DEVil's-Work Entertainment

Letting myself be known was always a big step for me, and so I’ve always kept to myself, in my little corner. But now I feel the need to get to know the world and let the world know me. 

A lot of things have happened in the past year. Some good others bad but ultimately all changes have led me here. A new fresh Start.

 I now only have a part-time job of 2 hours a day, because bills still need paying, but I'm dedicating myself full-time to Game Development. Witch is something I've wanted to do for a few years now but always felt pressured not to.

Things aren't going to be easy, I know this, but I will try to make my best of this situation since it's what feels right. And I haven't felt right in a really long time.

Being able to say I can focus on making Games has made me feel liberated like never before, almost, dare I say, free.

I have now 1 main project I want to see to the end. That is the Inn Simulator project I started last year. In one way I feel that this project has improved, not as fast as I would have liked it to, but due to previous work constraints, it has still shown development.

But now, I feel that with the fresh start my life is taking, so should the project. Now that is no longer a part-time thing or a hobby, I need a different structure to make this work.

And so a new project folder seems appropriate. To both help reduce clutter and help with tidying up any spaghetti code that I have.

Obviously, with going Indie there are always some issues, like self-accountability, self-imposed deadlines, but I've taken a lot of steps to mitigate this.

In the past weeks I've been working on the first interactions on the inside of the Inn/Tavern.

Ive been trying to make a playable character in a 1st person view, that will work as our innkeeper, and will be the one taking in customers orders and fulfilling all their needs.

I've also been working on the NPCs, and the first iteration I have already made is a basic AI with 3 needs, Hunger, Thirst and Tiredness. Once he spawns, those 3 needs will start with random values, determining what the NPC will order. Either food, drinks, or a room to spend the night.

They also have a patience meter, and once that runs out they will leave. If the needs that they need feeling is fulfilled in time thought it will restart, until the next need is met, or they leave the Inn satisfied.

The Inn keeper can also pick up mugs, plates, and fill them with food or drinks. for testing purposes he can also consume them (not very good if you want to sell them XD) so that after being consumed he can wash the dishes so we can go back to having clean ones.

Hello, it’s definitely been a while since I’ve updated the projects I’ve been working on, and this DevLog is also more of a catch up of all the work I’ve been doing this past few months.

Due to having changed my work places recently, I had a full month where I stayed home in January, and I ended up using all that month to develop a new project I was actually very excited to work on.

It’s an Inn simulator, with farming and management mechanics.

I started working on the farming aspect of the game first, creating some plots of land and some simple UI were you could select the crop you would like to plant first.

Then I added some watering and fertilizing mechanics, so that you could speed up growth and maximise harvest of the crops. Next I also added plot deteriorization, so that after a few crops have been harvested, you’d have to re tile the plot before you’d be able to plant something new on the plot.

Different Crops have different growth stages and times, and give more or less produce once harvested depending on their conditions while growing. Right now they are being sold once harvested, but in the future you would keep them in an inventory system, where you could then use them at the Inn to cook for your patrons and to make drinks.

Hi, today I will be doing the first Dev Log for my Inn simulator!!!

 I started this project on the 6/1/23 and decided to create a small prototype of what I would like to make one day as a bigger scale game. 

It's been 2 weeks under development, and so far we have 1 of the main mechanics already done (just not polished yet) Farming! We can now farm some specific crops from carrots, potatoes, cabbages, onions and tomatoes (more to come). 

We can water the crops, making their growth timers shorter, and we can fertilize the crops, raising the amount of harvested produce that would normally result. So far none of these resources cost any money (for testing purposes) but you will need to pay your water bills and get more fertilizer for your crops.

 Plots also have a degradation system in place, so after every harvest you will notice some visual changes, and after a few harvests you will need to tile the plot once again if you want to keep farming on it. 

All harvested produce will go to the currently labelled 'Inventory' tab that will keep track of all thigs your Inn currently has available, from drinks food items and cutlery (mugs and plates). 

The day and night cycle is also fully operational, giving a little insight to what the time in the game will be like. For now crops only take a short moments to grow, but once testing is done they will take a few days to actually produce something usable in the Inn. 

There's also some visual ques whenever you hover over the plots, to let the player know if he can or cant do an activity like harvest, water, fertilize or tile. 

And we finally did it again. We changed our game ideas/project one week before having to deliver our Project Reports. 

We, and I mean more I than my project partner, were super unmotivated with what we were doing. And so we decided to discard the Visual Novel idea, and revisit one of our Game Jam projects “ Let there Bee romours” and expand that game jam prototype we made last year. 

I’ve decided to work on the final project with an artist, so that way she can make art for a game, and I can have art for the Visual Novel.

