I accomplished what I set out to do last night, which was to implement the gorge scene view with parallax. It was, for the most part, pretty straightforward (with the exception of a certain 50-line if-else chain…) and it looks pretty good so I’m satisfied with my work today. Tomorrow, I’ll add in collision and VFX to it.
Summer proper has really hit with full force: it’s almost too hot and humid to do much of anything. That being said, today I got a surprising amount of work done on the visuals for the gorge view, and aside from some minor tweaks I’ll be making along the way, it’s pretty much done for now. Tomorrow I’ll separate all of the different layers and add animation, and hopefully I can get a parallax working as well. I want to get them integrated into the game fully by the end of this weekend. If I can accomplish that much, I think I’ll take a break from this for the next week or so and shift focus back to But For Now, We Are Young, which I’ve neglected for nearly the entirety of the month now.
Today was the hottest day of the year so far. I spent most of it in the city. Sawyer and I attended an event out in Brooklyn hosted by his school, a kind of weekly showcase for people interested in receiving feedback for games they’re working on. All of the games we played were pretty interesting and well-designed, and we had a good time. It felt pretty good to see others’ work and to help them out with feedback. I think that’s my favourite part of making games, honestly: talking with other people about them, and hopefully having a positive effect on others and helping them work through issues or even improve their craft.
In regards to my personal work though, I accomplished,virtually nothing. I sat down to work on the stuff I mentioned yesterday – lowered visibility for rain, and smoking – but I implemented neither of them, and instead just wasted several hours thinking about girls and feeling like shit. Spending too long in the city, especially on warm days like these, inevitably has that effect on me. Life is best lived on one’s own, I suppose.
Tomorrow I’d like to attempt to implement smoke for the fire. I have some ideas for how it might work but we’ll see if I actually get around to doing anything.
Another day with very little progress. I opened up GameMaker telling myself I would get some work done… and then I got absolutely no work done whatsoever. Tomorrow, I’d like to, at the absolute least, implement border darkening for rain. I can also implement smoking as well, since I actually finished the sprites a few weeks ago and for some reason just never got around to actually adding them in. That shouldn’t be too difficult or involved at all.
I worked on some stuff today but honestly I can’t remember what it was that I did. I guess that must mean that it must have not been very important, then.
Didn’t bother logging yesterday for whatever reason. I didn’t get much work done today, I finished drawing the labels on the pack but the kick is that they’re too goddamn small in-game so now I have to completely redraw them again, letter by letter. I probably won’t be able to use the same font due to the scaling, which will look pretty bad mots likely; I’m too tired right now though to test it out so it’ll have to wait until tomorrow.
Another productive day. I didn’t spend too much time outside although I still have time to fix that (although I probably won’t).
– Added trees.
– Depth sorting works a bit more consistently now (and is fully compatible with grass).
– Camera zoom is much more functional and scales smoothly on the player, with a maximum range of 8x.
– The improved zoom works very nicely with the increased map size (up to 2048×2048, but also works well up to 4096×4096). I’ve yet to optimise the instance count (since there are basically no other instances of which to speak…) but as they say, don’t pre-emptively optimise, so we’ll cross that road when we get there.
The first day of summer, and an appropriately pleasant, if not otherwise unremarkable day. I got some work done but nothing significant enough to warrant any further details (or even a dedicated commit, for that matter). At least it wasn’t a shitty day.
Added grass, plus a whole bunch of other changes, most of them insignificant enough to not warrant an attempt at documentation. I’ve been working very inconsistently the past few days and have been overwhelmed by a general sense of free-floating anxiety.
Anyways, the grass is pretty much directly imported from matharoo’s “Depth-Based Grass + Wind” asset, and the only modifications I’ve made deal with formatting and minor changes to variable names. Technically it’s a paid asset so I really shouldn’t commit it, but… I’ll probably end up just removing it in the final build or something and hoping nobody reads the commit history. It uses a vertex buffer to draw all the grass sprites programmatically distributed throughout the room, and then uses a shader to slightly skew the sprites to simulate wind. It’s a pretty straightforward process (although the implementation and execution of it is pretty involved so I won’t go into any further detail about it), but ends up looking really good, with little cost to performance.
I’m thinking about adding a bunch of larger, thicker vegetation – things like long weeds, bushes, rough brush, patches of tall grass and the like – using objects, and adding some player interaction to them. By that, I mean stuff like dynamic movement when the player walks through them, since the grass doesn’t have any effects. For stuff like that I think I’m gonna handplace it.
In general, I’ve been working on systems a whole lot these past two weeks or so, but I think I’m gonna switch over to environmental work for a change (and also because I’m not feeling so good all of a sudden, and don’t really feel mentally equipped to work on systems). By the end of this week I’d like to try to get a decent-looking environment together, with trees and rocks, maybe a structure. Well, we’ll see if it happens.
