Not much to say today, I've added a few more rooms while wondering what I had meant in my design doc when I said that the player would "climb ladders". There are no ladders in 100RTBD, only blocks you can jump on. Ladders would be like, one way blocks, but you also should be able to climb down them. I don't think I have a climbing animation either so... no ladders!
Time spent on the project so far: 533 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Although I'm having some Unity problems again - the editor is sluggish as all hell - I've created a few more rooms today, bringing their total at 281, which means, strictly by the numbers, that I have about 28% of the game done. Not 28% of the critical path, mind you - but I feel like I'm saying that all the time. Anyways, I'm still working on it! Hope the unity issues fade out tomorrow...
Time spent on the project so far: 532 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
A few more rooms are done, some of them have challenges in them and I've created a few new items as rewards. One item that I didn't plan on having at first - in my so called 'design document' was something to temporarily illuminate a room. Now that I've been playing in darkness for a few days, I see how important it is. I also had to fix a weird bug where the Energy Blade skill would disappear off-screen the second you used it, weird huh!
Time spent on the project so far: 530 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Meet the black hole gun! It's quite powerful and you can hit enemies with it multiple times since the black holes don't disappear when they hit anything and they move slowly! This also lead me to add the 'blind' status ailment on enemies. On the player, it's simple, the blind ailment prevents you from seeing well, but enemies are controlled by AI, so they don't exactly have the concept of 'seeing'. Except in some situations, where enemies will try to move toward you, or fire at you, or things like that! In this case, blind enemies will not be sure where you are, so they'll be more or less blind!
Time spent on the project so far: 528 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story, implementing the black hole gun
Screenshot after the jump: Black hole gun
Horror! I was working on the brand new Dark Gun that shoots black holes, but unity froze while I was transitioning between two rooms. That's when the game auto-saves, and it appears that it froze just the wrong way, deleting my saved data. I wanted to move on with new stuff before restarting the whole thing, so I tried to re-create a workable save file by hand. I'm wondering if it's worth it to spend some time to create a debug menu of sorts? Just a simple console where you could change in-game values directly, that would help future tests, but it would take some time to implement properly...
Another thing I've added, however, is the creation of a backup save file, whenever you select 'continue' on the main screen, it will create a backup.sav file for 100RTBD, so if the game crashes and you lose all your progress, you can at least recover from that. It's not a huge deal what happened today, but it's still a bummer ;(
Time spent on the project so far: 526 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story, trying to fix my save
Screenshot after the jump: Catastrophic failure
Back to our scheduled programming! I've fixed the details of that boss fight in State-6 against a giant kilobyte, now I'm working on a new enemy type! The ExaBot! This wiggling tower of uncertain death shoots bullets around, but when it stops its defense is much higher and that makes it tougher to kill! State-6 is still pretty new, so I have a bunch of work to do before the next big event in the game! The player should acquire Ghosting pretty soon too!
Time spent on the project so far: 524 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
I'm done with work on VIRTUAL PET! I've tested, tweaked and re-tested it all. You can go play it at my itch.io page, I know it's not perfect, but it was a small gamejam project, and I enjoyed the first hours of the projet very much. Then when the additional days got added to it, I started working on a bunch of features and then it became kind of a bog ;) But I'm happy to release what I have so far :D
Time spent working on VIRTUAL PET in total: 35 hours
This is my second to last update, since tomorrow I'll just test everything and submit my VIRTUAL PET to the #petJam! I have to say that I'm a bit bummed out that the deadline got extended twice, because otherwise it would've forced me to keep things simple. Now I've tried to do many different things and I'm not sure if I've done any of them well ;)
The final activity sure is something, by the way :D
Time spent on VIRTUAL PET so far: 35 hours
After messing around with Unity's client/server infrastructure for a short while, I've figured out the best way to make VIRTUAL PET work on the internet, it involves a website, actually! I know how to make these, so it wasn't that big of an issue! Now VIRTUAL PET can send and receive data from the internet!
I should probably put a big bold note somewhere on my game's page when I'll release it to warn people that everything they tell VIRTUAL PET might be seen by someone else. That's part of the game tho :)
Time spent on VIRTUAL pet so far: 33 hours
I'm almost done with VIRTUAL PET! I've added a bunch of features today! Like Pong! You guys like Pong, right? Well, VIRTUAL PET PONG is an activity you can play with your VIRTUAL PET! I have to fix a few things regarding 'multiplayer' and then I'll test the whole thing extensively, and then that'll be that for VIRTUAL PET!
