Rebel Does Stuff

Another example of what I’ve been working on through this Zenva Unity course.  It’s Frogger...but I used a Spider so I’m calling it Spoder.

I’ll give everyone something more exciting than text this week.  This week’s Zenva course was making Pong that could be played by 2 people.  Such excite, very excite?

I mean I’m learning, so that’s good.

It’s been a while since I caught everyone up, so let’s do that again.

-Comic Tea Party is going to be getting a version that’s a week long.  My hope with this addition is that people in bad times zones for Thursday can join and that people get another opportunity to have their comic spotlighted.  However, it’s obviously a big change with lots of back end work, so I’ve been stressing and working on that.

-Rebel of All Trades has been continuing, although I’ve made the decision to drop lit analysis posts after this coming week.  This is in an effort to make myself a bit more time for fiction writing.

-I’ve been continuing to do those Unity courses I’ve mentioned last week.  Nothing to report on that front other than I learned how to magically detect screen size and stop a ship from traveling off to its doom.

-Other than these, I’ve actually been trying to rework my priorities and schedule a bit more.  I’ve been in a bit of a funk feeling sorry for myself and the whole “what’s the use spiel.”  Usually when that happens it means I’m overdue for a rehashing of my priorities so I can make sure I keep working on projects I’m passionate about.  Changing the schedule is a bit difficult, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel where this is concerned.

So with School of Zenterianexius out, you may be asking, Rebel, what’s next?  Or ya know, you don’t care and are here for some reason, but whatever.  I’m gonna catch you up on all my projects and stuff I’ve been doing the last month or two with SoZ being released.

-As per usual, I’ve been hosting Comic Tea Party.  I made the decision a few months ago to move CTP to its own Discord server, so I spent a lot of August setting all that up, getting bots to work, and so forth.  The move was made at the beginning of this month.  New things are coming on that front hopefully, but another part of the move involved redoing the website.  It’s not the best persay, but I like how it turned out for what I’m able to do in regards to my own skills and Tumblr site limitations.

-Still just running my blog, Rebel of All Trades.  Nothing new there, other than my webcomic reviews have moved there now with the shut down of StArt Faire.

-Working on writing stuff, none of which I want to reveal.  Suffice to say my fingers are sore from writing intensely.  And my brain is sore from thinking intensely.

-Game wise I’ve been prepping for my next game.  However, I want to learn how to do 3d games, and thanks to Humble Bundle having a bunch of Unity stuff in a bundle, I am now able to do that.  In particular, I’m working through a Zenva course set that was included in the bundle.  Still on the first course, but you can see my dumb platformer level progress here.

I am a week late mentioning it on here, but oh well.

Yes, friends.  The game is, in fact, released!  I pulled out the stops to get it done super early, so I hope that you’ll download and enjoy~!

Like I mentioned last post, a lot of my time game dev wise has been devoted to beta testing.  I’m through testing the first four chapters, and I’ve finished a good number of edits needed for Chapter 5.

Suffice to say, I think I’m track to roll out the game some time in October at the latest.

Meanwhile on other fronts, I’m prepping stuff to start livestreaming games (hopefully if I don’t shy out).  I’m also looking to re-do a few of my logos for other things as well.  Hoping everything goes smooth on that front.

Yes, yes I know it’s been a while since I updated this progress blog.  Things happened, life got busy.  I’ll run you through what’s been going on.

First off, after a 2 year run we’ve decided to shut down StArt Faire.  You can view the Issue 28 here.  As you can imagine, there was lots of shut down work to do in terms of extra stuff.  With the issue out, I can say almost everything is done.  However, there is still a single matter that needs to be addressed, and I’ve got a bit of work to do to fix our server up for general webcomic chat use.

With StArt Faire shutting down, I’ve also been contending with Comic Tea Party.  The plans are to grow the event, but I need to figure out a webhost situation for it and ya know, code a new website in general.  I started it, but it’s slow going because of time and because I’m trying out CSS Grid which I’ve never used before.  There is also an issue involving the server which is...a lot of work and probably moved up in the priority bag.  I also need to re-do my Twitter schedule and adjust to that and ugh.  Ugh I say.

