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. It has officially been 5 months since the first post.
Anyone who knows me probably knows I'm a musician. It's one (if not the one) favorite of mine for a thousand reasons, and I have a long history with music. I don't know if I've ever talked about the music for this game, and if I have I don't remember. I originally envisioned a hybrid of jazz, orchestral, and electronic (with some give or take here and there), but it ended up shifting to pretty much exclusively jazz. Jazz is obviously a genre I'm familiar with, considering I have to compose the music. I can see some of my other genres as potential fits, but ultimately I felt that I wanted to be putting a lot of character into this game. Not zany per se, but a little world of its own that stands out. CR-0 was one of the first to be a departure from tradition, as he gives character and entertainment value to tutorials and tooltips, which are a conventionally dry and unexciting thing. Jazz is another step in a similar direction--where many games may settle for similitude, I want my game to have uniquity. I'm obviously not the first person to put jazz music in a game, but I'm not too far down the line--it's not a common occurrence. Jazz also carries the energy and tone that matches my gameplay. Going full slow-orchestral felt counterintuitive to the faster pace of the game. I also feel as if jazz is one of the more universal genres (if you stay out of the nerd/complicated stuff), as it's largely real instruments and easy-to-grasp energy and groove. Undertale's music has some jazz roots, and though a little more stylized, it is a great example. The music depends on the weather, which means it switches up every minute. I wish I had something to show, but unfortunately Weebly locks audio behind premium. I spent this week composing tracks for the 5 weather states you saw last post, and I'm happy with how they turned out. One more big task off the checklist. The game's pretty close to a playable alpha, and there's only a few big things left. A few of them are things I still haven't brainstormed design I'm happy with, so they may take a little longer than usual and I may clean up smaller things as they progress. Cleaning up a few visual things. The combo multiplier text is now quite a bit more fun. The old one was just a static gradient that scaled with the value. Now it has a wave that scales in size and speed, as well as color cycling. I'm aware it's a little hard to see around 2.00, as that's where the saturation and value are in this middling area that contrasts poorly with the grass, especially when it cycles yellow. I'll probably put my usual transparent box behind it, but it'll either need to change color or be an awkward other color since the text can be both black and white. Text outlines don't work because they're pretty abhorrently ugly with pixel fonts. The weather chance bars also now have textures. This makes them a little more distinguishable at a glance, and gives a little bit of shape language that may help with identifying what each bar represents. As a reminder, there is Rain, Frost, Heatwave, Time Tear, and Clear (none). If you can figure out which are which from just these images, they're doing their job. I also added a Fahrenheit option because it's easy and practical. We also now have a potato. I realized the few crops I have were distinct, but not unique. They were different, but none of them stood out. Likely because I've never put much serious thought into value balancing yet outside of just quick skims to ensure some variety.
The Potato is a first attempt at some more "extreme" outliers. Anyone who's been watching closely might notice that these are very not valuable, but not every crop's value comes from the money it makes. Potatoes are very passive and grow slowly, making them harsh investments space-wise. But in turn they are very robust and take little upkeep, and they far outclass the combo limit of anything else. I'll be changing existing crops similarly. I want each one to have some character. Long time no see.
Unfortunately, I have nothing pretty to show today. The time I spent on the game this past while was mostly just working on a save system, which proved to be about as big of a pain I thought it would be, if not bigger. I'll try to keep the technical jargon to a minimum, but with a save system you're obviously writing all of your relevant data to some external file(s). At first I tried JSONs, which were in a tutorial or two I was looking at for guidance, but those tutorials only went over structs. There's a different type of data in GameMaker called a data structure grid (ds grid) which can't be easily saved to a JSON in this way. It seems dumb and makes save systems a pain in the ass, but I suppose it's probably due to technical limitations and differences between JSON formatting and GameMaker. With 2/3 of my data being ds grids, I shifted to .ini files briefly, which has more built-in GameMaker support, but quickly stopped. Ini files are very limited and aren't the greatest for saving data, so back to JSONs. I ended up having to create a function that converts ds grids into some format where you can make it JSON-compatible, which took a little longer than I'd hoped. External files aren't your average GameMaker experience, and it's sometimes like half a taste of a different world. I'm no GameMaker engineering expert, and I imagine I'm probably in the Valley of Despair on the Kruger curve. Story time aside, though, it works. Saving things adds a little overhead to anything I wish to add to the game, since obviously many things you might add to a game will add variables you want to save. Saving isn't the end, though. I realized in making this system that it's likely I'll eventually have to create some code that manages porting old save data to new saves, which involves reworking how my save code functions. It's not huge (and it'll make for a better system) but it's necessary to prevent the game from breaking nearly every update. There's a lot of code in the game I'd like to just improve in general, but that's a time sink that shouldn't be very high on my list. I think content and core features will come first until I have a playable copy, and then I can do some needed clean-up so 1.0 is in an optimal state. |