Time spent on VIRTUAL pet so far: 30 hours
It seems like the deadline for the #petJam has been extended to wednesday, but no matter, VIRTUAL PET is almost done and I don't want to add too much more stuff to it besides maybe 5 more activities. When your VIRTUAL PET dies you get a perk, perks have effects like giving passive bonuses, unlocking new activities, or just changing the appearance of your VIRTUAL PET. Here it is with all current visual updates, color, glasses and a smile :D
Time spent on VIRTUAL pet so far: 24 hours
VIRTUAL PET connects to the internet in order to do things. Right now he's going to look at random wikipedia pages and ask you what page it is. It's not very hard to figure out, but your pet is trying it's best! I still want to add a few more activities and other things and then it'll be done, I guess! We're rooting for you, VIRTUAL PET!
Time spent working on VIRTUAL PET so far: 21 hours
I feel lucky to have two weeks to make VIRTUAL PET because I feel that if I only had two days I wouldn't have been able to do it. My VIRTUAL PET needs a fair amount of content to be complete, so I still have to generate all of that. I guess that's what's left for me to do while waiting for the deadline. I also want to create eyes and mouths so your pet's appearance changes a bit depending on how it grows.
Time spent on VIRTUAL PET so far: 19 hours
Most of the core mechanics of VIRTUAL PET are done being programmed, now all I need is to add content, activities basically. I've also decided to change the way your pet's life goes down because even with all my best efforts, I can't reliably find the last time your computer rebooted, so now he'll lose one life per day. That might be a bit slow, I suppose, so I'll have to rethink that! But right now that's what's in place. 7 days left!
Time spent working on VIRTUAL PET: 16 hours
My code is now insanely convoluted and badly written. Spaghetti code at its worst, if I say so myself! I don't know how it evolved that way too, but now I'm stuck with it. VIRTUAL PET is still going pretty fine, but I still can't make him die yet, I'll have to fix that at some point. Death is important in VIRTUAL PET. I'm almost done with the initial set of four 'activities' you can do with your pet, so that's that I guess!
Time spent on VIRTUAL PET so far: 12 hours
I suppose I should have seen it coming; I got bogged down in some random thing that wasn't important because I didn't have a proper design doc. I started working on some adventure-game style text parser for about an hour before figuring out that I wasn't going to need it. That's also something to be expected when you work on a project alone; especially where you don't have much time, it's easy to get lost.
But I think I've fixed that problem and now I'm moving on with other things. I just want to get the 'intro' of the game done, then I'll start the endless loop of taking care of your VIRTUAL PET!
Time spent on VIRTUAL PET: 6 hours
Usually, I write a design doc before making any game. Actually, I often write design docs for games that I will never make! I erase them after I figure out it's not worth keeping them around. For the PetJam, I just am working on the game. I assume that's how game jams work, right? You have a limited timeframe to make something, so the luxury of time isn't really there. I suppose in such a situation, skipping the design document and going straight into coding isn't a bad idea!
So my current VIRTUAL PET is called EJBU-ADDY - I changed the I in VIRTUAL for Interactive instead of Intelligent - and here's a screenshot of what the game might look like when you boot it! ADDY's mouth moves when it talks and his eyes will follow your mouse cursor around. The middle box will be used for you to reply to your PET and the big box at the top right will be for your PET's stats. I'll be working on that tomorrow!
No design doc, but still, I have so many ideas I'm writing them as comments into my main C# file. This game probably wouldn't expend very well past a certain point since everything is written in just one class, but I want to get it done, not really have anything fancy, code structure wise ;)
Time spent working on VIRTUAL PET: 4 hours
I really wish I could go to more IRL GameJams, but in the meantime I'm just going to try my hand at this online one: https://itch.io/jam/pet Basically, a virtual pet. I'm making a literal virtual pet. My game is going to be called VIRTUAL PET and it's going to be cool I think! I'll update this section of my site with my progress and stuff! Making games :D
I'll also try to add a screenshot every day so you can see how it goes! And with some luck I'll have plenty of time to work on it during my vacation next week, so that fits right in with the 2 weeks schedule
Time spent on VIRTUAL PET: 2 hours
State-6 is going well, I've made a few rooms today, and now I'm working on a mini boss fight. Working with lightning and darkness effects is an interesting way to make things interesting! I've noticed that some rooms have weird bugs because the camera isn't at the same spot as it usually is. That'll be fixed tomorrow.
If I had to restart my project from scratch, I would change the color of blocks/enemies with code instead of having done it by hand before I started coding. Changing the sprites for all of my maps and backgrounds manually is a bit tedious, and I'm sure there is a simple way to do it programatically, oh well!
Time spent on the project so far: 522 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story
Screenshot after the jump: The state of State-6 so far!
I have a nagging suspicion that skills aren't as useful as I would want them to be. Challenges are much easier if you use skills, but you have to use many keys in order to get all the good skills out, and that might not be easy to do 100% of the time, especially when you're on a timer. Maybe I should map the skills to the number keys? But then how would it work with a controller? Should I rework all the skills so they're on the same timer but are all much more stronger? Should I get rid of them? I'm still thinking about all of that.
Time spent on the project so far: 520 hours
Currently working on: Continuing the story