Daily* Devlogs

I've got the system setup now such that you can set yourself to "holding" or not. If you are holding and cycle through your action bar we will add your item to the hand, if it is something that can be held. Now unfortunately, I have realized a subtle nuance between interacting with say an apple on the ground, and interacting with that apple in your hand. When the item is on the ground I want you to collect it, but when the apple is in your hand I want you to eat it. I'm going to think about this tonight and figure out the smoothest way to handle this. I'm sure it'll be pretty obvious but for now it isn't striking me. On the bright side we are making some good progres…

I didn't do much of anything for Moosecats today. But for good reason. I've had to strip down the office because starting Tuesday its going to be getting remodeled. This is a three week process and that means I'll be doing both my job and Moosecats from either the living room or occasionally the back porch. This should be interesting and I'm looking forward to seeing this room once it is done. The only hope I have is that by the end of it I have no regrets. The contractor we are using is not cheap, but if the result of that is no bumps then it'll be worth every penny. Anywho, tomorrow once I fully strip down this room I'll see if I can get a little something done.

Alright, this is the final night before construction. The entire room is cleared out and I'm mighty tired. I've got to wake up early in the morning which isn't super great. And I've got work which will obviously take the morning and half of the afternoon. BUT once that is done we are back on the horse for getting work done. The next step will be hooking up the logic for using an item you are holding. I believe it should be pretty straight forward. When we pass you through the item we'll want to collect if you aren't holding something, since you I think we'll have you able to either hold something or interact with things. If you ARE holding something then you eat it i…

Woo boy! The exhaustion from work and just life in general really got to me. I reminded myself multiple times yesterday to not forget to post and yet I forgot! So today we are going to get yesterday's update and today's resolution. I was just not feeling the item and world actions flow when I tried to implement it yesterday. For some reason it was just not really vibing with me, I'm sure you've felt this before. You do something, anything really, and it feels off. There isn't anything morally wrong with it, not even nothing technically wrong, but it unsettles you. Your mind wonders what you are thinking and why you don't do something, anything else. That's where I …

Tonight we didn't see any updates but for good reason. Work today encompassed basically the entire day until it was sleepy time. This happens sometimes, that's just how life goes from time to time. The next step of our work, I believe, will be starting on dialogue. It does feel like we've officially hit that point. This will either be fun or frustrating, either way I'm looking forward to it.

I've got support added for very fun and animated conversation text. So this weekend my goal will simply be to add a sign into the game that has some message. Once we've done that, which I think will be an overhead box above the sign, we'll start thinking about text boxes with cutins for people. I think that's something I want to do and the next part of this whole party. Should be a fun weekend!

Today, our little Bean, of Moose and Bean fame, has a limp. Not sure what she did but clearly her body didn't appreciate it. I know it might sound a little silly but it completely threw out the window any chance of me concentrating at least for today. Hopefully by tomorrow with a bit of rest she'll be back to normal or at least less pronounced in her pain. We've scheduled a vet appointment. I still plan to do dialogue work in the morning tomorrow but I'll be keeping a close eye on our little kiddo. They are both too sweet to be dealing with injuries.

It is a bit of a cliche with my updates but I am, shocker, very tired. So what I'm about to write not even be very coherent. Today I did manage to create the speech game action, and a very basic sign made out of a thin cube and a cylinder. When you interact with the sign it triggers the speech action which then prints to the console log. The next step is adding in a handler for this object that is raised by the game action. This would contain the text and other details pertaining to this actor, and all others like it in the future. Once I have that done I'll have the interaction medium and the data storage and recovery system. What I am also working on is the po…

Alright. I think I have a plan. We will generate the box on a canvas layer, this will need to be placed just above the speakers "head". We will want this to snap to the edges of the screen as you look around, until a certain "stretch point" causes the object to "snap off" and stop being visible. If it works out I might also make it fade out if you walk away as if you can't hear it anymore. I played a fair bit of Warcraft today because A) I'm really smitten by Pandaria Remix and B) I wanted to see what talking looked like in the game. I really dig how naturally it all just works. These are the kind of things that really impress me with design. Like a good camera contr…

