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[Pizzamakesgames]

Ah! Finally someone recognized the geniosity of the dead project icon. How long I had to wait for that moment to come

Quantumpotato, my nomenclature might be a bit weird. Textbox is just a class I've been cultivating since forever which stores all the logic of my UI. The plan is to get rid of it and put all it's contents into the superclass I'm extending all of my states of, because it feels like doing it that Textbox way is turning a corner when I could just be at my destination right from the get-go. Excited to do that, by the way. Gonna report any fires I might have had to put out once I'm done with it.

In other news, I've been quite miscellaneously busy! As in old Pizza fashion, let's have a messy post about that.

Devlog Entry #9.17.10.18

Short preamble: I've been trying to sketch out a lot of stuff, both acoustically and visually. Let's start with the aural part.

I've been fooling around with Famitracker a bit in a sudden hunger for authenticity:




Also I've been getting into a VST called Medusa2 that I've not been using enough recently, made an entire track using just that:




And then I made another track without anything special or fancy to it, so it also doesn't have a video: https://soundcloud.com/pizzamakesmusic/idunno

Lastly, I've thrown the soundtrack of SATURDAYS on Bandcamp, mainly because I want people to listen to that rad MP3-Player track:

https://pizzamakesmusic.bandcamp.com/album/saturdays-soundtrack

Woof, now I've used up all of my energy on preparing those musics in a way that will hopefully make somebody listen to any of them and got nothing left for the visuals. Good thing it doesn't take a lot of convincing to make one look at a picture, does it?

[io3 creations]

Ah! Finally someone recognized the geniosity of the dead project icon. How long I had to wait for that moment to come

I did too!

I guess I forgot to mention it because after following the devlog (in secret ), coming across it on the main Devlogs page and seeing R.I.P., I thought the project was DEAD!  But then I was happy to see that it wasn't.  Then I realized the connection. Also, I just assumed that connection was "obvious" and that's why it wasn't mentioned.

[Pizzamakesgames]

Devlog Entry #10.17.11.06

Hurray, new and original content! Isn't that nice?

Let's have some words about that gif: It's existence is solely owed to arbitrary self-imposed deadlines enforced by social pressure. That's like 5 words I dislike in a single sentence, but since it lead to new content who could mind?
In short, at the beginning of this 3-day weekend I just had, I vowed to have a gif of a new area ready by the end of it. This not being the first longish stretch of free time where I didn't work on this game as much as I think I should've, I just kinda felt that I needed to get something other than boring old refactoring done, so whoever was following the progress of this project would have something interesting to look at for once.
Weirdly, I've been getting a pretty solid sense of what to do next in this ever growing game recently, so while not being done refactoring yet, still having to get some more music theory into my head and with lots of finished areas without anything to interact with inside of them yet, new areas were really the last thing I needed more of as of late. I did get tired of boring anybody to death with endless news about advances of the code and such, though, so I'm happy I somehow managed to pressure myself into creating something nice to look at, even though I didn't need it right now.
The downside is, that since this was kinda off my mental development path, I don't actually know how this woodchopper dude is going to look yet, which is one of the reasons why I didn't create this scene yet even though I already knew how the area itself was supposed to look, so you're left to look at a dude chopping wood that will eventually end up looking different.
Rambling myself into a conclusion here, I think it would be nice to throw one such new area into the mix every now and again to have something interesting to post as well as further the foundation of this game for the time when I'm done refactoring and can stop being afraid to code anything substantial in fear of using functions and the like that I'm still to rewrite.

Oh, also I made a song a couple days ago that was the fourth in a series of songs I made in my downtime at work and was the first to end up satisfactory:



tl;dr: chopchop

[Pizzamakesgames]

Didn't expect a satisfying result creating this character so quickly, but here we are!

Meet the Woodchopper:

[katastrophic88]

Ooooh, this looks good. Looking forward to learning more and seeing progress!

[Pizzamakesgames]

Spent the last two weeks sorting the voice notes that have been accumulating over the past year and transcribing whatever interesting stuff I might've wanted me to remember into my slightly less messy assortment of written notes.

Simultaneously, I got rid of that blatant Windows 95 window frame and replaced it with a design of my own, while also revamping some numbers in the process, to other, better numbers. Get ready for some hot old vs. new frame comparison action:

 

This thing went through a hundred thousand iterations during the past couple days and I'm very, very happy with the final outcome of the design.

I could talk about this thing for hours, but I think that's enough for being a boring nerd. Back to working on the actual game, I'm gonna wrap up that prologue already!

[Pizzamakesgames]

Week 1: Just begun and already too late

Hello everybody!

Starting right now, I'll be posting an update of this game's development every week from now on until forever.

But, alas, it's the end of the second week already and I havn't done anything yet! So instead, let's size up the current situation.

Let's run the current build of Skullz 'n Skeletonz.



Hi, that's me. This logo used to have half the resolution and a plain old white text, it also used to read Pizzamakesgames. I'm not happy with this revamped version yet, and it still does the engine fade to black which I've gotten rid of for most of the rest of the game.



The pizza is followed by an illegible title screen that is way too dark and missing an important asset that would normally be looming in the distance. Technically, this screen was already finished at one point, at which it looked like this:



The old version is much more legible, not only in regards to the text, but just wasn't a powerful enough first impression (also a technical nightmare, look at those fades), so forgive me for feeling the need to work on this a bunch still, but I'm excited to get this particular screen into a state that'll make the player want to dive right in from the very first second.

We choose the new game option and...



We get a broken loading screen followed by the start of the first scene that I'm gonna keep a secret since it's something I don't wanna spoil. That blue line in the lower left is due to me having haphazardly hacked in the inventory recently without accounting for changing palettes yet.



