Down to last three tasks, all prose related. One is a trademark of mine, an epilogue based on what happened. It is big impact for little effort; gives the campaign a weightier ending and the characters some closure.

Yesterday worked on the actual ending. It was missing some logic and graphics. Loads of graphics really, but I managed it in the end by reusing as many existing assets as possible. Quite happy with it. That might just be relief speaking.

Today got Release and Demo build logic done. Credits menu and asset licences are also in. Completed the last graphical tasks (cursor, icon, GUI stuff), finally done with visuals!

Testing revealed easy-to-fix issues in the save system. It reset some values in the world state when using the restart option. A save system which erases progress isn't quite up to par.

The project itch.io page will not take a lot of time to get together so if all goes to plan I'll get this wrapped up by Sunday. Last bit of overtime for the last bits. This better not carry over to the next project!

The name is still a mystery... That one is coming down to the wire too, unfortunately.

Cheers.

Half of the links in the thread don't appear for me. I'm seeing a grey circle with a white bar in the middle where content should be.

Yeah, that is really annoying. Image links from both Patreon and Google photos (out of all things!) seem to rot really fast. No idea why (and they are just fine for me in Firefox, but not in Opera or Chrome?). Will need to find a solution; trying Drive next.

Thanks for the report.

Uneventful last two days. Yesterday's testing revealed many new issues. In fact by the end of the day the TODO list had grown longer than in the morning. Could be demoralizing that, yet I'm unfazed! The finish line is just there!

Hard work whittling down the list. Down to 5 critical tasks, mostly small'ish graphical things. Should not take more than a day, tomorrow that is.

The initial deadline whooshed past. Unlike some, I'm not a fan of the sound it made. Friday is for final testing, setting up the store page and such. Next update at that time. Release hopefully over the weekend.

Cheers!

It's about time. Added a much needed animation to the beginning of the level. The characters appear from the portal. Very simple, but makes a big difference.

Testing tomorrow. More tweaks, fixes and polish too.

Cheers.

Worked on the settings menu and the level ranking system over the weekend. Took time off too, don't you worry (mom!)

The Beta milestone stream revealed some bugs, so fixed those too. Good progress. Now to finish the darn thing!

Cheers.

The logic works and the "special effects" are in. Three different enough endings. Polish is needed of course. I do think I need to sink a couple of hours over the weekend on a few features. That's fine, not burned out just yet.

95% done? Will stream about the current progress and release plan on Sunday at 17:00 UTC (Twitch as usual)

Cheers!

There aren't a lot of inputs, but might as well have them rebindable. The system is simple, yet effective. Will make a public repo for it after the project.

Many small tweaks too; going through the list. One of the bigger items is a ranking system for the levels. Not a complicated task, but there are only 4 (work) days left so I need to consider each additional feature carefully. Testing needs to be done too. Better not forget!

Cheers.

That's as far as I got. Spent the better half of the day on monkey work and going through the easy items in the TODO list.

For the controls panel I already have a simple keybindings system, just need to hook it in tomorrow. There are not that many important settings. Should be able to get them all in.

Will have to write the ending prose tomorrow too. I cannot call this 100% before the ending is in!

Cheers!

Mostly worked on that today. The difference is more noticeable with the mage on the right. One more expression for the pixie too though. Also tweaked things whenever something small came up.

Lastly implemented the corruption effects for the shapeshifter. This is the type of monkey work mentioned in the past. Will have to do the same for the mage tomorrow.

I don't have a name for the project or any of the characters! I'm hoping to come up with something soonish (no panic monster in sight yet!)

Cheers!

Just kidding! Added in one of the campaign options: disable graphics. Took only a moment as the simple level graphics mode was already there for testing purposes.

The real task today was GUI graphics. You can see the border on the dialog panel up there. Used them on every element pretty much. Looks all right.

Small tweaks and fixes here and there. That's the agenda for the whole week more or less. I do have a big list to go through.

Cheers!

Not quite... Good news first! All the levels now have visuals and they've been tested too. The final boss fight still needs an ending prose, but other than that the levels are done.

Contentwise the advanced options are still to do. Luckily those are non-critical features and can be dropped if need be.

Next week: polish and wrap-up. More optimistic now (90% done!). Surely this'll all come together in the end?

Cheers!

GUI sounds and initial attack sounds for the fox and mage. Tried making those last two myself and they didn't exactly come out well. Jumped to other things instead.

Graphics for two more levels.  Had to change the design of the first one a considerably. It was boring to play, but no more! Implemented an indicator for corruptors who are about to appear. This simple change allows for reacting to changes earlier.

Other than that, some fixes and more music. Finding good stuff. It'll mask the less than stellar sound effects I hope!

Cheers.

Spent the morning fixing and tweaking some prose related things. Then added missing animations to the tank and the exo-suit. Next jumped to sound effects (got maybe a third of them done). Lastly added graphics to two more levels.

Good amount of work there, but I'm not going to lie, it was a lot of overtime! Been doing that recently and I'd rather not. Sure, time is ticking; ticking away! Come back, time!

Ahem... Talking about the schedule, that's all. Less overtime tomorrow. Only going to concentrate on audio (and those darn levels!)

Cheers!

Playtested and implemented graphics for three more levels. 9 levels to go. With this pace I'll get them all done by the end of the week. That is just in time for the content complete milestone.

