On break

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!

Breaking the chain of not updating to talk about what I've been working on. As the absence of Poppin & Jupa here can tell, I switched projects back in April, to an older one I worked on for about 8 months in 2022. Main reason was feeling dejected a bit after the animation didn't do as well as I was expecting; been getting the impression that Tiera is more popular than them with folks lol.

Again I won't be cancelling it, or never working on PnJ, just switching focus so I can stay productive and make something that feels fun for me, which this has.

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As a refresher, here's the game I've been picking at:

Jumping into 2024 by summing up the last month's work, before going into a yearly summary.

The main goal I settled on was roughing out the level layout for chapter 3. This involves initial placement of level geometry, obstacles, enemies, important items and collectibles, refining room size and connections, and initial placement of characters for cutscenes and talking.

Enemies are still incomplete, so it's not possible to start testing them out yet, but it's in a position now to inform what a player will do in the chapter and allowing me to refine it.

Excluding subareas, here's the current geometry of it:

To reiterate, Chapter 3 takes place in Snow Machinia, the city on top of the Mount Glitteroam. Poppin and Jupa will be venturing through different locations of it on their way to the Bicentennial Ball.

Part of that route comes across a robotic crane at a factory, which acts as a mini-boss:

I'm pretty satisfied with how it turned out, being able to grab one of the adventurers and force you to whack him enough times to free them.

Part of working on the map is figuring out what else obstacles will need to function properly, and I started that process after finishing the map.

You can see a bit of it here, involving buttons that require a larger weight press down, stalactites that reform after falling, and making the platforms you can cut able to move up and down, similar to the hanging barrels.

There was also some private testing of Chapter 2 with a couple of friends, and their feedback has been logged as stuff to fix in the future.

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This was a productive month by my standards, I think making bosses and level design is pretty rewarding, though I don't think other people are able to share my enthusiasm for it. I've been wondering if I'm sharing too much and should limit these kind of updates to text. I'll think about it though, since it's something that helps me out personally in keeping track of progress.

Next month, I was leaning towards working on the chapter 2 fixes from testing, and working on the enemies for chapter 3. There's about 10 new enemies in total, while chapters 1 and 2 had only five new enemies respectively, so it'll be quite a bit. But it might take a backseat to some important new years resolutions I wrote for myself, dealing with other life things.

That's all for now!

Not as much updates for this month, due to taking a small break to work on Tiera stuff for a bit. You should check that out if you haven't yet.

As for Pocket Adventure, I finished editing the chapter 2 script to shorten things, and working on the very last cutscene for it. That led to working more on the cutscene editor, which had it's updates carried over from Fragaria Park. A lot of fixes have been made on the editor so that I can inch closer to being able to fully edit in it, the major change being able to add/remove images that show up in the dialogue scenes.

A more interesting change is that I went back to the first tier of alternate attacks to the boxing glove, and tweaked them all to feel better. More balanced while remaining unique, I hope. The second gif here, the cuckoo bird, is able to pierce through and hit multiple enemies. Jupa's charge will create a wavey projectile that stuns any enemies it hits, and Poppin's charge causes a cacophony that hurts anything near it.

Speaking of the "tier 1 glove alts", the chest for picking one of them is moved to the start of chapter 2. Originally I put it in an optional area in the middle of chapter 2, but I think having something new to attack with after Chapter 1 is a little better paced.

I'm starting to pick at the surrounding optional areas in Chapter 2, stuff that doesn't necessarily have content to it but is meant to tease at future areas/tasks you'd do in later chapters. One of them involves the third bandit type, the Cinmin bandit, and I wanted to update his base sprite shown here (on the left), to his new one (on the right). Little changesl ike this I feel like reads better and is more pleasing.

And finally some cutscene assets. Nab, the green guy, had a bit of a big head, so I went through all of his dialogue sprites and narrowed it more, making him fit alongside PnJ more.

At the top are some other NPCs... one of which is the farmer you talk to at the end of the chapter 1 demo. I debated on it and decided to just make dialogue sprites for all unique NPCs. I think that will help differentiate whether or not you get exp for talking to them.