Next up is this scene in which I'm trying to give a big contrast to the previous hectic mess I didn't just show you while also driving you to do something by the screen shaking and the sound crunching rhytmically, hopefully enticing you to figure out what's happening. This is the first scene I'm basically completely happy with. I changed the way these responses are written after reading a good book recently and hoped they would give a nice contrast to the casual talk the main character is using. You'll see in a sec.



You'll get a little intro movie after you've got through some dialogue in the previous scene. This is one of 4 shots, and probably the only one I need to change something about still. You see, that skull you play as is called Joseph, but there's some great potential for immersion if the player were to pick his own name which I don't wanna miss out on, so that text is gonna change from "Joseph" to "yourself" eventually. The name is still gonna default to Joseph if you wanna go all like "I'm not gonna be renaming the main characters" on me.



This is the big one. The first scene to give you full control as well as the last shot of the intro cutscene. Your adventure starts here, and I've been stuck on this scene for a while, using it as a playground to try out a lot of different ways for the player to interact with the game.



Once I'm completely happy with this scene and determined a satisfying  way to interact with everything in it, and with that, the entire game, every scene after will be as easy to create as if I was playing the game myself, and I'm real close to be done with that.



That's it for this one. The next entry is due today already, so I'll probably continue this with another post of all the scenes that already exist but aren't connected to the gameplay loop yet, of which there are a lot, and then we're off to new adventures. Let's get this game made!

[KorbohneD+++]

This is looking very, very good! I am impressed!
Can't way to play it!

[Pizzamakesgames]

Thank you! Very much appreciated. Also:

Week 2: Sizing up the situation some more

That week went by quickly, huh? As promised, here's the currently inaccessible rest of scenes that are already in the game.

Remember those crossroads from the last post? First up are the three locations these will lead you to:



A woodchopper just going about his business. His hut will be enterable and I've got a couple neat ideas for his dialogue that I can't wait to realize, particularly because this guy wasn't part of my original draft, which makes me want to make him fit into it all by him not fitting into it at all ever so much. Also this area is supposed to be on a path that leads into the woods which I'll have to make a little more apparent.



A bridge which I have a mind to totally revamp because of dramaturgical reasons, and Trug. Who's Trug? Oh, who knows. Also excuse part of the window frame obscuring Yendor as he slides in, that's part of that haphazardly hacking in the inventory thing. Will get fixed momentarily.



A nice view of Bedlam. Yendor seems a bit big against the background. Probably gonna move him up a little and add a little something for the player to do here. Pretty satisfied with the scene overall, though.



Wander down that path and you'll end up at Bedlam's town gate. The text is glitching out pretty badly here. That stuff's gonna be fixed with me getting done refactoring my big ol' engine class. Otherwise kinda fine with the visuals and everything. Should probably give the player a little something to do here as well.



Welcome to Bedlam, welcome to purple. Gonna have to create the room behind this door, otherwise I'm good here, I think.



Bedlam's residential area. The game's first scrolly screen, also where I decided I needed to make a universal walking function that considers if the screen should scroll or not once you hit the middle of the screen and vice versa. Lots to be done here, even after initially being done here, as that's not the last Yendor will see of these sidewalks. Wanna know more about that shadow? Huh, what shadow?



Some more Bedlam. Included the fade this time so you could see how broken it is with the Bedlam palette at the moment. I was gonna look at that sign hanging in the store front but apparently that's currently crashing the game. Oh well, we'll get there. You can go to the right from here, making some secret event happen and eventually making you end up...



...at the marketplace! Meet Amok & Koma, the "bosses" of chapter 1 and last item on my list for now.  There's gonna be all kinds of fun stuff to talk about regarding what's gonna happen here when the time comes. That's it for this double feature. Hope I could bring ya up to speed.

I'll be back in 7 days. Possibly with some entirely new stuff as well as some fixed up and finished old stuff. See ya then!

[jb]

I like how the limited palette and pixelated background leave a lot to the player's imagination still - all while conveying a strong tone/mood. The new background animations look nice too. One thing I think could be improved is the character portraits, for me they disrupt the simplicity and ambiguity of the other sprites and come across as looking a little more comic (though that could be intentional).

[Pizzamakesgames]

Hey, thanks for the input!

That's an interesting point you bring up there, because these portraits are special to me in a way I can hardly describe.
The first thing that got created, back before I even knew this was gonna be a game, were two of these portraits, and every time I decide to create a character now, the final product feels like a new person with a life and a personality all of his own. Changing anything about them just feels like it's not something I can do, you know? I wonder if you're able to imagine my point of view a little.
I do also wonder what it would look like if your suggestion were to be implemented, though. Any examples or descriptions?

[io3 creations]

The issue raised by @jb is one of those subjective issues and will come down to personal preference.  To me the character portraits are perfectly fitting.

Not sure what could be done to keep the ambiguity.  Perhaps if only the characters were used instead of their portrait.  Or only their heads. 

If your target audience is yourself, then it's better to go with your own vision.  Otherwise, you'd need to find out from a large enough number of people what most prefer.

[Pizzamakesgames]

Ah, I think I get what you mean by ambiguity. The character sprites being ambiguous is more unintentional than it is deliberate, kinda like with old RPGs where your cutesy party members just looked like that because of the limitations of the resolution.

The backgrounds also being somewhat ambiguous is then more of a side effect of the way I'm creating them and something I'm trying to steer against as it's important for you to know what you're looking at by in order to interact with it.

You could say the character portraits are actually the only thing that is as defined as I'd like it to be.

[quantumpotato]

Portraits help draw attention to who's doing the talking, which helps readability.