On the down-low, I’m also kind of taking on a Twitter chat, so that’s an adjustment that’s been adding stress to my life.

I have been beta testing SoZ.  However, beta testing basically means there is no new content for the game.  I thankfully finished the midway boss today, so I guess I’m halfway through the beta test?  I don’t want to make release promises for the game though.  It’ll definitely be before the year is out though.  So that’s exciting.

There are a few other projects that I’m trying to do and have to keep tabling.  And just...my life is a chaotic mess right now. :”D

The library.

A major change occurred.  In that I was going to do random encounters (despite disliking them myself), got fed up with trying to pick good step encounter averages, and decided I’d just do on-map encounters.  I made it somewhat easy asset wise on myself to be honest.  But yeah, that’s way different than I intended a week ago.

Other than that, I’ve been busting my butt every free moment I get this past week.  I’m....actually mostly done with my map sweeps to be honest.  I have the last chapter’s findable items to do, and then a season’s dungeons several things to do.  However, despite that vagueness I expect I’ll be able to finish up everything next week (assuming nothing comes up).

As you can potentially see from these screenshots, I’ve gotten a lot of work done.  A lot, a lot.  All the enemies are fully created + troops.  All the Skills are working and so forth.  The states are also ready to go.  The only thing combat wise I need to do (until I decide what changes need to be made during testing) is put the troops on the maps.

However, I’ve decided to be efficient about my maps...in that I’m aiming to make a single sweep.  In order to make this single sweep though, I also need to have my Armors and Weapons planned out, implemented, and decided where to go so I can hide them.

As far as that part goes, I am almost through the planning stage.  I expect the database implementation stage will take a day of work.  From there, it should be decent simple to put on the map?

If you follow my dev map, basically I’m combining the combat and items part so I can do them both at once (https://illimitablegalaxies.weebly.com/soz.html).  During my sweep I’m probably going to also tackle the extras with the map improvements as far as effects go.

Beyond that there’s still more to be done.  Most of the characters need their skill formulas inputted (such fun very fun).  I also have to fine-tune my states, because while I believe I implemented the what they do, I haven’t implemented the turn wear off shenanigans.

After that, it’s going to be a tedium of setting up the maps to be combat ready.

Oh joy.

So yeah I didn’t update last week.  Why?  I was working so hard and just plum forgot.  Now that I’ve told that lie, the truth is I had a mush week because of the StArt Faire issue release.  I did a few things, but mostly I was mush.

This week I unfortunately don’t have much to show.  Oh, I worked on the game.  I definitely worked on it.  What I did was a lot of math and planning with numbers.  Math does not make a fun visual.  I’ve started implementing the monsters though.  In the sense of getting their stats and stuff all setup.  So yaaay?  There’s gonna be more weeks of this I’m afraid though.  Numbers and planning that don’t make for great screenshots.  And then more weeks.  At some point I will be doing map tweaking so screenshots then.

I’m kind of in shock right now.  I didn’t think I would be able to today, but I pushed through everything and managed to accomplish the implausible.

The game is theoretically playable.  It doesn’t have combat implemented yet or items or anything like that.  But theoretically you could play it right now, get through all the cutscenes and puzzles, and reach the end of the game. (Emphasis on theoretical cause I have yet to do a thorough test all the way through).

This is....man.  Like, at the beginning of this year there was so much left to do.  I just...I’m in awe.  I’m honestly in awe.  The combat is gonna take me all summer to implement probably.  But just the sheer fact that I’ve managed to get all the cutscenes done is amazing.

I did not make as much game progress as I would’ve liked today.  Part of it is love energy due to having to take one of my cats to the vet after 4 hours of sleep.  The other part of it is I decided to add a smidgen extra work to the end.

The two major things I did finish were the first part of the ending cutscenes and editing the sprite things that I’ve put off a year as far as editing goes.

I’ve had free-time this week, sort of.  Either way, I powered through game work over the last few days, enough to have an extra update.  I’ve accomplished planning out the character select screen, the opening, and then the starter scenes.  Here you will see the new opening to the game.

The character select still needs to be worked on, but CalimonGraal (who made the title card and face portraits) is generously going to make me images for the character select to use.  Once I have those, I will revisit that part.