Sprint 3 Demo

A day late this time, which is a habit I definitely don't want to get into.

Anyway, there is a *ton* to talk about. I came down with a spring cold toward the end of last weekend and ended up taking a couple days off from work. Bedrest and boredom helped me make quite a  bit of progress

The Highlights

We have a camera system now, and it actually looks pretty cool

It's amazing how such a small change can help it feel like an actual game

I also redid the art on several things, including the house and trees

We now have a primitive timekeeping system that is currently tracking hours, minutes days, and some other stuff. More work to do until it's finished and properly counting days and weeks and months and seasons and so on, but it's working nice

Also redid the dialog system from scratch and made it look like an actual text box

Sprint 3 Planning: Let's All Go to the Monsties

Alright, this will largely be a stream-of-conscious type of post.

I feel real good about where I'm at after 2 sprints (weeks). My head is overflowing with feature ideas, coding ideas, and more. I think I'm ready to take the next step and start to seriously think about future plans for this game

This sprint is going to be spent on two main areas:

1. Visuals. Not necessarily improving the graphics (they suck) or anything like that, but more trying to get a grasp for how I want the game to look. Should there be a HUD? What's the best scale to work with? What are some things I could do with perspective? And so on.

2. Planning. This is where I hope I can use my experience as a BA. I plan to create Visio charts of game loops, feature lists, story summaries, and maybe even some minor script writing

One goal I hope to certainly accomplish by next Saturday is a list of possible titles for the game. I feel establishing that early is important for motivation.

Anyway, we'll see what sort of grab-bag of coding I can get done as well. I hope to at least class-ify the Monster objects and maybe even play around with a camera. I also might try my hand at an "interior" state with the ability to enter a house. That'd be neato.

More to come!

Sprint 2 Demo: Hey, maybe this is actually a game?

Weekly sprints means that I don't necessarily have a ton to demo each week. Well, that, and also the fact I'm just one dude working on this at a "barely could be called part time" pace

All that said, I feel like I actually have a lot to show for myself! Here's what Trello would have me believe:

I actually did quite a it more than that, but that's the general state

In terms of highlights, implementing a state system was key. I dunno, maybe I'm alone in thinking this but I don't think that's a concept that necessarily comes naturally to people, so I'm very happy with the results

I also did a great deal of refactoring. I'm not sure if this is a typical feeling or not, but I really like refactoring. I like a lot of tasks that could be described as 'editing', and refactoring really scratches that itch

A lot of work went into taking my previous junk and making it a lot less fragile. My typical coding process is as follows:

1. Hack something together using shameful techniques and practices until something visual shows up

2. Slowly unhack each  bit one by one, re-building and re-running the code after every hurdle

3. Once unhacked, bask in the moment of feeling like maybe I'm not complete garbage

4. moments gone

5. Days later, re-read my code from step 3 and realize it still sucks. google for best practices and refactor

Anyway, enough boring stuff. 

I mentioned before we have game states, which is cool, and let's me have a start menu and a game loop state. and a pause state. 

Let's see. The sky moves now. I replaced the re-colored Underdale annoying dog and replaced it with an awful, terrible sprite. Speaking of terrible sprites I spent a great deal of time learning pixel art. The player and the tree (Douglas)? Well they're awful. I'm strangely proud of Geller the Chef, though. He's the first monster I thought of and also the very first pixel thing I ever created

Between now and release things are going to change dramatically, but in making this GIF I'm realizing there might be an actual game here, somewhere. I dunno...it's starting to slowly take shape

Also there's a patrolling picture of Ted Cruz. 

Anyway, enjoy

Keeping the dream alive - let's plan Sprint 2

I've decided this whole idea of "planning" sprints down to the task level - or even the story level - is not working for me.

I'm not sure if anyone has ever tried 1-man Agile before, but playing the part of Product Owner, Developer, QA, etc. etc. is proving difficult

Instead, I'll talk about overall goals and we'll see just how many of them I can get to

Goals for Sprint 2

1. Refactor!
A lot of my code from Sprint 1 is throwaway. I'm also a bad programmer, so let's just assume all my code is throwaway

This sprint I'm going to focus on rewriting code and making it better. More robust, more comments, all that stuff

2. Monsters...?
Every so often my wife will look over my shoulder and ask, "Uh, aren't you doing an Animal Crossing clone? What exactly is that thing, then?"

