dinocat

Summer is here! And so is an update on Pocket Adventure.

May was pretty so-so, spending all of it chapter 6 level design, and there’s still a few rooms left to complete. I'd say I’m around 85% done? The lower area there is new; a sewer segment before Poppin and Jupa enter the factory proper.

I did draw up more enemy designs.

Top row: Launzard, Lizword, Galvanari, Clean Shot Bottom row: Hoppinstop, Lead Head, Squeedge

And making base sprites for some of them, too.

Something about chapter 6 as a whole is that it limits save points to only a couple. It’s still pretty accessible, but you have to go out of your way for it, to make you weigh the risk of taking on the next segment versus taking time to heal up. It’s the best compromise I can think of while maintaining the convenience of the save point as both a health restore and place to save, but stressing more on keeping track of health.

My thought process is having longer/tougher segments gives value to having more health, which gives value to buying foods, which gives value to money, which gives value to finding chests, which gives value to exploration, which is where all the gameplay happens.

It also helps prep the challenge for the next chapter, which I’ll get into maybe next month.

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My main goal for June is to finish off chapter 6 level design. That involves about 4 main rooms and 2 bonus ones. I’m also contemplating other design work for 6, like designing and base spriting out specialized enemies, a mid boss, a minigame, and coding an obstacle/enemy hybrid, “Zombie Rickity”. I kinda want to jump to cutscenes for chapter 6 now too… so it’ll either be that, or planning out chapter 7’s obstacles and finalizing the design plan.

Sorry this month was sparse in fun stuff to look at. It probably won't improve until Fall, when I expect to be done with level design for a bit and can focus on enemies/cutscenes/event scripting.

Small update, I ended up skipping last month as I ended up taking a short break, followed by traveling out-of-state, followed by coming down with a cold. Took a bit to get back into the project.

For March I worked on Chapter 4 level design more, rounding out the starting area that leads Poppin and Jupa into the Clock Twerp village. This sequence involves a short "puzzle" where the two have to chase one Clock Twerp into a false wall, to open it.

It involves splitting the two up in order to corral the fella. It gets a little trickier afterwards.

After that is the two exploring the destroyed west part of town, almost getting crushed and picking up the bomb gadget card. The level design is in place, but hasn't been tested yet and has some objects requiring coding.

Chapter 4 also saw the start of cutscene work, given that chapter 3's was finished and it made sense to start fleshing out the two locations connecting to each other. Here's one bit, where PnJ first enter Tickton (there's no background/object assets yet)

During April I switched over to Chapter 6 to continue level design work. It takes place in a factory area, and I'd say I have about 40% of it mapped out.

This involved restructuring it a bit to match current notes. It involves designing for 2 paths and the player potentially entering from either end, so I have to balance how obstacles are introduced with that in mind.

I've also found it needs a bit more coding work for obstacle ideas. One of them was spawning garbage blocks that ride conveyor belts before being dropped into molten steel.

You can jump on them as they melt away, which I hope to make use of it in one section.

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That's about it for this update. My current plan is to keep picking at Chapter 6 and finishing it for May. That would leave the rest of Summer for planning out Chapter 7, and from there I'll have the main story's level design complete. Following that I can continue onto cutscene scripting and enemy coding for chapters 4 through 7. But that's still a ways off.

Hope you all have a nice month!

Happy Easter! 🥚

Hi all, this month was pretty rough. Sick, sleep all fucky, day job picking up, slight burn out. I didn't get as far as I had originally planned but made some progress at least, the focus going back to Chapter 3.

I had wanted to created an optional baseball minigame to discover, a tribute of sorts to the one from Wario Land 4. Various pitches to hit as PnJ, and getting all hits rewards you with chests. The base functionality is here, though I wanted to set up something special for the last pitch... I'll have to get to it n the future.

After picking at that, I went back to scripting out cutscenes. This one finally got to the museum, where they finally reach the Bicentennial Ball and the Gilded Engine! And thus, the real conflict/plot can get underway, of the Engine being stolen and PnJ trying to get it back so that they can join in at the Ball (well, mostly that's what Jupa wants...)

You might remember seeing this from the cutscene at the end of Chapter 1. Now it's in in-game sprite proportions!

Another thing with the museum I wanted to do was add an optional room filled with some old relics. Gives the impression that this actually is a museum, while also adding some lore to the city PnJ travel to.

Part of the work involved designing the original founders of the city, and their wives. I'm pretty happy since it hints at a certain connection with another species.

Because all the work was cutscene related, there isn't really anything too nice to show. This wip down here is a portion of when the Engine is stolen. It's a bit goofy that this engine is so modular it can be taken piece by piece, but felt like a good compromise to showing this groups of Clock Twerp fellas being able to make off with it.