I tried working today for a bit, labelling diagrams and such – to be honest, I didn’t really try much at all – but predictably, I got very little work done and instead I just spent the entirety of the day suspended in a state of vague unease. Last night I suffered a profoundly disturbing and disgusting dream, whose contents I’d rather not share. I feel as if my life has taken a turn for the worse once again as of maybe a week or two ago. I’ve been feeling overwhelmed by minor deluges of strange and frenetic notions lately but I just can’t express or articulate them in any way. Tomorrow I’m going to try to get more work done, which is to say, I’m going to try to work on something in the first place. I hope I’ll be able to recover from this soon.
Woke up today to find a message from Taylor telling me she had to cancel on me at the last minute, which honestly, I’m not even too surprised about at this point. I turned on my PS4 only to discover that my external storage had corrupted, meaning an entire terrabyte’s worth of content was now unusable and the only way I could remedy it was by reformatting the drive, thus wiping it entirely. On top of all that, it’s extremely humid and raining, and the paper is too damp to write on.
Fuck this shit.
Missed my entry last night; not gonna bother making it up. The day was complete shit and I wasted hours wandering around the city for literally no reason. Needless to say, I got effectively no work done whatsoever.
Fortunately, today was much better. Sawyer and I went to Brooklyn to attend a social event hosted by the local chapter of the IGDA. I was at best mildly curious about it but there were a surprising number of people there and I met some students, all from NYU’s Game Design MFA programme, with whom I talked for some time. It was a nice social experience – it’s been a good several months since I last spoke to someone new in person – and also, I gained a good deal of knowledge about the MFA programme in particular, in which I had previously held a passing interest but I never seriously considered it because I had some doubt in the professional efficacy, for lack of a kinder phrase, of the degree. She seemed to be genuinely enjoying the programme however and spoke highly of it, as did the other two, and meeting people who worked with games and seemed actually well-adjusted and enjoying life has been really encouraging and I feel imbibed with a greater sense of optimism.
I think that I’ll start the application soon.
Nothing really to show today, although in terms of the backend, I’ve managed to fully segregate each subinventory from one another and I now have different child inventories set up under a single parent object. It works well so far, although I still have to touch it up a bit; I’m thinking that maybe I might investigate the possibility of reading and loading the data from a JSON file (maybe CSV?) rather than one ridiculously long series of “pack_add_item”s. That might be a bit beyond my current abilities though…
Earlier, I finally fixed the font scaling and implemented a pixel-perfect viewport. Got tired of seeing the font getting warped and stretched out weirdly, so I fixed the dimensions of some characters (mostly just the “M” and “m”), reduced proportional character spacing to -1, and set the view scaling from 3 to 4 (for a clean 2:1 upscale, instead of 1.5:1, which was fucking up the fidelity before).
Spent a good while implementing the fundamentals of the inventory system and while I’ve got something decent to work off now, I don’t feel as if I’ve accomplished much of anything. There’s a lot of formatting and modularising left for me to work on before I feel comfortable pushing anything and I’ve been feeling pretty tired lately but the truth is, the real reason behind all this exhaustion lately, is that I really just feel distracted, and honestly kinda fucked up by this whole business with the girl.
She left for back home today and while I realise that there was really nothing there – that there is nothing there – and that it’s all just in my head, I can’t stop thinking about it regardless. Acknowledging that on its own already makes me feel like shit, and that’s just how I feel when I’m actually trying to be responsible with my feelings; when I let myself slip, it just feels even worse, i start feeling hopeless, it makes me feel like this is just yet another one of those many things in life that so many other people can enjoy, from which I’m just permanently shut out. I know that’s not true – probably isn’t true – but the feeling persists regardless and eats away at me and my motivation and my ability to envision a better tomorrow, or even just any tomorrow at all that isn’t defined by persistent loneliness and the gaping abscess of possibility.
Well, at least no one can blame me now for not giving it a try.
No work done today. Too tired, didn’t feel so good… I think this weekend I’m gonna take a break from all of it.
Began implementing the backpack inventory into the game, the spritework and key-based navigation are entirely in and I slowly worked my way through a rather convoluted initial approach towards a solution that, while not in any sense elegant, is definitely more legible than hardcoding several dozen image indices via stacked switch statements. I feel sadder and more tired today than I did yesterday, and tomorrow, if I get in any work at all, I think I’ll just focus on one particular thing and get it done and call it a day instead of spending so much time scoping like I usually do.
