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[awetos]

Don't ask me about the last devlog/game (Autotelia) It's abandoned. (too ambitious for me)

I started working on Alarm Buddy a couple of months now, really I started in Jaunary. I tried to do a YouTube devlog for but soon scrapped that b/c I was spending way too much time editing the video instead of making a game. I find that I'm extremely motivated when I write about what I'm doing and this is just my development log so I don't annoy friends to death with my updates.

I'll update this intro later with stuff about the game. Basically it's a mobile game that tracks when you wake up, a bit of an idle-resource management-sim-casual type thing, the kind of things I like. I just want to write about things I've learned and what I've worked on today, share some screenshots, maybe come and look back on it.

Video

Flowers can be planted as seeds, then harvested when mature. The harvested flowers go into inventory. Later flowers will be used to craft bouquets to increase your relationship with the alarm buddy.

High res video here:
https://imgur.com/a/YY5A2fN

(alright, I figured out the gif thing, my gif was too big. This is just the idle gardening proof of concept.)

I just finished programming the gardening mechanic earlier this week. I've been dealing with health and school stuff for the last couple of months, but once my health got better I just took off like a madman. I'm working on a shop interface now. Don't mind the graphics, I'm going to do all the programming first and then all the art. And redo all the UI too of course.

I can't believe how rapidly I've learned things once I committed to it. For instance, I made the little debug tag for myself to so I can read the debug logs when I'm on my phone. Today I also learned there is already an asset called LeanTween which does UI animations; for the past 1-2 years I've just been coding the animations myself.

[awetos]

Today I started on the shop.
I created the little shop item boxes, and then the bigger scroll view.

Then I learned LeanTween can do the cool shrinky and expandy thing.

(don't mind the x box is still floating, i'll fix that later)
Once again, art is temporary. I'm out of town right now so I can't access my tablet. I want to do all the programming first anyway so that I can test the game while I make art for it.

Oh, but you know what though? I did make the coin icon as a path/vector in photoshop.



It's amazing how fast and clean it is to make items as vectors. I can't believe I've been using photoshop x years and never touched the paths and vector tools. But now my mindset is, learn everything possible.

[awetos]

6/30/23 update
You miss me? It's not like I didn't just update yesterday. I'm challenging myself to develop rapidly.

Today I made the popup for the item dialogue.


I also made the "more menu." I did a little bit of coding so that if you're already on that scene, the button won't load anything but will pop up and down nonetheless.


A bit of the preview for the features I will have.
Also you can see how the lighting and shading can make a huge impact on the tree! It's just a model I got off the internet.
If I can drum up some interest, I would love to be able to commission some 3D models of various things for bg's.



A higher res shot of the shop item dialogue. Yes I drew the food, and I want the rest of the game to have this level of quality.

The buttons and button footer will be replaced by icons in the future, and be folded up easily. For now they're just words.

[awetos]

7/1/23
hello devfriends, welcome back to the best hobby in the world.

I'm finally at that point in my life where I'm writing a script to populate my serialized fields instead of dragging and dropping myself. To think 2 days ago, I didn't know what [ExecuteInEditMode] or OnValidate() meant. To think a few days ago I was too afraid of "broken references" (which literally never happened) that I would always program things to check for nulls and to do a find if a reference is not in the editor - now I'm like, f*ck it, the editor exists for a reason. I'll drag and drop.

I had a couple of ideas on how to keep track of the shop item grid, but at the end of the day, as long as I'm not instantiating a bunch of stuff, if it works, it works.

Today's progress is my silly little item shop showing things by categories. I had to go update Item with some new variables like a bool for whether it'd appear in the shop or not. Again, credit to my friend who helped me with the Inventory backend. He used LINQ for it and idk what that is. I was completely ignorant of its existence, and now I can't afford not to learn about it with all the item sorting we have to do! So I have learned that today. I can't believe I'm at the point in my life where it's faster to learn something new than to try and makes things with only what I know and am comfortable with.

The other progress is that the item footer can now be collapsed. I'm trying not to polish too early, I can come back and do that later. For now, I have to ruthlessly focus on what works.

Also you can see I have different currency types implemented too. The stones are what you get for waking up on time.
I hope you all join me in this journey to develop the best alarm game in the world. I have some ideas for the fighting part of the game that's pretty complicated, but fuck it, we've already come this far, lets make it the most complicated alarm game.

