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[Shadow64]

A Thing I Told Myself I Would Do

I've tried to put together a number of game projects over the years, but lately I've been kicking myself for being one of those gamedevs who never finishes anything. I sat myself down to produce something for Ludum Dare 38 and pretty much every thing that could get in my way did.

Since then, I've been frustrated very frustrated. I decided that if I want to move forward, then I need to start completing things. This TIGSource thread is something that I'm starting to keep myself responsible. I plan to update at least once a week and hopefully I'll keep to that schedule.

Time will tell if I chicken out.

I'm not going to say much yet about the game in this first post, but it is pretty well thought out as of right now and most likely I'll edit the first post anyway (that seems to be how people do this, right?).

Anyway, as I produce things, I will post them. This will include screenshots, animations, demos, music - or pretty much anything else that I can think of. I hope that you will find it interesting. If you do, please let me know. I would love to hear shouts of support - thank you in advance.

Right now I've got a git repository ready to go, my project folder all set up, some small design docs, and GMS2 open for business.

I've also got a project management excel with some basic tasks to complete and this was one of them: CHECK!

So here we go: COIN.

[Fromage de Soja]

Good Luck! 

[Trilaterus]

If I had a penny for every project I've not finished! My two cents on the matter is that us devs keep coining terms rather than... rather than... Ok I'm out of coin puns.

In any case you got this! :)

[Juliano]

Sharing the process through devlogs, twitter and so on really helped me to continue on my project, TIG community is very supportive, so starting with a topic I think it's a good start!

Game development is hard as hell.
I could not see myself doing it without the support of my friends and community feedback.

I'm really interested to see how this is going to unfold! Following! Good luck! :D

[jarnik]

Good luck there!  :handthumbsupR:

I mostly fail at keeping the main goal in mind, because I usually get stuck focusing on a single detailed problem. Also as a mostly introverted person, an urge to share my progress and communicate in general does not come naturally to me.

Things that help me: bringing in friends and getting their feedback regularly, preparing a buffer of stuff to share later, so that the stream of updates is steady, setting fixed deadlines for certain features.

[Shadow64]

Wow. This is all really incredible! I honestly wasn't expecting there to be any response whatsoever yet.

Thank you all for the kind words - proof positive that TIG is the community you all say it is.

I did some quick coding work today. I'm currently working on getting some simple text functions in. I can now pull all of my text from an excel file, which is something I've always wanted to be able to do.

While that is exciting for me - it's not much to look at, so I won't be posting any gifs of...text. Haha. I'm trying not to push too hard - the ol' "slow and steady wins the race" method, I guess. At this point I'd rather get it all done at a slow pace than gun it and burn out.

I'll try to start posting goals/deadlines for things if they seem reasonable, but I want to keep things positive and I'm okay with being slightly reclusive on things. So long as I don't stop, I think it'll be okay.

Thank you all again for such a strong positive response on what I considered a weak start. That was a pretty awesome thing to wake up to this morning and definitely helped motivate me.

If I can help motivate you on your projects in any way, let me know!

Oh! Some people might find this intriguing, but I wanted to put together a Spotify playlist of music that is influencing me for this project. If that sounds good to you (no pun intended) then feel free to check it out.

Obviously some of the music I chose is much beloved by a lot of people, so I'm not going to pretend I'll be able to hit that mark, but hey, it's something to strive for, right? 

[Shadow64]

First, I would just like to say thank you again to those who are following along with COIN. It means a lot to have people interested and I'm sure it will keep me pushing forward. So again: THANK YOU.

Now onto the update!

COIN will actually have a fair amount of text when it's finished, so I wanted to have a strong system for printing that text. I built one already when I started COIN as a jam game, but it didn't allow for something I really wanted: color changing. Basically, I wanted to be able to change the color of the text at any point in the textbox. You see...

So I kept working on it and...



I also added some speed controls which I'll later be able to control at will!



Allowing the user to skip through text they've maybe already seen, or...



slowing it down for an old character or to make a dramatic point!

Getting this done in GameMaker Studio 2 was no small task as there are a LOT of string issues with the engine. There were a ton of edge case bugs - most of which I feel that I have dutifully hammered out of existence - but I'll definitely be keeping an eye on it. While I'm excited that it's "done" I'm also fully expecting it to break somewhere down the line. For now, though, it's good!