Since we’re a group we both agreed my inicial narrative could be changed to encompass both of us, and not just me, so we are going for a sci-fy narrative set in a space colony.

The project is moving along, slower than what we probably should, but we’re still figuring our some wrinkles on the documents and the pipelines. We clearly disagree on some departments, but noting some planing can’t solve.

ok. This is it. The final project has started. The last 3 years have been building up to this. 3 years of game design and now we have to choose what our final project is going to be about.

I went for a visual novel.... or I should say I’m going to be working on a narrative because the fact I can’t draw is still a big part of the “visual” part of the novel, and I’m not sure if I’ll be working alone or in a group. So that fact will be decisive on the fact of will I have art or just the narrative itself.

I know it’s been almost half a year since I post anything, but school work this semester has been a bit different than previous works in the sense that we haven't really made any games at all, and so I’ve been a bit more away than I would have wanted.

BUT two weeks ago I participated in my second Game Jam!!! I and my partner formed a group and decided to forget about school for an entire weekend and participate in the Jam where the theme was Falling Appart.

And fall apart we did, we ended up only using 24h of the 48 available, and so we didn't finished the game entirely, but we’re proud of what we have so far.

We did make a small narrative for it, despite the fact that it might not be present in the prototype we made. It would be something along the ways of “A giant Mole is eating up a subway, and our main character needs to run away and avoid the Mole from eating him.”

It’s full of bugs, from the lack of time, and from the fact I haven't programmed in what feels like forever, but, in my opinion, it adds to the entire vibe of the theme XD. 

The bugs vary from random teleportations, buggy collisions, and the fact that we can’t distinguish the background from walkable platforms, and there are some platforms that fall but give off no visual cues that they are going to fall.

Here are some images from the game... yes our main character is a green cube, like I said, we had some unforeseeable problems and only got 24 h so we didn't had the time to get player sprites in the game.

We have some traps, in the form of electric wires, that are there to slow down the player’s progression through the game. The player character passes through some different colors when he dies since he’s being electrocuted (but since this is an image it only shows the red color).

And the platforms that fall once the player touches them.

Just an update on how this school project turned out:

This is Sori, our main Character, he’s a skeleon returned from the death to defeat his former enemy.

Somehow the trees are missing their textures, but they’re there.

We added some new areas, like the Mausoleums entrance:

And a small dungeon for the player to explore:

Besides school, that thakes more time that I would like, I’ve been entertaining the idea to make my own side project, that was school independent, noone giving me deadlines (except for myself) and no grade to remind me of the disaster that project was....

So I’ve decided to not keep that project as one of my many failed attemps at something, and give it try.

And so I introduce Dungeon Style! Name is provisory (as is anything so far XD)

The story is simple, we play as a whitch that wakes up one day to find her cat missing, and so she goes on to try and find it. (Short story yet, but I think i prefer to start a small prototype with a little story and then grow it from there)

So far I’m not focusing on art, so I’ll be using placeholder assets that I downloaded from itch.io from  0x72 -  Dungeon Tileset II. I do intend to make my own art, but I’m not very artsy, so it will take me a while.

What i have so far is basic movement for both player and possible enemies.

Enemies can free roam, but will chace the player with it gets too close.

We can also get hurt if enemies thoutch us, but I’ll be tweaking that next once I add player attack mechanics.

So far that what i have, but I’ll be adding more each day.

Check out the video  where i show some of the progress

School as been chaotic. We have a playtesting session tomorrow and I can't seem to have everything ready(at least everything I deem needed or useful to collect data from a playtesting session with the rest of the class), although to be honest I don't expect much.

My last playtesting sessing for Project With Hunt went pretty badly. Half the group I was put in skipped class, so I only had 3 people test out my game and one of them filled out my form with mostly one-word answers (really useful there buddy)... But I was confident for that one, since it was an individual project.

Now? I’m in a 5 people group, and i feel like I’m not working enough, and that all the code I push out to show sucks. Maybe it’s just my existential crisis but I feel like I should have worked more in the code and probably added more of the mechanics we want for the final project. I’m only missing two really, but one of them is the core of the game and I’m not even sure I can finish it in time. I’m hoping for the best.

In the meantime, here's a picture of our prototyped scenery

With the Game Jam over i can only say that it was two great days. I had lots of fun, and the game we did was playable, not great but for the first time we have a playable game and not walking simulators XD.

It was a great experience and I’ll defenetly be doing it again.

Neering the 24 h mark, we already have a playable platformer game, with a cute ant as the main character! She loves to gossip and so she travels so she can share gossips and learn new ones.

The game is ready to start with playtesting and after that, we can finally go rest for the night.