Seems cool!

This looks great. Nice work!

Looks amazing.

[Custom puzzle size]

Custom puzzle size

For now, I'm using an open-source jigsaw puzzle generator which outputs puzzle pieces in strict rows and columns.

When I started out, I hard-coded the puzzles to be 6 pieces by 5 pieces, because I was using placeholder images that were landscape-oriented, and I wanted to reward myself with new images after roughly 30 healthy actions. But in my family, 1000-piece puzzles were always our favorite, so I knew if I was going to release this for puzzle enthusiasts, puzzle size would need to be customizable, and also flexible according to the puzzle image's aspect ratio. Now I've implemented that using some silly math that seems to work well enough.

The idea is that an "ideal" puzzle has a square number of pieces, starting at 5x5 = 25. I warp these "ideal dimensions" according to the image's aspect ratio:

Code:

width = 5
height = 5

width *= (image.width / image.height)
height *= (image.height / image.width)

width = ceil(width)
height = ceil(height)

This gives a number of rows and columns that aims close to 25, but stretches so there are more pieces along the puzzle's longer side. Currently I let the player choose every other square number up to 961 for their "ideal" size, so in theory you can generate a 1000 piece puzzle. Of course, I don't want to have to do 1000 healthy things to solve a whole puzzle, so I also allow a configurable number of pieces to be unlocked per "point" earned. I didn't want to let players choose 25 pieces-per-point with a ~25-piece puzzle, so I limit the highest choice according to the chosen size.

1000-piece stress test

So I finally decided to try 1000 pieces at a rate of 32 per point, expecting the game to slow down or crash. It's actually running decently?! But I don't have all 1000 pieces unlocked yet, because I don't want to cheat just for testing purposes.



Zooming in close enough to see piece shapes clearly does make the pixels in the images too big, though.



And I think with 1000 pieces, the puzzles will be more distracting than motivating. Maybe I'll set the limit lower, but for now I just want the code to be in place for arbitrary sizes.

Any website suggestions where I can upload gifs without downscaling?

Seems pretty cool! Hope you can keep the ambition in balance 

[Habit Puzzles (working title?)]

Habit Puzzles (working title?)

Gifs





(Sorry some of the GIFs shrank. I'm slowly replacing them with better ones.)

Concept

Time to put on my promotional hat and talk about a side project I'm almost ready to release.

It's a habit tracking game inspired by Habitica, which really helped me get healthy years ago, but I find doesn't work anymore because I'm not invested in the game mechanics. I want a gamified habit/to-do list app, where the game is more engaging to my personal taste, because artifical points and XP sometimes don't do the trick. I knew I would find a habit reward system more compelling if it revealed original content, but that you can't just chop most fun content into tiny pieces that are each a small reward. My family is ride-or-die for jigsaw puzzles, which are something you can engage in for short amounts of time without feeling deprived if you don't finish in one sitting.

So anyway--you just put your habits and tasks into it, check them off when you're done, and earn jigsaw pieces to put together. This has been a really fun technical challenge and I've finally got the core jigsaw puzzle features done, the hardest of which was handling piece rotation in groups. It's (almost) all implemented in a custom Lisp I wrote on top of the Haxe programming language. The code of the game itself is also open source but I wouldn't recommend digging through it yet. All of my shameful secrets are in there.

My goal was to make a new way to motivate myself to do important work, which I've known all along is ironic, because I worked on it lots to procrastinate more important work.

Now that you can actually solve a puzzle in it, I feel almost ready to put it out there for a buck or so, in an Early Access stage. If people are interested, I can iterate and take it a lot further. I don't know how big a market there is for this, but I do get some motivation out of it myself, so if no one else cares I think I'll still feel pretty good about it.

This is super weird and I like that about it.

One thing that happened to me is I got to the forge and managed to get the extra items from it, then I tried a bunch of combinations and didn't get any feedback so I was confused. It was only later (and I was kind of stuck) when I realized I could put the ingredients out individually to get told what they are, and it told me I needed a combination of 3. Maybe somehow you need to indicate this more clearly when you give all the ingredients--because I actually had already found a combo of 3 but not gotten credit for it because I hadn't triggered the explanation.