So what's next? Well, I actually made this in a separate project so it's portable. Since I built it that way, I should be able to just drop it into the COIN project and get it working. After that, I just need to add some simple features like holding full conversations as well as changing the name of who is speaking. I also need to change the positioning because right now it's not where it should be.

Once that's all done I'll actually be able to play out full conversations in the game which is huge. After that happens, I'd really like to setup a debug text player which would allow me to type the textID into a menu and output any conversation. This would allow me to text things a LOT more quickly, so it's probably worth doing.

Anyway, thanks again for reading along and if you have any thoughts or just want to say hi/leave an encouraging remark, then trust that it's appreciated.

Also, before I go, I just want to give a special thank you to those in the GameMaker Discord that I've been hanging out in lately. Specifically GiftOfDeath, antialias85, DeathInc, and Juju were extremely helpful in discussing things with me when I got stuck. I didn't always take their advice, but it always helped to talk it out and I certainly couldn't have done it as quickly otherwise. THANK YOU!!!

See you all next time! Back to work!

[tylerfunk]

Looks good! I really need to figure out how to implement a text engine into my current project. That's something I have no experience with. Hats off to you! 

[Trilaterus]

Nice to know I wasn't the only one struggling to add text features! This reminds me I had plans to add shaking text, waving text, differing fonted texts... Yeah I should carry on with it ^^

[Sustrato]

Link your git repo? I'll follow if it would help with your own accountability.

Finishing things is super important. And LD isn't the easiest time to do it. This is a good step though.

Nice work on the text editor, having modular components for your projects can help a lot, and it just makes you a stronger programmer (much more so than re-hacking everything each time... not that I do that or anything).

[Shadow64]

Thank you Lugalias, Trilaterus, and Kris with a K for the kind words of encouragement.

I would also like to thank those who have asked me about the project or offered to help. At the moment I'm not adding people to the project and my intent was for COIN to be a solo project. That said, I'm trying to be open to things, so if you've volunteered your services, I appreciate it and will keep you in mind should that change down the line.

I'm keeping on - slow and steady.

Actual Game Text!

So it's nothing fancy yet. Or at least it doesn't look that way, but a couple of cool things are actually happening here. One, the textbox is functional. Very functional. The names are actually stored in variables and all of the text is stored in a CSV file. Even cooler?

DEBUG!

Yeah, I actually made this cool little debug menu which will allow me to check any conversation in the entire game whenever I want. It works really well. I just hit CTRL+D to open the menu and then I can type in the TEXT_ID for the conversation I want to play and hit enter. The rest takes care of itself.

Now the big trick will be when I add choices. Right now it DOES have the capability of incorporating variables into the text itself, but soon I'll be adding the capability to select the next part of the conversation based on a variable's given value. Based on how I've constructed everything, it should be pretty fast and hold up extremely well.

I know that text in a box on a screen is pretty basic to a lot of people and this teeny glimpse into the story is probably not driving anyone up the wall in anticipation, but I'm looking at it this way: I'm very close to having a textbox system that I can import into literally any gamemaker project I want - forever. That is making me a VERY happy dev right now.

There are a few more things that I'll be adding soon. I want to be able to change the music, add a soundeffect, change the typing speed without user input, and add some vfx as well.

Once I'm done with those things, I'll be adding choice boxes, branching conversations (as mentioned), and title cards.

If I can make all of that happen easily enough, I'd ALSO like to add another debug menu which will allow me to change any global variable in the game at will. That will make testing different scenarios in the dialogue flow MUCH easier.

Again, it's all very simple stuff, but I'm building a foundation here. Brick by brick. Onto the next one!

See you next time! 

[Fromage de Soja]

Good to see you keeping up with the dev and the log! 

[Shadow64]

Thanks, Fromage. :D

My goal is to post about once a week with some kind of update. I'm going to try to keep things in here spoiler free while doing that, but we'll see what happens.

Originally I was supposed to have a vertical slice ready for a few people to check out on 5/15. That deadline definitely didn't hold. So I've decided that instead of project managing this into oblivion, I'm just going to let things play out and base future dates on work that has already happened. Seems like a good plan, but who knows?

With the upcoming holiday weekend I should have quite a bit more done by Tuesday, but that remains to be seen.

(I feel like I've said something and then said "buuut who knows?" just about ever sentence here...but we'll see. )

Hopefully in the next couple of posts I'll be able to start detailing exactly what the game is about. But, hey, at least you know some folks get murdered, right?