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October is a month I usually spend playing spooky games and drawing, so I don't expect to get a lot of game dev done. Another part of why things are sparse is my job has been picking up and it is asking a bunch right now... I expect it to calm down in a couple of weeks. I'm pretty lucky though, budget cuts halved our entire team and somehow I didn't get let go. And thankfully that government shutdown didn't happen cause then I wouldn't be getting paid at all for who-knows-how-long.

My game dev plans right now are finishing up this next batch of Cutscene Editor fixes, use it to animate the last cutscene, and then continue picking at the tertiary rooms connected between chapter 2 and future areas.

But what you can expect for sure are more pics this halloween time! Hope you enjoy them.

For starters, here's a death+respawn animation.

Ledge grabbing, and Tiera being able to pull herself up, drop down, or jump off from it.

Throwing things now has a reticle that goes up/down automatically to indicate direction. She can also shake furniture for items, but doing it too long may annoy whatever else is inside them.

The hotel will have rugs, which, if Tiera stands at one end, she can throw to cause a curl to roll down it. This can catch some of the staff/residents by surprise.

Tiera can also crawl underneath it, if she prefers a more passive/sneaky route.

She might prefer staying out of sight too. The guests tend to be aggressive.

Last month I skipped because half of it was making fanart. Same with this month too, so this combines the two.

May and June were mainly on asset creation and decoration for Chapter 2. All parallax backgrounds are completed, all decorations are placed, the exceptions to that being sub-areas: the toxic tunnels of the mines, and the hives belonging to rock roaches. More bugs were spotted and taken care of. The autotiler was refined further. Poppin and Jupa do less weird things when squished by blocks.

* WHAT’S NEXT?

What’s left for chapter 2 is placing remaining assets, fixing the rest of oversights. Testing and applying some changes to a couple of enemies (making them harder) and the boss (to give you more opportunities to hit him).

Dialogue still needs to shortened in a few spots, and I’m sure I’ll find more problems in my own test playthroughs.

* WHY DID THIS TAKE SO LONG?

Along with taking a break to work on Tiera from May 2022 to February 2023, this chapter was when I started working on additional glove types for the gadget box and fleshing out the functionality of the pause screen and elements within it, including the minimap and equippable items, and overall changes to the design, like differences between Poppin and Jupa.

Basically I worked on a lot of stuff that isn’t directly related to Chapter 2; that’s why it’s taking so long.

* NOTES ON DEMO

My rational back then was to figure out more of the overall structure so I can make save files more consistent, but at this point I feel like its too much content on top of chapter 1 for a public demo. There are levels where I feel that’s more appropriate, but I’m deciding to work on that later, after polishing this up and starting on chapter 3.

I do make some timelines for how long stuff would take. I think I’ve gotten more realistic with estimations… but it’s not realizing Chapter 3 would be nearly 50 weeks of straight work. The demo level I mentioned, which is a side area you can explore outside the main plot, would take 16 weeks to create

.* RAMBLING

I’ve become okay with how much I’m putting into this, since it’s just something I want to exist.I don’t have a lot of huge hopes of it taking off when I look at so much other work out there, that look great to me, and yet I barely hear about them. I kinda feel like that applies to just people and life in general. I think all we can do is spend the time we have on the things we care about and leaving something behind. Some people go with a kid, and my characters are like that to me.

This post has gone on too long, I think I’ll cap that here, thanks for reading.

The big work on this month was creating an object that could handle auto-tiling collision blocks for me. I spent around 2 weeks on it but it’s managing to cover a lot of the stuff I want, albeit there’s still fine-tuning with slopes. Ended up making a lot of the tilesets meant for chapter 2 based around it. I’m pretty satisfied with it since it helps prevent what could be 1-3 hours of manual work, and instead doing it once the player enters the room. That leaves details like walls and decorations to figure out.

A lot of parallax assets were finally taken from concept art to sprite assets, which you can see a few of in the first gif. There’s still some left, like this minecart rail I want to put in:

I also spent time making more journal/shop menu assets, representing items you can buy and equip at different points.

The auto-tiler and more bug fixing ended up taking a lot of time for me, so I really didn’t get that far with making Chapter 2′s level art. There’s just a lot of small decorations I’ll have to make on top of more bug fixing and editing more dialogue/cutscenes to be shorter. My intention is to continue on those things, as well as ironing out more of the auto-tiler.