Edit: before anyone panics - yes, I've been doing builds consistently too, to test things. It's just too long to download to my phone and screen record and then upload and edit the video
Also life update... going to start packing to move soon, but I'm determined to stay on the grind and let nothing stop me. I have an internal deadline and every day I don't develop is a day I have to be a nodev.

[awetos]

7/2/23

I got it to load a random assortment of items (and amount in stock) for the stock, based on rarities, save and load them.
I have nothing nice to say because this took an obscene amount of brainpower, and STILL isn't efficient and clean.

[awetos]

7/3/23

I-it's finished? The shop module is finished?

I was just focused on doing the next thing and the next thing and suddenly there was nothing left in the trello.


Today I got the shop restocker and the buy options working.
The shop has a list of times that I can change; right now it restocks at 8AM, 4PM and 6:30PM (for testing purposes). Every time the scene opens it up, it calculates it again based on the list, so I can add or remove restock times in the future (eg. only restock once a day)

In the longer video, you can see that you can buy based on different currencies.
You can see a longer video at this link: https://imgur.com/a/cfIvW3L

The quality is marvelous on my phone. The build works. Can't complain. Fixed a few logic errors, like where I forgot to save the inventory after I purchase an item, but it's fixed in the video now.

It may be hard to believe but I might just be getting the hang of this thing. My mind is getting better at thinking about how to organize the things I need.

[awetos]

7/4/23

Happy 4th of July, everyone.
Today I made the health and trust meters. I also made the tester. I made "character profiles" / serializeable data, so everything is all hooked up. The character data will manage everything, and within that class, it can access health and trust and stuff. So that way in the future, if you have more than one alarm buddy in your "house", the love and trust can be accessed in all of them. The ones that aren't active will have their stuff decrease slower.

Increase trust by waking up on time and giving gifts. Health will just deplete over time (I make them "starving" after 3 days, and eventually bad things happen, like running away), giving you an incentive to wake up and take care of your alarm buddy.

I'm thinking about making each alarm buddy have some sort of rng for the personality, eye color, and stuff. I want each person to feel like their first buddy is special. 

Song of the day:

[awetos]

7/5/23

Cleaned up the code a little bit so that I can in the future, make the two bars sync up. Right now only the minimized version works. You can see it's at 84%, it has been calculating depletion while I've been out doing errands all day. I'm starting to get ready to move. So progress will probably slow down for a bit.

[awetos]

7/6/23

So, I realized why I was having trouble with the health bar, and then the detailed view. They are both reading and writing to character data at the same time. I'm screaming internally, you're supposed to lock the thread? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readers%E2%80%93writers_problem

I knew something was fishy. I'm lucky I can even think about the name of the problem, as I vaguely remember this from class. The progress I've done today is several hours worth of packing up to move, but I've run out of bubble wrap, so I'm tackling this problem until the caffeine runs out.

UPDATE:
It works now. I pause the previous meter, and let only one health meter be active at a time, and let them all pass around the character ref. Shhh... it all works.

[awetos]

7/7/23
Still packing to move. The next part of the game is programming the "use food item" option, but before I do that, I need to sort out how to manage characters.

[awetos]

Devlog 7/8/23

LADS!!!

You don't know what this means!!! Today I grew a new neuron. I learned how to write a script for a camera to capture a render, save it (not as a texture, not even as a sprite, but a byte array!) and load it - all at run time! No resources.Load, nope! This "portrait"/ screencapture can be stored on a server! You don't know what this meaaans --- this means my dress up game can have all sorts of whacky hair styles and eye colors, and I can save a dynamic new portrait based on the player's changes! I didn't think / know this was possible before today. My neuron has definitely reached across my brain.