Also put in more music tracks and tweaked the volume fading. The big programming task today was making sure the build works. It seems updating to the 2018 version of Unity (which is apparently Beta.. Ups!) helped by removing the weird crashing bug. Great!

Had a few other scene loading related bugs in there, but managed to fix them all with the help of the debug build option. Editor of course does not have those same issues for some reason.

Still a bit unsure of the current progress. It does not feel like I can gobble it all together in less than two weeks, but maybe I'm just not seeing the finish line clearly. I can push the release a few days at least and I do plan to take a week off after the project anyways. I'll need that!

Cheers.

Have I got a cautionary tale of technological malaise for you today, no pictures either so get your reading cap on.

I took yesterday off to finish up my Alakajam 2 title PEACEKEEPER, so no work got done (Saturday earmarked for overtime again then!) Just for fun I installed Godot 3.0.1 and tried to get the C# support working. No dice. Linux Mint runs an age old Mono version by default (4.2 something), better update? Still no dice. Well, nothing broke so not a big deal, maybe they'll fix that in the future.

Early today I realized that something did break. MonoDevelop doesn't recognize the runtime properly anymore, basic classes are not found! Still somewhat green in the Linux business had loads of trouble reverting back to the older mono version, but finally managed. Problem is, it did not help.

At this point I decided to do that which I was not supposed to do until the next project: Update Unity! Apparently they'd completely dropped support for MonoDevelop so had to install Visual studio Code instead (simply called Code in the package manager... Please, Microsoft!). Seems to function just fine, debugging is ok, but for some reason it has the very same problem as MonoDevelop! Cannot find basic C# classes!

The Code editor (see how silly that name is!) complained about lacking the C# .net runtime so I begun the hunt by getting it. Unfortunately the ".Net in 10 minutes" page had no instructions for Mint. Tried two Debian and three Ubuntu repositories, but none worked properly (kept complaining about the architecture. I'm running 64 bit, what's the issue!) I even tried manually installing an older Ubuntu package with no further success. More research revealed that there is another (proper) download page for the SDK which does have instructions for Mint..... Great!

Funnily enough the .Net SDK only removed the error message, but not the issue. Luckily one other person had had the same problem before. Guess what. VSCode needs Mono too! The newer version of Mono! Gah!
Checked up the requirements of Godot again, trying to kill two flies with one stone. It requires 5.4.x, ok. Figured out how to download an older version of Mono (5.10 is current btw.) and finally got it installed for real.
VSCode works! Phew. Got a bit of work done today at least. Lastly booted up Godot and tried to build the C# Solution -> Error message...

That there is the story. Beware, for your productive hours may be reduced to naught when it comes the hubris of updating.

Workwise I did implement graphics for two more levels and found some free (and legal) music online. Free Music Archive has a search function for licences so finding proper commercial use tracks is a breeze. SoundCloud does just as well in that regard. Lastly there's the audio portion of the internet archive. An esoteric jungle at best, due to limited search functionality that is.

More audio related topics coming up this week. Hopefully no more technical issues crop up in the meanwhile.

Cheers!

Realized that trying to add in all the assets to all the levels in a row is not only dreadfully boring, but also counter productive. You see, changing the level layout takes more time with graphics as they need to be changed too so I took it slow and play tested each level first. Also added in yet more level design functions to make the whole process even easier.  

12 levels done, 13 levels to go. Will go through those levels a few at a time. More screenshots in the same place.

Did not look into the crashing bug today. Alakajam awaits! The theme is "You can't see everything". No ideas so far. 80% done btw.

Cheers!

The plan was to implement crude graphics in all the 20+ levels, but didn't get very far until I realized that the current level editor functions just weren't enough to quickly implement the assets. Improved the editor window and now there are quite a few useful options.



Got the 6 first levels done more or less. Should be able to crank out the rest tomorrow? It is dreadfully boring work though, so who knows.

HD screenshots

Noticed something odd while taking the screenshots. The Linux build sometimes crashes when pausing. To make things even worse there is no error message! The only clue is that it exclusively happens in the tutorial levels. Will need to investigate further. This is rather critical.

Cheers.

Drawing all day long! Some programming in between there too.



Already implemented many of these in the graphics test scene (E1M1), they look alright when colored properly in the scene. That's why they are mostly grey scale btw. More on this tomorrow.

Feeling somewhat tired of the project for the first time now. I only have two and a half weeks to go, though, so I'm certainly motivated to see it through. Luckily the second Alakajam is happening this weekend, meaning I get concentrate on something else for a while. It'll be fun as jams usually are.

That's the rest of them. Now there's a total of 5 tutorial levels, 18 main levels and 2 boss levels. Enough?

I've been thinking about a "hardcore" advanced option which would alter each level to increase the challenge. Should be a fast way to add in some replay value.

Also fixed some issues and tweaked things. Usual development woes.

Cheers.

Started the day with scheduling the whole week. The task for today was world graphics for the last three characters. Got them drawn quite fast including animations where needed. They don't look terrible as far as I'm concerned. Tried making a representative GIF, but no luck there.



Tasks for the rest of the week:

• Campaign (part 2) levels (6 more)
• Unique level assets (props, trees, buildings, etc.)
• Implementing level graphics (boring, but it has to be done!)
• More prose (currently only tutorial and boss levels have dialog)

 

Loads of work to do, that is.

Cheers!