Almost starting to wish I made this game in Unity, since menus are a breeze over there. I fixed UI scaling (or so I hope). I had it in before, but it was a setting, which caused all kinds of problems when trying to change it in the middle of gameplay. I've settled for a middleground where I create the game and its contents around the minimum resolution (1280x720) and have any higher resolutions scale UI size equally to the height difference. So if your monitor is 1440px tall, your UI is twice as large. Text sizing doesn't scale because GameMaker doesn't support it, but maybe there's a workaround for later. There were still a lot of bugs I had to flatten, and there's probably still more. But for now I'll probably ignore it and call it good enough. Notifications are animated. Many other small things like this will eventually be animated as well. I'm tempted to add some future-proof polish onto what else I have, just so things look nicer. Milestones have also been visually updated. They were abhorrently ugly before, but now they're a bit more organized, spacious, and have nice icons for the tier you're on. As I may have mentioned before, all tiers now go up to ten instead of five.
I have also implemented a page system for the menus, since fitting everything onto one page in some menus is an eventual impossibility. So... more menus. I'm not sure where it ends. I may add a new crop next just to preserve my sanity. Sounds are still a work in progress. I also started a tiny unrelated side project out of curiosity, but I'm not sure where it will go. Thanks for reading. More menu trash. Sorry. I don't like them either. I have moved them to be right-aligned. It feels a little uncomfy compared to being centered, but it's nothing new in the world of games, and I'll get used to it eventually. This is foremost to make room for CR-0, as he gets crowded out on some pages on low resolutions and his text overlaps some menu content. I made it so mousing over his text makes it transparent, but there's no affordance that implies such and it's hard to make one, so I'd rather move them out of the way (an "affordance" is a design term that means something's design/properties inherently implies its use, like how a handle "affords" holding or a button "affords" pressing. If you want to learn more, everyone always recommends The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman). Secondly, though, this is a change that is a part of what I envisioned for prettier menus. I won't be finishing it off now since it's purely aesthetic, but maybe eventually. A double-feature of this menu design, however, is that before unpausing a large amount of the playfield is visible. I had initially implemented a feature allowing you to hide the menus and see under them, but now it's redundant and I find this to be a much more intuitive and better designed system.
I was working on sounds as of last post, and I've finished redoing all the menu sounds. I was unhappy with how they sounded, and the new ones are crisper and less acoustically intrusive. All the game sounds are next, and there's a handful of new sounds I'll be making for things that don't have sound yet. Some of them require greenery sounds, though, and it just finished snowing nearly a meter here, but I'll see what I can do. No progress lately, been playing a little too much Dwarf Fortress.
Next up is probably sound though, since, like music, it's one of those things that you don't realize gives a lot of life to games until it's not there. Sound is a little more time-intensive than most of the other things I've done (probably because I haven't made any serious art yet) since it includes a broad process of identifying needed SFX, brainstorming the sound, recording foley, constructing the sound, and implementing it. Those middle three are where the magic happens but also the most lengthy. I've already gone through and identified all the placeholder sounds I will replace (basically all of them) and done a little brainstorming, but there's definitely a lot of nuance I have not looked over. Traditionally, I'm a sound designer, so expect nothing less than detail. Again, Weebly's sound sharing is locked behind their premium service. Maybe I'll think about uploading a Youtube video or two to show some things, but it's a bit of effort. I've found an idea for the game I want to make next after this one, but that doesn't mean I'll be abandoning this one any time soon. I hear from a lot of solo developers of a kind of "project restlessness" in which you work on something for a while and then get tired of it, and you jump on the next exciting idea before finishing the last one. I like this idea enough though that I'd like to at least see it through to my expectations, which namely means most of the content I've brainstormed implemented. Hard to estimate where that's at now, but maybe around a third or a half? But there's other ideas that could expand that greatly. A main menu has been added, along with a few more settings options. One of these settings was a resolution option, which unfortunately was one of the worst things I've implemented so far. Weebly is not fond of my images and gifs at the moment, so I have nothing I can show, but the main menu isn't very exciting-looking without splash art anyways.
Resolution settings seem simple in theory, but I've found they cause a lot of problems. GameMaker's camera system is sometimes a little hard to wrap your head around, and fiddling with resolutions and scaling only makes it infinitely worse. It took me a very unfun amount of time to get it working, and I'm still unsure if it works 100%. I believe a concerning amount of people use resolutions like 1366x768 and 1280x720, which also means I have to get my game's UI scaling perfect, since ~700 pixels of vertical space is not much to work with. After resolutions, though, there's not really any other settings that would take very long to implement. I've got it so adding new settings is extremely simple (it's just adding a new checkbox or slider to the settings page). I also doubled the amount of tiers Milestones have from 5 to 10. The game's starting to come together, and some of my focus will eventually shift to balancing at some point after I'm happy with my systems. In the meantime, though, I've been patching a lot of small holes. Unfortunately it's a lot of technical monotony, and none of these holes involve any fun content. I'd expect there to be more to do as well. I am also making a new site for the tentative public release (and title drop) of the game's early alpha stages. This site will probably stay up since I can't just change domain names, but new devlogs will shift over there when I'm ready. Thanks to the people who actually read these. I get a pretty consistent small handful of folks. |