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[Thirteen]

@Xárene
Yes, the tree will be in the game and will be a location you can go to, but I'll probably give it some visual updates, since my style has changed a little bit
Unless you're talking about the top-down game with the black figure and antlers, that is a whole other story.

Some updates on the visuals and assets for you guys, been testing how I'll display the dialogue too. I'm not currently working on the shadows and lighting 'cause I'm really not sure how we'll program them, but I want lots and lots of light rays, cast shadows and all the good stuff (btw you can totally click the thumbnails to see the image bigger).


I'm such a weeb.


Those stones are totally not done, but I wanted to show you guys SOMETHING to prove we're not ded.

[throwaway]

Game looks pretty cute, something about that default hairstyle though

[Kersei]

This looks pretty great, you have more done than I thought, keep doing a great job.

[Thirteen]

@throwaway
Haha, it's supposed to look crazy and quirky, so I suppose it's good :D

@Kersei
Owwwn, thanks, Rafa ♥


Stones are now real.

And I'm oficcially on vacation now, so things will be going a bit faster here
Also, we rethinked some things and the walking and moving of the game will be more of a top-down, mechanically speaking, though most of the map will be corridors and stuff. So that's it, just updating it here and hopefully next post will be about composing or dialogs.

[maruki]

Gorgeous rocks! Keep up the good work!

[Thirteen]

Thanks, Maruki! ♥

Sorry for the disappearance trick, guys. We had some problems, Pepper ended up giving up on the project and we had to look for another programmer. I started looking through my friends, and no one was available, so I started looking on reddit and forums, until I found Diego, of GammaLateral. He has already published some games, so that's a good sign. We had to redo most of the code, but the movimentation part of the game is finally done, we have doors, stairs, running... I only need to finish some sprites and polish anothers. Meanwhile, Diego will be developping the composition part of the game. Here is a gif for you guys showing some animation and stairs action!


You can stop and turn at stairs, you'll also be able to run on them.

[Thirteen]

Hello, everyone, I'm back!

So, it's been a while. I gave up on this project for some time, things weren't going forward as I wanted, partly because revshare - which is basically working for free until the game is out - isn't really motivating to people whose idea is not being made, partly because I was lacking experience to lead the development process of this. So yeah, I put Octavia on pause for two long years, but I haven't stopped evolving as a gamedev; I did some jams (and won a few!), including some with the infamous Juju Adams, got involved in some bigger projects, like BomBear and Don't Sink! I also evolved a lot as an artist, I developped my style and got around to buying a tablet, so now I can actually do digital art and can stop pixeling with a mouse, haha.

Anyway, cutting off the bragging part, I got around to a great team in the GameMaker subreddit discord server, which I made Don't Sink with and with the launch of the game, we were looking forward to our next game. And since I'm graduating this year and I have to make a graduation project too, I got back to this little game, and I'll try to document it here both for my project and for marketing, haha. So introducing the guys here, the lead programmer is the illustrious Seabass and the musician is the magnificent Topherlicious. So, I'm trying to do this game right, so I started with a GDD and passed it through the boys, then some moodboards, and now I'm back to conceptualizing environments.

So, just a reminder for anyone here who don't know anything about this game and doesn't want to go to the first page to read it - and I admit it needs some updating - Octavia will be an RPG that tries to tackle with the feeling of creative mediocrity, which I feel is something we all felt sometimes in our lives, the feeling that our work isn't bad, but it isn't remarkable. The gameplay will be somewhat like The Escapists with Yandere Simulator, but randomly generated, more on that later on. Anyway, here is some work I did for the corridors of the college so far, in digital art. I'll have Seabass post it here about the actual coding and programming part soon, but that's it so far! Good luck us!


Here are some options and variations for walls and tiles.


And here are some arches and columns.

[Seabass]

The programming behind Octavia!

When we began discussing Octavia all I could hear Thirteen saying was, "None of this is going to be easy with Game Maker because it's single-threaded."

The lack of asynchronous/threaded capabilities definitely is hindering to most GM users but that alongside my dismal amounts of confidence in completing a project of this scale has caused me to prepare like never before.

How to bypass our lack of threading
From the beginning I realized having a school full of students that can walk, talk, follow routines, and interact in lots of different ways could cause some major performance issues. On top of this we needed to generate our world with tons of random variations that would take loads of time to process. Now you see when GM gets caught up processing code in a single frame the window simply stops responding. Dropping a few frames isn't a major issue but the game appearing to have crashed is an issue.

At first I attempted to write the world generation to work itself out across multiple frames with some code that looked something like this...

How not to do multi-step processing

Code:

// Create Event
step = 0;

// World Generation
switch ( step ) {

    case 0:

        // Generate rooms
        ++ step;

    break;

    case 1:

        // Generate corridors
        ++ step;

    break;

}

Now here's why that approach is horrible under-cooked lasagna. Say that generate rooms takes 15 frames to process on my computer but it takes 350 frames on a some other slower computer. This would make porting to consoles (one day in the future) a massive pain in the butt. The Nintendo Switch might take 2x longer to do CPU-based work than the Xbox One and generally writing code in a one size fits all style is ill advised.

My second attempt was far better and made a lot more sense. It takes this idea of breaking up code into multiple steps a bit further by providing a framework for deferred processing. I am now able to give the game tasks to complete. These tasks contain sets of scripts and a desired framerate. The framework handles everything else.

The way this system handles code is also much cleaner and more readable than my previous approach. Here's a sample...

The right way to do multi-step processing

Code:

gml_task_create(

    // Task name
    "world_generate",

    // Target framerate
    60,

    // Scripts
    chunk_ini,
    chunk_generate_rooms,
    chunk_generate_corridors,
    chunk_generate_corridors_cleanup

);

You can grab it for yourself right here for free.

I hope this post was informative and useful. I'll continue to post more GML tech stuff such as this as we move forward!

[haks109]

Just around to say this game looks awesome! I'm loving the pixel art and fluid animations you're doing