EDIT: Now I'm really confused. After trying so many combinations with the new items it gave me, the forge told me to make the same shape that brought me to the forge in the first place--which didn't work before. That's frustrating.

[Productive Procrastination]

Productive Procrastination

Protip: procrastination is very healthy if you do it right. This morning I'm procrastinating my episode 3 re-write by meal prepping for the week and cleaning up around the apartment. And now, by dev logging, which is much easier than script writing because my standards for the log are lower.

Here's a screenshot of me rewriting episode 2:



That screenshot shows my second draft on the left, and the first draft on the right for comparison/copying and pasting parts I can reuse.

I write my screenplays in Fountain, a plaintext language, because I need every one of my projects to be version controlled and proprietary scriptwriting programs like Scrivener and Final Draft, while cool, use non-portable formats that don't version control as well. Plus, I can do my writing in Visual Studio Code, which has the huge advantage that I can extend it with my own plugins. (When I started this project, the Fountain files were actually exported from an Emacs org mode file, which is a long story.)



For rewriting episode 3, I decided to try using the custom VSCode plugin that I implemented for the bigger purpose of converting the Fountain scripts to "game" code. (I think introducing this plugin will make more sense if I start with the example of rewriting a script before I explain that fountain->code conversion process.)

I call this the ktxt2 editor. The k stands for kiss, my custom programming language that powers this whole project. The txt2 stands for 2 text files in one--because this editor/the .ktxt2 file format links 2 text files together in one. The left side is a "source" file, and the right side is an "output" file. Blocks of source are linked to blocks of output, which can reference the source block as $source, or define their own manually entered text. So the ktxt2 file in the screenshot should export this:

Code:

Title: Flies Flies Flies: Episode 103
Credit: written by
Author: Nat Quayle Nelson (she/her)
Contact: [...]

/* Flyman asks to be with Miguel -- it pronouns -- etc **/




/* I didn't know you had a thing for BUG STUFF */

The 4 blank lines are because

in the source stands for \n\n, and the output file on the right has its own line breaks following $source which includes the original source block.

Well, ktxt2 SHOULD export the block above, but I'm always breaking it, so just now it was actually messed up. Whoops.

ktxt2 can also have complicated logic in an output block:



I used to be doing a code conversion like that (it's a regex replacement), but I made the right call to do it simpler now:



More on how those conversions work later.

[Some Parts of my Writing Process]

Some Parts of my Writing Process

I'm the creator and main writer of the "show". It feels weird to call it a show while I'm sharing it on a gamedev forum, but future posts about the production (which is mostly done with code) will make it more clear why a web series would fit in an indie gamedev community.

So, I mostly make all the big decisions about the characters and the story. I write the first drafts of scripts alone, and at that point I get feedback from my writing group, and my screenwriting friend group that also makes up the voice cast. My friends are a diverse group of people, and I rely on their feedback and ideas at the revision stage to make the characters believable positive representations of the cultures, genders, and sexualities, etc. of the cast. Sometimes this involves doing a whole pass of scenes or episodes with one of my friends as a co-editor.

If this project is ever well-funded enough for me to pay my friends to create their own episodes, arcs, first draft scripts, etc., I'll be extremely happy to share that workload and also center more diverse voices from the first stages of the creative process. When the story structure and themes are all determined by me (white, middle class, from Utah), I think it shows in the final product that while the cast is diverse and many authentic perspectives go into the characters' voices, the show was still born from one pretty privileged person's brain.

Which is the norm for mainstream TV/games, so I'm not trying to beat myself up about it. Just trying to stay mindful and keep growing. This month I decided to revise every character to better match the person performing the role. Instead of asking queer people to play cis/hetero characters, I'm going to embrace how lucky I am to have a majority-queer voice cast (including myself) and make the show even more queer than I planned it to be.

Of course, the writing process can't be 100% identity politics. It would be paralyzing--I would question every line I wrote, and never finish a script. I know this from experience in past projects where I was so anxious to be sensitive, I never got anywhere. When I'm writing a first draft I try to be as un-censored and messy as possible. As a writing student in college, I learned that writing a first draft is more like spreading manure (literal shit, but fertilized with raw growth potential) for future, better drafts to grow from. You find the good parts in all the shit, and you build from there.

