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[makerimages]

Shouldn't the link be http://officemanagement101.com/ ??

[Riho]

Oh my, I'm embarrassed
You're totally right.

Thanks for pointing that out.

[Riho]

I get a lot e-mails from composers (though I assume most you gamedevs do) asking if I they could work on the game and many of them are quite talented judging from their portfolio. I'm honored that they consider the game worthy of their time and interest, but I've had to turn all of them down, for several reasons.

First of all I have over a decade of music background myself. I made the soundtrack for my brothers game Don't Drink the Pink just a few months ago and I hope to compose some more in the future. But since I felt like the styles of music I feel comfortable with wouldn't quite fit the theme of the Office Management 101, I got a good friend of mine involved pretty much from the start. He goes by the name of Sonuba and you can check his music on his soundcloud page. Even though this will be his first time working on a game soundtrack, I personally feel his jazzy vibe goes with the game perfectly.

Secondly this game currently has a $0 budget and I mean it literally. I've been working solo on the game full time since the beginning, but my savings are running out and I barely manage pay rent these days. Having to pay for music, no matter how good it may be, is just not an option for now. And even if I had a budget, this is still my first commercial game project and I have no way of telling if the game will sell more than 5 copies.

Still, I'm very glad to receive these e-mails and I even keep a list of all the composers that have contacted me. I've noted down their details so I can maybe consider them for a future project or suggest to any fellow game developers. It would be more helpful though if you sent your default prices as well or if you'd be willing to do a revenue share deal or if you'd be willing to do a free soundtrack for a free game (hint-hint: my brother is working on a free point-and-click game called Kingdom of Ehcilc and has no composer yet).

[Riho]

The past week I took a break from the game development to do some freelance work, plus spent some time with family and friends for a change, but I tested some simple shaders today to create a day/night cycle for the game. Here's where I'm at right now:



Animated:
http://tulevik.eu/om101/om101_night_shader_20140503.gif

I'll have to do some more freelance work on the side for a while to cover my living expenses, so progress of the game will probably slow down a bit again, but I'll try to do at least a little whenever I can.

[Riho]

Cross-post from last weeks screenshotsaturday:


So what's been going on? I've been quite busy with the freelance work, but squeezed in a few hours of game development here and there. This week was mostly about random (or procedural) character generator, which would combine different body parts to create different looking people. I hope this will help me save time down the line from not having to draw too many animations, but still giving a variety of different characters. The way I'm doing it now is having the heads, bodies and legs in separate spritesheet files and a random combination will be picked based on gender. Some characters will also have additional accessories like hats, glasses or scarfs added by random.

For starters I needed a proper base sprite for both males and females. I had some temporary character art drawn from earlier, but I felt like those needed to be reworked a bit. After that I've been chopping them into parts like a true serial killer. The first ones for both gender are done now and I gave them the codenames Adam and Eve.



Many more to come though and I hope the character generator will also finally add some much needed variety to the game screenshots

Also here's a simple 4 frame walkcycle of Eve:

[makerimages]

Her right leg seems too far away from the left one.

[Riho]

You could be right, I'll try a few more edits before calling it final.

[jeffrobot]

I really like the concept. I'm a big fan of management games. Your art isn't doing it for me though. It looks drab to me. I think it's partly the color palette. I prefer brighter colors.

[Riho]

That's fair, I figure there's no way to please everybody. Although the art may not be final, I'm also not looking to do a total rework of everything. But thanks for the comment, it's refreshing to hear different opinions and I can only hope that maybe one of my future games will be more to your liking!

Meanwhile Hooked Gamers did a piece on the game http://www.hookedgamers.com/blogs/murraylewis/2014/05/18/office_management_101_is_shaping_up_nicely.html

[Riho]

So I made an edit to the walking animation.


Which one would you say is better? On the left is the old one and on the right the new one.

[castled]

Well, the distance between the feet makes more sense in the second one but it does make her legs look a bit stumpy. I would probably try moving the beltline up one pixel to give her longer legs?

Cool project btw!

[Riho]

Thanks for the tip, I think that improved the sprite indeed.


Also drew some more body parts, so here's an example how different combinations of them would look:

[Riho]

After countless iterations of Eve, I have fleshed out most of the basic animations and incorporated them into the random character generator.



Still only a few variations, but it's going to be easier to make more from now on.

Now I'll need to get the male characters up to date as well and get started on some AI tasks. I'll make a longer post about all this and what I've been up to in a few days.

[makerimages]

Really like!

[Riho]

Wrote a couple of articles over at IndieDB.

First one talking about what I've been up to with the game:
http://www.indiedb.com/games/office-management-101/news/do-the-work

And the second one describing how the character graphics/animations are generated:
http://www.indiedb.com/games/office-management-101/features/random-isometric-character-generation

[makerimages]

Hope this isn't dead..

[Riho]

The lack of updates is embarrassing of course, but the game is far from being dead. I'm actually really close to giving an early pre-alpha testbuild to a couple of people. I'll definitely write about it as soon as I can, but my time has been very limited lately. I pulled some weeks of 14 hour workdays for a freelance gig and then it took some days to recharge my batteries and get into the gamedev mindset again. After that I've still had some days when I gotta concentrate mostly on the freelance, but it's not as hectic anymore for now, so I've been working on the game whenever I can. I'll post about the progress soon enough.

[Riho]

I gave out the pre-alpha prototype to a few friends yesterday, so that means the testing phase has unceremoniously begun.

During the past month I've been suppressing the urge to work on the presentation side of the game (UI details and whatnot) in favor of coding the core features. This has resulted in a clunky and somewhat confusing early version prototype, but it's functional and playable once you actually understand how things work. There's a mountain of bugs and the todo list is miles long, but it's way past time I put at least something in the hands of people.

I feel like worrying too much about the looks of things early on has hindered the progress a lot and even though the screenshots so far sure helped to generate some interest, it's been a sort of a double edge sword, since I've had no way to verify if the game's actually going to be fun to play. But I guess it's a lesson I had to learn, with this being my first real game project and all and me soloing all the work. I hope I'll be able to balance working on the presentation and the backend better in the future.

So what now? I'm still lagging way behind on talking about progress updates on the related blogs, including here, so I think I need to get on it ASAP. There's actually a lot to talk about, though not much to show in form of images. Still a lot to do before I'm satisfied enough with the game to put out public alpha release, but we'll get there eventually. Thanks everyone, who's been patient and is still interested

[Riho]

I opened a forum to have a central place for all the testing related discussion and figured I might as well get some more people involved in the testing, which means I'm now gladly accepting applications for testing.

Also, I wanted to share this screenshot that one of the testers took. You might notice that he added a bit of his own flavor to it too:

[Riho]

I've been fixing bugs and adding features in preparation for the next pre-alpha test version. The current testers have done a very good job of pointing out some key problems and I'm trying to address those before adding more people on board.

Some of the testers asked for paintings to decorate the office, so I also added those while working on some related fixes.