yes I started another game jam, shush). It's a long list.
This might be the one that breaks my 100% jam success record, but it should at least teach me a lot even if I can't get it finished in time. I'm hoping to make heavy use of Cinemachine's state camera, so currently playing with that. Then I'm building out the physical structure of the game with scriptable objects (I promise this does make sense), and then since the actual gameplay is very simple it's mostly going to be learning some Blender and content writing.
Excite.
With Ludum Dare coming this weekend and Rust + Tetra my tools of choice, I'm hurrying to understand both. Went through every single Tetra example today - rather pleased that it works with the controllers I have. Also pleased I did this at all - I was rather drained today, so not breaking the streak is something I'm rather proud about. Quite a bit ahead of me to feel confident for this weekend, but every inch counts.
Today I spent about an hour on trying to make art that fit the Jam game me and Keane are working on, but hated it all and threw it away. Then I moved on to starting to work with Raylib in Rust, but it just errored me away. If anyone has experience with this, hit me up in the comments and I will be eternally greatfull. In my time poking around the docs, I came across the cheatsheet - https://www.raylib.com/cheatsheet/cheatsheet.html and decided to spend the next portion of my time creating a dark theme for it. I'll work on cleaning it all up (with a toggle) and submitting it as a pull request to raylib.com's github tomorrow (or whenever I get to it). For now, Stylus users, I'll add the CSS as a comment to this post so you can add it to your pile. I also looked into the github for Streak.club to see if I could edit the api by myself, but had a hard time finding my way around the document since it's written in the dev's own scripting language "moonscript". I really hope I can get it linked to Robot Avis soon, I think it would generate a lot more traffic here. That's all I got done in today's free time, not too productive. Check back tomorrow! Peace.
Thought I'd missed the deadline last night, but apparently this site is in some bizarro timezone and doesn't change day until 10am my time. This is useful knowledge.
Update: Apparently that only goes for Daily Gamedev, not Decade Jam. So one streak continues, one broken. Woe.
So, after all that tedious waffle about my visual novel over the last few days, and after finally settling down with it and starting to make serious progress, and after basically being done except for making more art, I asked myself an important question: "Since it turns out I strongly dislike to play visual novels, why am I forcing myself to make one?"
Instead of deciding between finishing the VN and dropping out of the I Can't Write jam, I realised there was still a mystery option C) scrap everything and start again and build a whole game in four days.
That's still longer than a lot of jams, so I should be able to get something out despite being a nubcake.
So yesterday morning I sat down at a new Unity project thinking about what story I wanted to tell, and how to do it without having much (or maybe any) characterisation and text. And I'm loving it! Working on the VN was like pulling teeth, but working on my stupid little abstract representation of a real life situation? Funtimes!
Just have to figure out how to include a duck in it somewhere...
Edited with progress from the 8th:
Got on with my new project for this jam today, having well and truly discarded the visual novel. I can't quite figure out exactly what sort of game it's going to end up being, I'm building it out based on a general feel I'd like it to have rather than based on systems I've designed. We'll see how that goes.
Already learned more in the last two days than I did in a week and a half working in Ren'Py. Although I am glad I tried it, and gained a passing familiarity with Python. You never know when that might come in handy.
Yesterday, me and @Keane48#5421 started working on our entry to the 2020 Low Rez Jam; a 3 week long game jam where the game's screen must be 64 pixels wide and 64 pixels tall. Our idea is to take some little monkey dude named Briun and have him climb a mountain of hotdogs or something. It'll be great. Trust me. Also check out our WIP gif.
Also kinda slowly making progress on Robot Avis' Streak Club feature, but the API is not complete yet and I haven't heard from the developer in a while so we'll see. Other than that, life goin along. Code well, and Good Night.
I added hot dogs which randomly spawn on platforms. Then i added stamina to make you jump less if you have less stamina. Then I made hot dogs give you stamina. Then I fixed about a novemdecillion bugs I created (I googled big number) and made the particles look a lot less bad. The attached image is of some placeholder hot dog art I made that didn't come out bad, but I'm not a pixel artist. the image background is transparent in the actual image but that has a resolution of 9x4 so I decided to screenshot this for your viewing pleasure.
Had a bit of a chill day today. Discovered and fixed another bug with the jam demo, and tidied up its Itch page a bit.
Then I chatted to a few people and picked someone to work with for the Unexpected Jam that starts in a couple weeks. We'll be making a point and click, and my teammate is a young woman so that's nice to see more lasses taking their first steps into dev. She's in the US so timezones don't match up perfectly but eh, it should be fine.
So, between now and then I have free time to work on other things. I also have a lot of knitting and cross stitch to catch up with, and a fantasy football league to set up, so dev updates will be more minor for a while. All things in moderation, and so on.
As I expected, sprite-based tiles look a hundred times better than those plain, blurry black lines I had before. The visual style has nothing in common with what I had in mind at the start, but I'm kind of exploring ATM.
Who knows what's gonna come next.