I try to write in the morning, before news or media from the world can seep into my mind and set my attitude. I get my coffee and a snack, and make myself as comfortable as possible (blankets, a puffy coat if my room is cold in the winter, cuddling up with the dog when I'm staying at my parents' house, sometimes writing on my laptop in bed). Music. I took a video of myself dancing in bed to LCD Soundsystem one morning because I was blocked on how to write my second draft of episode 2:





I can proudly say that the episode 2 revised draft is done, and now I'm organizing the table read with the voice cast. $10 patrons will be invited to watch/listen and give feedback.

I like the new name. I like the idea of the psychiatrist character tying everything together. Until Dawn did a similar thing with a psychiatrist framing the story and getting more and more evil-- was that an inspiration?

Oh, that's a tough call. On its own, I think the first mockup is the best one. I think the depth is worth breaking the pattern. It's a hallucination, so it can be jarring and that will actually make sense, right?

The visuals, point-and-click interface, and the story elements you're describing really remind me of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream--which is a great game.

[First Trailer Release]

First Trailer Release




I've been publicizing my new Patreon to friends and family who I know will want to support it. It's kind of like mooching off everyone I know who works harder or earns more money than I do, so I can make this weird passion project a more central focus of my life.

I'm always managing my energy against a day job, so I put minimal effort into the Patreon page at first, planning to start by canvassing the folks who will donate no matter how janky it looks, then iterate on it later to try to appeal to a wider patron base. Who exactly is the demographic for this very personal visual novel/web series?? I have some guesses but really no concrete idea yet.

So I'm still thinking through what the patron tiers should be. For now, I want to make sure people who can only afford 1USD/month, can still access full episodes, because there's only one episode and the production value isn't top-notch yet. But over the last couple weeks while begging my family members for money, I realized that without a trailer, I'd be asking total strangers to pledge a dollar a month for the project sight unseen!

So this morning I re-edited the cold open of episode 1 together, and I'm releasing that as the first trailer. Currently, even though the "show" is scripted and rendered by a game engine, I have to manually record the "game" running, then use OpenShot video editor to cut down long and awkward pauses in the dialogue that come from part of the code being optimized poorly--I plan to write a technical devlog about the voice-over/dialogue system soon.



A bunch of people have pledged at $10, which I didn't actually make a tier for. With people valuing my work higher than I expected, I've started coming up with ideas for a $10 tier reward. One idea which might appeal to fans, and also help make the project better, is that $10 patrons would be invited to the virtual table-reads of episode scripts, and have the chance to give feedback while the show is being written. I have to ask my voice cast if they would be okay with that--and at a certain point, I'd have to set a hard limit on the number of people attending. But I think it's a cool idea.

Looking super cool!

This looks really cool so I'm gonna follow along!

One thing is that your title is almost the same as Tales From the Crypt, which was a famous horror comic anthology and then a TV show. That might make it confusing for people, or harder for your game to show up on Google searches.

[PATREON]

Dev logging is hard! I always end up petering out on updates after waves of inspiration to write about every component of the project. So I look back on all of my old dev log posts and they always start with "sorry it's been so long."  Well maybe someday I'll stop feeling bad and just write when I can.

Some news:

• The pilot episode is finished.
• I submitted it to the festival on time.
• It got rejected!
• That was disappointing! But I finally got back on the horse and made a Patreon:

PATREON

So cool that you're still working on it!

This looks super cool!

This looks wild and cool! I love Rust, so tetra seems cool too!

[Praise Bobble-Head Jesus]

Praise Bobble-Head Jesus
Despite getting my crew of voice actors organized and lines recorded much faster than I expected, there was no way I was going to finish episode 1 in time for the December 17 deadline for Midwest Weird Fest.

Then a miracle happened! They extended the deadline to January 14. To be honest, I still have to overwork myself to get the pilot done in time, but I'm offering my thanks to Bobble-Head Jesus regardless:



(He makes an appearance in episode 1.)

An extended deadline might also mean that I have less competition in the running?

Happy holidays, everyone! <3

This sounds really cool. Makes me want to check out the games that inspired it.