And it's true. A lot of my time has been spent coding a basic platforming engine and learning LUA. Right now this thing resembles more Mario than Animal Crossing

I hope to change that with this sprint. We'll have monsters - using dummy placeholder art, no doubt - and we will hopefully talk to them and learn their secrets. Or will they learn ours...?

3. States!
If you're like me, the idea of 'states' is about where you've given up on game designs in the past.

I'm trying to avoid that this time. This week I'll spend some time getting at least a menu and gameloop state up, and perhaps even "proof of concept" states, like maps or inventories

Alright, that's good enough for now. We'll see how much time I get on this as the week goes on. See you then

Sprint 1 Demo

In a previous post I mentioned how much work I was able to get done in a single day. It turns out it's a good thing I had so much free time then, as I barely touched this thing for the rest of my mini-sprint

Here's what I can demo today:

Not an impressive amount, but let's get on with it!

Here you can see a clearly orange dog standing by a pixel house and tree while a "day/night" cycle goes off in the background

A few notes, in case someone who actually cares is reading this in the future - the sky, tree, and house are mine. The dog is from the wonderful Undertale, and the ground sprites are some license-free sprites over at opengameart.org

Anyway, I'm pretty happy with how this all turned out. The "cycle" is achieved by drawing the sky layer first and then drawing a semi-transparent rectangle over it. The changing of colors is achieved by gradually increasing/decreasing the RGB values

I think it came out pretty cool and was incredibly easy to make

I don't think I ever explained 'jetpack jumping', and I actually have no idea if anyone uses this term. Here's what I mean...

In Mario games (among other platformers), there are really two styles of jump - tapping A, and holding A. Tapping A causes you to jump at a static height each time, while holding A causes you to jump a bit longer depending on how long you hold it

Here's it in action. Tapping A...

And here's Holding A...

Though this is an Animal Crossing and life simulator, I feel it is very important to get a good "feeling" platforming engine. I'll explain more in a later post, but for now I'm pretty happy with how this went

Anyway, today will be spent doing some odds and ends and planning the next sprint. 

Sprint 1 - Progress Update 1

Wow! I'm terrible at predicting how much work I can get done in a sprint!

Ok, so in the span of just a day I was able to check quite a few boxes on the Sprint 1 goals. Even better - or, depending on your view, even worse - I added quite a few more items to the goal

In terms of things I was planning for:

• Created a pixel tree!
• Added basic "jetpack jumping"!

In terms I didn't plan on, but did anyway:

• Completely redid the test level using real tiles and sky
• Experimenting with painting of some layers over the character (trees in this case)
• Basic framework for a day/night cycle (this was fun)
• Made the dog orange

Here's the GIF of the progress...

Sprint #1 Planning

Alright, not sure where to start with this so I figure I need to just start typing and see what happens

I've decided to play with 1-week sprints to start. It's obviously just me and the amount of work I can get done might be minimal, but at this early stage it's easy to demo "big wins"

After playing with both GameMaker and Love 2D I've decided to stick with Love. The former has better "content management" and overall would be more futureproof, but there's something very appealing about the quickness and uniqueness to Love

Anyway, let's talk about what this Sprint will consist of

Sprint 1 - 03/13/2016 -> 03/19/2016

Goal
Continue work on the main parts of the engine. Focus on aspects that are visual or demoable so that the main part of the game can start to take shape

• Implement "jetpack jumping" (hold jump for higher boost)
• Fix issue regarding mid-air jumping
• Begin work on states
• Implement NPC layer (basic)
• Implement NPC dialog (fake / hardcoded)
• Make at least 3 pixel portraits
• Make at least 1 pixel house
• Make at least 1 pixel tree
• Create at least 5 NPC concepts

Alright, I have no clue what my velocity is going to be, so we'll see how many I can get done there...

More to come