Worked for a while on the spritework for the backpack UI screen, and aside from the labels, it’s pretty much finished. I have to figure out how I’m actually gonna implement the mouseover events – doing it by the sprite dimensions is gonna be an absolute pain in the ass, I’ll say that much right now – but at the end of the day, if it really gets down to it, I can just create a bunch of objects layered over one another and call it a day. I think I’ll work on implementing the basic mouseover event behaviour tomorrow: and maybe I’ll even have something to show for once.
It’s strange to think that I only started working on this project since the beginning of this month – but then I realise that that’s actually a good deal longer than I realise, and that it’s almost halfway through the month already. That concerns me greatly, and fills me with no small amount of anxiety. I haven’t made any significant efforts on But For Now, We Are Young since the end of last month (although today I did make a few very minor entries into the spec document); but my mood has begun to degrade once again and I feel that soon, I’ll be able to resume work on it once more.
I started using OKCupid again for no apparent reason (no: the reason was that last night, I felt a tremendous pang of loneliness, more acute than usual, and sought to immediately fill it by seeking out the most socially encouraged form of partnership, which is coupling) and in a disturbingly short period of time I matched with this strangely attractive girl. We talked about sad Radiohead songs (what other kinds are there?) for a brief moment and for just that moment, I felt a kind of strange feeling that this might be – no, that this was – nice, that maybe I could get back into all of this, to rehabilitate into the fold of society; but then the moment passed and in the space left behind I realised I’d run out of things to say and I started feeling hopeless once again just like I always do and now I’m thinking she’s just not really that interested in me and now I’m thinking that I should just leave her alone and that this, all of this, was just a big mistake from the start, that maybe this just isn’t for me that I don’t deserve it if I’m not willing to tolerate even the mildest setback and that I don’t belong here and that this is a world in which I am no longer welcome and it’s all on me, a punchline I couldn’t quite catch, a joke on me but probably not.
Implemented a smooth(-ish) camera zoom… and that’s pretty much it.
I watched the entirety of the Ubisoft E3 conference today and for a while it was pretty exciting and I felt very motivated and I wanted to get more stuff done, but then, for whatever reason…
Well, I know the reason. But it’s the kind of thing you can’t say out loud – so I suppose I won’t.
Implemented a more efficient depth sorting system, replacing the previous “depth = -y” stuff that I was using with a grid-based data structure. Supposedly it should be much better for performance – not that I imagine that’ll become an issue any time soon, but futureproofing is always good. I haven’t posted any images in a while, mostly because I’ve been working on a lot of systems. Next week I’d like to get started on environment work and get this actually looking like something presentable.
Successfully implemented player and object directional shadows, despite believing just yesterday that I couldn’t get that shit figured out. Now, not only do nearly all objects cast shadows, but the shadows are relative to the position of the sun, which moves in the sky (note that the top of the screen represents cardinal SOUTH). Although it’s unrealistic for the player’s shadow to remain fixed at all time relative to the sun (especially at night) regardless of closer light sources, I’m strongly thinking about keeping it anyways as a means of telling time without having an actual time display. We’ll see how I feel about it when I wake up later today though…
Sawyer came over today. We watched some films and then observed the redness of the evening sky. I didn’t get too much work done today, but I did successfully clean up and modularise some important repeating scripts, and I also added the sitting behaviour when the pack is equipped. I feel completely wiped today, probably because I stayed up until 0500 yesterday working on… stuff I can’t even remember now. I’ll take it easier tonight. Probably.
Finally got the day-night cycle working as intended. Created lighting for both the player’s vision, which uses dithered tiling to represent visibility, and a much stronger light source for actual light sources (in this case, the campfire, but in the future, things like the emergency flare, the hand torch, the improvised torch, and the chem light), which aren’t dithered. The lighting changes dynamically and is directly tied to the time of day.
I also implemented a shadow system (well, one script: draw_sprite_shadow), but since it’s entirely based around the sprite dimensions, and since a good number of the player sprites are off-centred, the alignment is off and it consequently looks like shit. So for now, I’m keeping it out of the game; but maybe later, I’ll be able to revisit it and get it working properly.
Tomorrow, I think I’ll work on a smoke effect for the fire – it’s a pretty straightforward particle system, I don’t imagine it’ll be too complicated or time-consuming to figure out – and hopefully afterwards I’ll have time to work on another system.
Another late night. Worked all day on a stupid day-night cycle system that I didn’t even end up using; I couldn’t figure out how to get the view consistently situated relative to the player movement, of all things (although on top of that, since my knowledge of surfaces is, to put it lightly, abysmal, I couldn’t get it looking the way I wanted it to look in the first place), so instead I just abandoned it entirely and decided to work on something else.