Before I head off to bed, lets do a little brain storming. I've got the chat box setup, realizing that I've been an idiot this entire time and trying to take care of the more complicated system before doing the simpler one that'll satisfy most of my needs. This simpler problem is a chat box that will appear when you talk with actors or objects that have things to "say". It will appear, sometimes with menu options, and will close if you walk far enough away from the target. Perhaps even if you just turn I'm not sure, we'll have a menu option for disabling movement during conversation in case people want to use WASD (or similar) to make selections. I can't use a dialog…

Alrighty, we've got both parts of the relationship hooked up for the conversation. The Handler Conversation on the object, in this case Sign, and then Handler UI Chat Box on the chat box. The initial conditions for connecting the two is also ready. Not that I've made the event or listener yet but that will be trivial. The next step, if I've got the energy (a common comment from me but I am edging towards 40), is to create the first structure for housing conversation. I think it'll be a list of a class that for now only contains a string. Later we might include images and other information so that when you move pages we can update popin art or similar. It is …

We'll start first by saying that I noticed a way I could optimize my event system today. Not necessarily for performance but for when I need to make new events and listeners. I was able to reduce the parameters necessary from 3 to 2. That might not sound like a lot but that's 33% less work to do every time I have a new event to make! It adds up when you get to be my age lol. Secondly, we've made even more progress tonight! We now have the framework I discussed in the prior post started. The next thing I'll want to do is create the messages to iterate t hrough and to have it close if you walk away. But that's for tomorrow, for tonight I go to bed! talktome.w…

With the construction and work looming ever more on my day to day, I find that I'm not getting as much done as I'd like. But that's ok, I'm making small progress almost daily and that does mean inevitably it'll get done. Tonight I updated a few of the classes, got some of the code comments updated. Cleaned up areas that were rough around the edges. This weekend my goal is to get the sequential conversation hooked up and have the window close in one of two scenarios. You put enough distances between you and the target (or something similar) OR you finish all their dialogue and interact one final time. I think that's a realistic bar to set. Sunday evening me will …

Per usual, today was a me day. I was tempted to do some work but I also recognize that I need to relax sometimes. Liz and I have been playing a good chunk of Pandaria Remix. There is even a checklist that was made by a user that I've been using to see how much of the things I've unlocked during the event. It can be a little hard to invest any kind of time into games like this for me. Especially with the rise of Private Equity gluttony and Public Company implosions. It just feels like every media controlled by a corporation is not long for this world. No real reason for it either, games like this make plenty of money. But they cannot realistically make more money year…

Ended up watching the Sonic Movie tonight. It was quite good! I really enjoyed Jim Carrey as Robotnik. Lots of great visual gags and it gave me a good smirk from time to time. Definitely a good time. I don't really do letter or score reviews, but on my "Hated, Disliked, Experienced, Liked, and Loved." It gets a solid liked from me. But, I can only assume that the reason you are on this part of the internet is you are curious if I reached my goal for the weekend. I'm not sure...I wonder if there is any way to know. thesignspart2.webm One thing I am realizing is I need to update the interaction logic. That little blip was me adjusting my position to…

Alright, at this point I think we very much have the foundational pieces to make our vertical slice game. So what I'll be doing this week is setting up the initial flow of the game. We'll keep going step by step through the process. You know what, I keep doing the "we" thing so I'm just rolling with it while I type this up. Anytime we hit a wall we'll discuss that wall and how we need to overcome it. Be it a little bit of polish on a system, or a missing system I didn't think of, whatever. Over time we'll get closer and closer to the game. Which is an exciting prospect. Once we get to the point where there is something to play, even a small teeny tiny bit, I'll beg…

I'll be honest, today was rough. Work has a lot that I need to get done and Venus did not have a good day. Poor girl is either stressed or sick, or both. Hopefully she'll be feeling better tomorrow or at least in a couple of days. I don't handle that sort of problem well at all unfortunately. So once my long long work day was over and it was already edging towards 8PM I had to make an executive decision. Will I try and have any fun today or will I just work? I ended up taking the fun route. I needed that, but it wasn't entirely a wash for progress. We've got our developer quality title screen setup. I've got the events hooked into the buttons and now I just need to…