However I’m considering taking a break this month to pick at a different idea for a bit, so I don’t get burnt out on PnJ. I’ll have to wait and see though.

Today marks the 4th year of (very slow) development on Pocket Adventure! I didn’t get Chapter 2 finished like I wanted, but I did make a lot of overall touches on the game and seeing more people enjoying it, after putting out two demos.

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JANUARY

The year started when I released the first public demo, and received the first wave of helpful feedback. While I planned to work more on chapter 2 this year, I ended up working more on addressing aspects of the overall game and what shows up in chapter 1. The Tornup boss

But I did start work on the obstacles and enemies for chapter 2 here.

FEBRUARY

I scaled back some work to experiment with an animation, but I did start on the Rockroach enemy and updating how the Drill gadget worked.

MARCH

Another slow month due to picking up a round of commission work. Substantially I fleshed out the Drill gadget changes more, making something more fast paced.

APRIL

Dev work picked up this time, where I started to really address the chapter 1 fixes. The biggest one being implementing partner attacks.

MAY

More chapter 1 fixes, such as updating the minimap to be more user friendly and legible. Then, returning to chapter 2 obstacles: poison gas, elevators, and collecting ascentipede pieces to move a boulder for a puzzle. During this month, I also worked a week on a small fangame for my friend, Kunedon.

JUNE

Busier month, where I continued to finish up the drill, reworking the anvil and snowball glove alts. The minecarts were fleshed out more, and I implemented choose chests, a new way of collecting glove alternates. I added in the Bit enemy, and sprited Boulderoach.

JULY

Boulderoach finished, minecarts finished, and I decided to update Poppin’s sprites to match his current design. Major work was on drafting out the main chapter 2 map, followed by placing enemies and obstacles and setting up puzzles.

AUGUST

I decided to prepare for SAGE, so I was bouncing between making the base game nicer (fixed Jupa’s dialogue sprites, room transition animation, glove reacting better to hills and sticking out longer, and other nice touches), and making more progress on chapter 2 (cutscenes, dialogue sprites, more map work). The biggest change was adding in a new title screen sequence to make it feel more like a real game.

SEPTEMBER

This was the month SAGE stared, so I spent a lot of time checking out feedback and interest from people on the updated Chapter 1 demo, which was very helpful. There weren’t as many criticisms, and people seemed to be enthusiastic about the game, for what it is. Very good for my own motivation. During it I kept pecking at chapter 2: making the mid boss, starting the chapter 2 end boss, working on some in game npc sprites, and coding cutscenes.

OCTOBER

Chapter 2 work continues! Finishing up the boss attack for the chapter, followed by starting the grueling process of playing through what’s there, listing out every bug and issue, and beginning work fixing all of them. I got about halfway through that list before taking a break from scripting work, but I did tinker a bit with giving Jupa a separate attack style.

NOVEMBER

Programming work slowed down here, as I started focusing on some real life stuff. I did go back to finishing up design notes on the later main chapters; chapters 3 and 4 having their progression, obstacles, enemies, cutscenes, and map fully drafted out. I also did some more cutscene portraits.

DECEMBER Like last month, I’ve been busy with real life and commissions. But I did finish drafting notes on chapters 5, 6, and 7, so I should have a better plan on the rest of the main game now. 

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There’s a lot left out again, I think most of it was art work, fixes, and making things easier to work overtime for myself. I think the best part was getting to share demos, especially for SAGE, and getting feedback from people outside my usual place. It’s very hard working on a game this big and learning as I go along, and being scared a lot if people will enjoy it. So it’s nice to feel better now, though I’ll have to slow down as I try to focus on getting real life stuff sorted out.

For 2021, I would like to get another demo by the end of it, though it’s contents I haven’t fully settled on. Chapter 2 might seem obvious, but we’ll see. I would like to start getting original sound and music assets, finishing chapter 2, but I’d also like it to finish more ahead on the main chapters, getting their rooms drafted out and finishing up a script, that way I can settle on doing the sprites and programming and not worrying as much about conceptualizing.

Hopefully it all goes well, and things can sort out for me so I can have more focused work soon. Thank you for keeping up with the game!

Promo image for my game, Poppin & Jupa: Pocket Adventure! Please give the demo a shot, I’ve updated it!