I implemented the hunger system successfully, although I’ll have to adjust the rates of intake on the calories relative to hunger level a bit; more excitingly though I got the vomiting working, spritework and all, and for whatever reason it’s oddly satisfying. Vomiting is tied to two (well, three) major factors: excess consumption of liquids or foods (ie, hunger or thirst bars exceed their maximum limits), and ingestion of indigestible items such as mouldy / expired food, or raw meat. In the former case, once the player has ingested too much of something, a randomised timer will begin (around three to four seconds) after which the player will stop walking and vomit. In the latter case, the player may contract food poisoning, and this causes them to periodically need to purge the body of toxins via either vomiting, or defecation (it chooses between the two).
Being near puddles of vomit (as with faeces) dramatically increases the player’s risk of infection: within 64 pixels of either, any action the player takes sees a 35% increase in risk of infection, which, combined with low-quality tools, basically guarantees some kind of affliction (depends on what the player is doing). Like faeces, vomit can be cleaned up using
– a plastic bag (completely removes infection chance)
– an entrenching tool (drops radius of infection to 5% within 32 pixels, and leaves a visible mound)
– a shallow dirt hole (drops radius of infection to 32 pixels but leaves the initial 35% increase in risk of infection)
Stayed up last night until 0830 the next morning playing Outward. I have no idea why I stayed up that late; there was no sane justification for it. Well, whatever.
Got some work done today tweaking hunger, before deciding I wasn’t completely satisfied with how simple it was… and then decided, after watching some gameplay of SCUM, that I would instead work on a needless complicated and mathematically convoluted metabolic simulation that tracked caloric intake and output. Well, I worked on that for some time (much to my utter astonishment, I actually somehow got the model working out quite well in GM, mathematical relationships and all), before deciding again that it was way too complicated for literally no other reason than to sate my momentary curiosity in the matter; so I cut it out (and saved it in another file…), and restarted the design.
Currently, I have a more simplified version of the caloric system which balances calories as energy against hunger as a more abstract psychological metric. Currently, it’s planned such that hunger will deplete at a generally steady rate while calories – the sole source of energy – will be burned in direct relation to actions (ie, walking, setting up camp, breaking down materials, picking up the pack, etc). Hunger depletes (or, with respect to common language, builds up perhaps) much faster than caloric output and, if not treated, will lead to starvation, which directly depletes willpower (around 2.5% /hr). Starvation also begins drawing from the greater calorie store (accumulated body fat, that is), which will allow the player to survive for several days without food despite starving. Each meal has a hidden caloric limit; any additional calories consumed that go over that limit used go towards the calorie store, where, like I mentioned before, they basically serve as backup energy.
In short, calories are used to perform tasks and once they begin running low the player must rest; hunger is more tied to overall condition, and affects willpower the most.
I’ll work on it a bit more tomorrow, but I think I have it mostly figured out now.
Another productive day. Spent most of it working on spreadsheets – hell, what else is new – but I feeling confident enough to say that I’ve got the major systems worked out maybe 90% now. I even broke out some of my old bushcraft and backpacking manuals for reference; it was an interesting feeling looking through them, finding out much to my surprise just how much I actually remembered (and how much more I’ve since forgotten).
I was able to implement drinking and thirst into the game; tomorrow, I think I’ll get to work on eating and hunger. I’ve spent a good amount of time away from But For Now, We Are Young as well; some point soon I should start redirecting some of my newfound energy back into that as well. I hope that I’m able to get something out for this side project by the weekend; then I can feel fully comfortable shifting my focus back to my main project.
Good progress today. Although I wasn’t able to finish the prototype as I had hoped, I did get a lot of work done laying out the systems and I’m confident I’ll be able to get it out some time this week. The most difficult – and by difficult, what I really mean is just time-consuming – part is just drawing the sprites, which has been surprisingly straightforward heretofore.
Starting this project was a good idea and it’s helped boost my interest in all my other projects as well; I feel like I have a more positive attitude in general as a result of it.
Struck by the sudden motivation to start on a side project earlier today. It’s a much more traditional kind of game than But For Now, We Are Young: a 1-bit hardcore survival sim about a pilgrimage. That’s all I’ll say about it for now, but this weekend I plan on getting a very rudimentary prototype sketched up. I started working on it most of today actually and it’s been going pretty well so far. I’m pretty excited to be able to get some stuff out soon.
Went to the mall with a friend tonight where we stumbled upon a carnival in the adjacent lot. I shot out a star and won a prize. We then went to the lake, where we spent some time scrambling in the dark catching frogs in a paper bag from H&M. The frogs pissed so much that their urine soaked through the bottom of the bag and created a hole. We went to the diner and ate some fries in record time.
I didn’t get much work done today, if any; but I feel like I spent it well regardless.
