Log inMonthly progress check in!
Here's what I've been up to since we last talked about the game:
- Expression and reactions expanded.
- Advanced ability to swap groups of assets quickly.
This is a great thing for expressions, since there's a lot of asset swapping with the many layers of the mouth and eyes. Expressions are pretty streamlined on the tech side now!
- Expand the UI structure.
- Improve UI and game events.
Hard to describe this one. I'm simplifying the signals being sent around the game to describe what the player is doing. The structure and code is more complex to support this, but as a result, the player can easily be simulated by the debugger... or by unicorn magic or machines in the future.
For now though, this is driving us toward a usable expression designer, which is the first and most important (for release) part of the character creator. The character creator will start as a brain editor. The brain is harder to make manually since it's got a lot of pieces that are hard to test without tweaking the values live.
- Game "actions" design.
Big-picture, I see one final hole in the engine besides UI. It's a simple channel of information to describe events in the game. I touched on this idea above. I'm not gonna dig too deep right now since this still in the pen-and-paper phase, but... the cool things that come long-term from this is time control! Like, being able to set up automated machines on a pony, skip forward in time, and see how they're faring after hours or days. Short-term, this is an enormous help in debugging ^^;
- Make the engine more portable.
I'm also, on the side, working on the engine's portability. This engine will be used in most/all of my projects so it needs to be easy to maintain and update between games. Things like character data and UI designs might change, but under the hood everything else should be wired up to work cross-project. I'm about 90% there!
- Outsourcing help.
I'm also working on integrating my partner into helping with code tasks. Tedious things that I can't automate, don't need right away, but would help a lot if they were done. I don't want to spend my dev time on them when I could be working on bigger features, but really wish someone would do them. I'm excited about this part! Will report how it goes~
- so many bugs fixed.
Okay yep. That's it for now! I'll be posting monthly wrap-ups, which will usually describe whatever's in progress but not ready to show off yet. Whenever there's something visual or cool to show off, I'll post it as soon as it's show-offable!
- Expression and reactions expanded.
- Advanced ability to swap groups of assets quickly.
This is a great thing for expressions, since there's a lot of asset swapping with the many layers of the mouth and eyes. Expressions are pretty streamlined on the tech side now!
- Expand the UI structure.
- Improve UI and game events.
Hard to describe this one. I'm simplifying the signals being sent around the game to describe what the player is doing. The structure and code is more complex to support this, but as a result, the player can easily be simulated by the debugger... or by unicorn magic or machines in the future.
For now though, this is driving us toward a usable expression designer, which is the first and most important (for release) part of the character creator. The character creator will start as a brain editor. The brain is harder to make manually since it's got a lot of pieces that are hard to test without tweaking the values live.
- Game "actions" design.
Big-picture, I see one final hole in the engine besides UI. It's a simple channel of information to describe events in the game. I touched on this idea above. I'm not gonna dig too deep right now since this still in the pen-and-paper phase, but... the cool things that come long-term from this is time control! Like, being able to set up automated machines on a pony, skip forward in time, and see how they're faring after hours or days. Short-term, this is an enormous help in debugging ^^;
- Make the engine more portable.
I'm also, on the side, working on the engine's portability. This engine will be used in most/all of my projects so it needs to be easy to maintain and update between games. Things like character data and UI designs might change, but under the hood everything else should be wired up to work cross-project. I'm about 90% there!
- Outsourcing help.
I'm also working on integrating my partner into helping with code tasks. Tedious things that I can't automate, don't need right away, but would help a lot if they were done. I don't want to spend my dev time on them when I could be working on bigger features, but really wish someone would do them. I'm excited about this part! Will report how it goes~
- so many bugs fixed.
Okay yep. That's it for now! I'll be posting monthly wrap-ups, which will usually describe whatever's in progress but not ready to show off yet. Whenever there's something visual or cool to show off, I'll post it as soon as it's show-offable!
Keep up the good work :D
This game is gonna be LIT!
Pretty cool, kind of excited for the possibility of there being projects beyond this one once it's finished.