Small update just so I'm not leaving anyone in the dark.
I am working on art for the new site (and my art skills), which includes stuff like logos, headers, eye candy, etc. I don't really plan on a full-fledged, art-laden website yet, just something that gets by while not being devoid of visual interest. I will also have to actually put some serious effort into the art for what I've got of the game, which (judging by the art I'm working on) will be a significant time sink. My pixel art skills are nowhere near where I'd like them to be. With some references I can get close, but it's still a bit of a slow process. I've seriously considered getting someone better to do the art, but that gets into a gray area where I (A.) want to be proud of a solid end product that I created solely myself, (B.) don't have the money to give a good artist the wage they deserve, and (C.) don't feel like the hassle even if someone is willing to do it for cheap/free. I can already tell there may be many art redos. I am rarely happy with the end product when I do art, and it's very hard to accept something I don't feel happy with. Games like Undertale, however, remind me that gorgeous pixel art is not a necessary component to a great game. It's a vexing, oxymoronic ideology. I figure art will come as I go, especially with the new site. An eventual Steam release is my goal, which also involves some full-fledged splash art. The theoretical art to-do list is very long. Ironically, I almost look forward to it less than coding. I have recently landed a position at Respawn Entertainment after a lengthy span looking for jobs. I'm very excited to start, but for this game that means some things will shift.
Much of my effort will obviously be shifting towards Respawn, but that doesn't mean I am leaving anything here behind. Progress may come slower since I have less free time, but I would like to have this game in the public eye at some point in the next few months. It is effectively what I will be using to improve my design skillset, among other things. I am working on a new webpage that I will shift to for a public release. It will be much less white. I will shift the devlog over there as well, but I will probably reevaluate my approach to it. In the bigger picture, small updates like on this page are not very exciting and don't do well to please the masses. At minimum, devlogs will shift to being less frequent but more comprehensive, and cover more major features rather than every little thing I add. I am also considering an alternative approach that reads more like a design review, showcasing the thought processes behind each major feature and how they were made, and leaving the player-pertinent material to update notes. Both methods will give me a bit more time for developing and make for more exciting posts, as I believe the project is getting to the point where smaller things matter less and less. I will probably keep this page up since it doesn't cost me anything, but I won't really be linking it anywhere and it is bound to fade into nonexistence at some point. I may make some kind of full-development recap or something to summarize the contents of this devlog, but it is due time for a shift to something more professional to match the nature of the project. Expect a final update sometime before release, with the usual in between now and then. Been doing some bugfixing throughout the holidays. Caught a few major ones, and have been polishing some visuals. However, one visual I've wanted to add for a while has been EXP orbs. This is a little tough to get working, as it demands tackling an issue I've had too many problems with before: converting in-game coordinates to GUI coordinates. This would normally not be very hard, but when you add in resolution scaling and camera zoom it becomes complicated, and don't even get me started on scaling things not on the GUI to the GUI's scale. Nightmare. This works at minimum, though, and I'm pretty happy with it. It adds a lot of visual flavor to collecting things, and it's a lot of juice for something quite small. It does come at a bit of an FPS cost, but we're talking a few hundred FPS when the game already runs at theoretical thousands, and only when you spawn a ludicrous amount of EXP orbs at once. Finishing orders also gives a fat bunch of EXP, which is just as fun to watch as collecting a giant bunch of crops at once. I know I said I was going to put off visuals until after mechanics are down, but I'm approaching a tentative alpha test release and I'd like a minimum amount of satisfactory visual effects. I'm very set on making my game juicy, and even if it's not polished, I'd like to get in the framework for those visual effects, like what I have here. It's invaluable to a fun gameplay experience, as "feel" is everything.
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. |