Alrighty, so we've got an artifact setup to point to the title screen handler. This will allow us to modify it through the state machine. The plan, which I should finish up tomorrow, is to have the buttons disabled for now until the player loads. If there IS player data, we'll set new game and interactable to clickable, if there is no player data, we'll only set new game to interactable. Settings does a whole lot of nothing for now, don't have settings to worry about. Upon clicking either new game or continue we will transition into the game state. This will not always be the case. Once the Title Screen state is complete we'll move into the new game experience. …

As is so often the case, today is less exciting than yesterday. But hopefully getting us ready for a couple nice updates tomorrow. I've got a small bug with my loading order. Basically I need No sooner than I was writing this did I realize where my bug was and how to fix it. We've now got the title screen with the buttons disabled until the player data is loaded. If your player has a name (a requirement of playing) then I know you have a game going and the continue button is enabled, otherwise you only have access to the new game button and the settings button. Upon clicking new game, or continue, we enter into the game state. Obviously this isn't how it will always …

Well, I've worked a few 10 to 12 hour days and today I was rebuilding my office now that the remodel is finished. I'm sorry to say that means I haven't gotten to do anything with Moosecats this weekend. The plan tomorrow is to finish some more work in the morning and then spend the afternoon updating the state transitions for the new game flow. Obviously we won't have any animations but the hope is that we can start blocking out the experience so that later we can have animations slotted in nice and easy. The upside to a job is the financial security, can't deny that, the downside is sometimes it asks a lot of you. And the older I get the less of me I feel like I'v…

Obviously not mine, that's for a bit now. But I've started hooking up the player creation section. I know we need to know your name and we'll want to know your Birthday for a yearly gift in the game. This is all saved locally obviously like days of old. If we ever have online support that'll be fully optional and opt-in, not opt-out. I got no desire to know anything about anyone besides what they would like me to know. One fun thing I want to do hearkens back to one of my favorite games of all time, Ogre Battle 64. We are going to convert your real world Birthday into the day and month of the in universe calendar. I don't have that list with me at the moment but in…

Alright, names are pending possible changes in the future but we've got the following for the year: Scionur, Ghein, Auroht, Calia, Hidroen, Aten, Gefain, Phoen, Tartarune, Dimine, Chaine, Kalmine, and Thanine. Each month is 30 days long, which means we have a few more days than normal. Like many things with the project this will help make things feel just a little bit off, a little bit wrong. Sorry to say I lost some work from yesterday. But given that we didn't even have an update yesterday I think that was just how it works out.

Progress ticks on, the sands of time flowing down through the thin neck of inevitability. We've now got a simple object for handling dates, the primary use will be for birthdays. This is because DateTime in the real world and the date and time of this world don't actually line up. We could probably link them up in some way but I think this is the better path. The next thing I need to do is start hooking up the Handler for the Character Creation page. This will hook into a copy of the Datum Player class and once finished, save it to our open slots. But not for tonight, tonight I get some rest and hope I don't burn the entirety of my brain at work.

Getting back on the train, not by a lot, but enough. This week was harder on me mentally than I realized it would be. I think I'm going to move this section from scratch notes to some kind of daily devlog series. Where I'll either talk about the latest updates of the game or what I'm doing and how its influencing me. A big part of this is that those influences impact the design of the game, they have to. The only time that a game is unchanged by the experiences of the creators is when the process of creating is not driven by the creators. When a game is a vector for profit over experience, that's when it will live on regardless of the internal conflicts, the ups an…

While today was slow goings, I can happily say that I've started doing work again. The last few weeks of my life were extremely hectic with occasional workdays literally going from 8 in the morning until midnight. My brain and body were both drained, by the end of it I was just completely exhausted. I knew if I tried to work on the project at the same time that I'd not get anything even close to quality as a result. So I took some time off, focused on getting work caught up and out of my way. With today being my first return back. Unfortunately coming off of going to bed at 1AM did not help for the return. But I've had a few days off from work and I'm feeling a lot…