Planning and scripting all this, along with sequence before and after in the museum, took a bit of time to fine-tune.

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The last thing I was doing was working on the small chase sequence with PnJ going after the Clock Twerps before losing them. It's about two cutscenes left, and then Chapter 3 will be done with cutscenes and functionally playable from start to finish (though mostly without proper art assets).

This month, I'd like to follow-through on that, before heading back to Chapter 4 where I'll complete the Clock Twerp village area I had planned out, on top of fleshing out the intro and outro segments for Chapter 4 further.

It's tempting to cram more to-do in there, but what I'm learning is that I should probably pack monthly stuff with less items, so that I don't get overwhelmed.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy Spring!

First month of the year finished!! Excluding Poppin & Jupa, it's been pretty exhausting, but including Poppin & Jupa, it's been pretty exhausting. I'll load all that at the end of the post though.

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Last month was focused on Chapter 5 development, which is set in a Toy Kingdom. The bulk of it was level design. Something like ~14 rooms?

I think the overall structure of Chapter 5 is closer to Chapter 2, where (following a more linear sequence of PnJ entering the area, meeting the antagonist of the area, and undoing a spell) they're given several areas to tackle in whatever order they want, before opening up the path to the boss. It'll also include it's own miniboss, Dueldelle.

Said areas are based around a timed music box, a giant drawing canvas, a maze within a ballpit, and a small town dedicated to these Ibbix Doll fellas.

Part of this month also revolved setting up the structure of an optional trading sidequest based on these dolls. Each one of them has a single screen home located in the Toy Kingdom; when you enter it, they won't attack PnJ, preoccupied with some other activity. When you talk to them, they might trade an item you have with something else.

I'm being vague so I don't explain everything in it, but I'll leave these item graphics here for you to guess who gets what. There's only 8 items and 10 dolls...

The last area of the Toy Kingdom involves storming a castle, and a gag I had in mind was encountering increasingly larger versions of the "Tin Twerp" toy soldier enemies.

Until eventually, you reach a colossal one attacking from the background.

If Poppin & Jupa get past all that, they'll reach Tinker, the weird ghost twerp who rules over the kingdom. He forces the two to play a board game.

It's a segment I've been excited to do for years, and I think I've come up with a good system for it: Poppin and Jupa act as separate pieces, utilizing a spinner to determine how many spaces they move (which will make it possible to control how many spaces you move, if you bother timing it right).

Based on the type of space they land on it, a different effect will occur, but the primary ones are short minigames where they'll either race to the end, collect enough stars, or fight off one or more enemies.

Their goal is to reach 4 lit candles along the way, during which they'll play another minigame to snuff it out before they can continue.

The big catch is that, following the first candle, Tinker will show up on the board, slowly moving up. If he manages to catch the both of them, it'll trigger a game over. He moves even during minigames, meaning you'll have to complete them as fast as possible.

...Sadly, I can't show that as it's not all implemented yet. I figure fully implementing the sequence could take a month by itself, but I did want to get the outline and base functionality in.

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That was most of the meaningful work in January. Like I said it's been a pretty rough month; at my job, some major work items were due soon which required some over time to finish, and there's been a looming concern about the company's contract expiring in May-July, so I'll likely be job hunting or relocating again.

The other issue involves a few things. My laptop fan is getting old and starting to become noisy. I scheduled a repair appointment but it won't come up until next month, so in the mean time, I decided to back up all my data.

While backing up my data, I decided to follow through updating Game Maker. I've been holding out on a version from 2+ years ago. While it was pretty normal at first ( a few code changes), and had some benefits (listing potential errors/warnings, a much faster method for copy-pasting tiles), eventually it started throwing errors regarding a local variable I was using across breakables, doors, and parallax layers.

To make a long story short, I had been using the same name GameMaker uses for setting the base image of an object. This was fine in the older version, but this latest build got very confused by it, and started throwing errors. Eventually the project would not load unless I went into the project files and manually cleared each instance of this broken reference.

There are a lot of breakables/doors/parallax layers in the game. And on top of it, it would keep remaking this local variable after I removed it. In the end I had to delete and remake every individual instance of these objects where a unique sprite was set, to prevent it from happening. That took up several days I had set aside for development.

Hopefully, it should be sorted out now, and I can continue development as normal. This year I decided to take a new approach by outlining what I'd be working on each day, to keep pace, and I'd say it's worked out well for roughing out all the level design.

This still leaves actually testing and troubleshooting the level though, and enemies/bosses/the trading sidequest/the board game all still need to be finished. However, I think I'm going to set it aside for now, and return to Chapter 3, where I plan to complete it's remaining rooms and cutscenes.

Thanks for reading!