#developerlog

Hello, I'm Mony Dragon, Director of Development at Dragon Lens Studios. Today marks the beginning of my developer log journey, shedding light on my Unity development experiences. As someone deeply passionate about game development, my goal is to inspire and guide fellow and aspiring game developers.

What I'm Up To:

Currently, I’m working on a comprehensive 2D Unity template set to launch on itch.io. My vision? A template that's robust, user-friendly, and serves all 2D development needs. It boasts features like a dialogue system, message system, and saving/loading data persistence, among others. The newest additions? An in-game console and debug menu.

Unity's Pricing Changes:

While Unity has recently announced pricing alterations, I remain committed to the platform, optimistic about its stability and accessibility.

Join The Journey:

I’m starting to run out of opening sentences!

What’s new in the past 3 days? Not much honestly, well in my personal life. Just the same regular assignment hell and ignorant procrastination I put myself into! Now before you stop reading, I actually have great news: I’m finally making steady progress!

Yay! Yep, you heard me correctly, after all this delayed progress from assignments, competitions and stress in general, I’m finally making progress!

So how far are you anyways? In my regular posts here and in the CoG WiP forum, I’ve said I was about halfway done. This was not exactly right, but not exactly wrong either. After doing some calculations, I was at about 45% finished.

45%? That’s still a large amount. Well in coding and writing terms, yes, it is pretty large. Anyways, in about one day, I’ve finally reached... 55%!

Wow! A whole 10%! Yep! Though small in number, 10% is approx. a few thousand words, so I feel proud of myself! Also, looking back at my codes, I’ve finally surpassed 10k words on the current demo update! Which makes the word count from 33.6k to about 40k! 

Woo! Woo!

Yeah you’ve gotta start paying me now. Wait what?

This January, we've made significant strides on 🐾 Puppy Tasks, a .NET MAUI app designed to streamline your daily tasks with a touch of fun, and 🎮 We're Live, a streamer simulator game created during the Global Game Jam that puts you in the shoes of a Twitch streamer navigating the highs and lows of live streaming.

👀 Watch our journey, the challenges we faced, the victories we celebrated, and what's next for us. This dev log is just the beginning!

🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/LDZrin_-SZo

📱 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@monydragon/video/7330712830913645867

We're just getting started, and we have so much more in store. Follow our social media for daily updates and join our community on Discord to be part of the adventure from the ground up. Your support and feedback mean the world to us as we continue this coding journey through 2024.

Shoutout to anyone who gets the reference!

Progress? Yep! Still slightly slow for school related reasons (you burn out after writing like 2 essays), but another 1k words is getting done! I’m still around that 60% mark, so I hopefully wish I can get this update out this month! If you’re wondering, the story is still technically at its prologue, so this game is going to be a doozy of words!

It’s still the prologue?! For something around 40k words (code included), I honestly thought it would be shorter (oh boi how I’m wrong!). There’s about 8 segments in the prologue and we’re currently at segment 3! If you want to know the segments, here you go: 1. Dragon Scientist’s Lab; 2. The Scientists; 3. The Chefs; 4. The Detectives; 5. The Assassins; 6 and 7. The Criminals (Gang and Drivers); and 8. Socialising.

Well that’s long! Yep! It might take me years to finish this game, but I’m ready to take it on!

Just don’t burn yourself out! I’ll try not to! I still take breaks to keep myself from burning out, it’s going quite well, but I think I’m taking more than I want to. But don’t worry! My holidays are in a few weeks and I’m ready to write!

Woo! Woo!

So the standard fix rate per format joke is about $20. Why are you charging me?!

We are on the testing phase of the update!

Testing phase? I thought we were supposed to do that? Ho ho ho! I do not mean Alpha testing, I’m referring to the testing segment of the update! Also known as the ‘have you been attention?’ scene of the chef’s route!

Woo! Yes! Woo the achievement!

So when do you expect to finish the update? Next week I’m finally on school holidays, giving me a limitless limit of time to work on the update and finally release it after this on-and-off hiatus business. But I do hope I could be able to get free time during this week to finish this demo though.

So will you input another sneak peak? Shh my child, don’t spoil the fact that I will release a sneak peak soon... wait a minute.

So what’s your average wage? We really do need to negotiate this format joke rate. I’m a student with no job!

I’VE GOT A LOT TO DO SO IMMA MAKE THIS ONE A SMALL BUT QUICK UPDATE

BEEN BUSY, ASSIGNMENTS AND THE SUCH. ALSO PROCRASTINATED FOR HOURS BY PLAYING THAT BATTLEFIELD BETA AND ROLEPLAYING FOR DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS. UPDATE IS ABOUT 70% DONE HOORAY. STEADILY APPROACHING THE 50K WORDS MARK. HOLIDAYS SOON, I’LL GET TO WORK FULL TIME ON THIS PROJECT DURING THOSE TIMES.

wait the format jo- NO TIME, GOTTA GO EAT SCHOOL AND ATTEND FOOD

Hewwo OwO

That’s an interesting way to start off the log. Shhhhhh.

So it’s been awhile since you did the last log, what happened? I was originally going to do a ‘Developer Demo Update Log’, but then it took me a week longer than I expected so :V I could’ve, and should’ve, done a developer log in its steed but I was too focused on doing the update. Sorry guys!

Well at least you got the chef update out. Yes I did! And it was the most satisfying experience to do, after two months, seeing that sucker get released has finally rid me of stress... until school starts again tomorrow and I have to finish a minor update and also the ‘Detective’ update as well... so yeah :))))))))

So what in store for you now? Well I’m going to try finish a minor update, create more choices in the tests/exploration (as one of my followers suggested) and introduce the detectives, before the end of the week so I can get full-focus on the detective update. 

Also note: I will be away from writing for about a week or so next week, I’m going to a school camp and will be away from technology for that period. Sorry!

So another two months of waiting? Unfortunately, probably yes. Though I’ll try and beat my record with one and a half months, gotta get that work ethic pumping through my blood!

So are we reviving the format joke or not? Well you just wasted the potential by asking for it, so we have to wait for the developer log.

Aww. Well I can make it up to you, dinner per chance?

Are you just trying to create a character arc for me? I mean, might as well?

Heya!

Where have you been? Why haven’t we’ve been getting our week logs???Oh jeez, have I’ve been away for that long? In a nutshell: I’ve been over in Melbourne for around a week to do a competition!

Nice! What competition though? For privacy reasons, I’m not going to explicitly tell y’all what competition it was, but I’ll give you a hint! It revolves around alpacas and awkwardness.

So no demo progress? Unfortunately, everyday knocked me out, so no progress I’m afraid… for now!

Cool! Enough about us, how was it for you? A. M. A. Z. I. N. G. From underage clubbing (well something like that) to debating random teams from Indonesia, the whole experience was filled with craziness! I’ve even got into a dance battle with a guy wearing a bath robe! Which is slightly concerning! Overall, I was the 8th champion out of 1-2k people!

Awesome! Yep… so no format joke I’m guessing?

It’s 10pm on a Wednesday man. I’m tired. Ok, ok, we’ll just put a rain check on that one.