Aaand here's another update from earlier today, I was just messing around with the UI layout to be a little prettier. (hah! You recognize the other temp portraits? That's characters from my abandoned game lol)

What I said earlier, means that I don't have to manually upload sprites of portraits anymore. Yes, there'll be a lot of work done to size the ratios and resolution correctly, but lads... my goodness... And at the IDEAL END OF THE DAY IS TO ALLOW USERS TO CREATE THEIR OWN DING DANG ALARM BUDDIES

The road ahead of me is long. After I have these dynamic portraits, I have to make the character manager load information about each character onto the character selection - ah, you thought it was that simple right? You thought letting a girlie eat something was just going to be about adding some ints to a stored object??? No no no, we gotta go backwards, we gotta capture a portrait, load that, load all your girlies, load that and that....

sorry I'm super tired, still packing to move; but a great man once said "if you start something difficult during a stressful time, you will know it can only get easier." Also some family emergencies IRL so I won't be having my summer break to be releasing alarm buddy but I won't give up. I'll code on the plane if I have to. Nobody can make this game except for me. I have to keep going. Sorry for the ramble, I don't want to subject my friends to non-stop talking about my game. and I'm dedicated to updating every single day.

quick update: I just tested to make sure it really works by recoloring her hair, and then taking a capture - yes! it updated.
and I find out the Image component handles all the resizing and ratios FOR me! So I don't have to do anything.

Also song of the day:

[awetos]

7/9/23

Well the movers emptied my apartment today!
I am trying out some new characters, sprites from my unfinished games. I can use them as different alarm buddies to test out the character manager scripts.

This was from Autotelia xD (my first devlog here)
She's too short and the camera just captures her boobs.
This is an easy fix, I can add a new gameobject and set it as the pivot point near the face and center it.

I'm still not working as fast or as much as I'd like to, but each day I work and every hour is one concrete step towards finishing a game.

[awetos]

7/11/23


I got the portrait loader to work, with a tester to switch on and off the characters to snap portraits of them. It's not too terribly centered right now but I imagine in the future I will add a camera option to zoom in and center the portrait...


So now the character display can show them now
But however I have to revamp the "active character" system because every single trust and health meter is like, "oh! so i'm the active character? Let me write to that!" so all three of them are writing and going wait, i'm not the active character?

[awetos]

7/20

Hi hi, I am all moved in. I'm still around! I've began working furiously again on Alarm Buddy. I will update when I have something cool to share. This project is not abandoned yet, and I have a tight timeline to finish it!

[awetos]

7/21 update (today is 7/22)

I finished refactoring and cleaning up health and trust meters yesterday, and dialogues communicate beautifully. There was a time 3 years ago when I didn't know what that even meant. "How do scripts communicate data with eachother?" Now I know more than just find component or dragging and dropping - I also know things like pass by reference, value, and reading/writing to disk (which takes a boat load of time and lag, hence why I changed the health to only write to the character file on quit and otherwise just store health decreasing locally/temporarily)

Then I began writing the character management yesterday using the newly refactored system. Today's goals are to make a dialogue to be able to add and delete characters. Finally, when I am able to select characters like that, I can do the item handler (being able to feed your alarm buddy)

I also wrote a script for YouTube DevLog update to talk about the rewarder, the shop, inventory, and all that. I definitely want to get that up within the next week or two. It's gonna be quite silly to see this post that I've written that and not immediately see a devlog update right afterwards; I'll have the public scrutiny of "damn, they said they finished the script how many weeks ago and the devlog still isn't up?!"

[awetos]

7/22

Allowed characters to set the active character. I still need to make a loading icon when it loads the characters you have from storage. I can also load it in the background and just turn off the canvas of course; really this dialogue will only show up in the inventory page and it's own scene, so not much else will be loading.


An idea for an eye color in the game I wanted to share. Ocean blue with gold rims. I have so much I wish I could tell you.

I'm going overseas soon, I don't know what the internet situation is going to be like over there so I'm updating this now. I can't believe I've literally been in my new place less than a week and I urgently need to go attend to something.

I had a conversation with a friend today about the friend-quests in my game. Later, we were talking about if we woke up earlier we would have so much more time to work on our projects. I told her, "What if you were my friend in the game and we vowed to wake up at 6:00am together? You could literally be my Alarm Buddy."

The real Alarm Buddy was the friends we made along the way.

[awetos]

Decided to create Devlog 1 (devlog 2) as a bookend before I totally restart and restructure my code.

[awetos]

Hi, I am *checks notes* unhinged?


I just spent like a week slowly going drawing this loading page. It needs to be pretty dark in case people open their phones before the sun's up.

It's not even done yet, but I did a rigging test and learned a few things, like how I should separate layers into their own objects and not just layers.

1. I don't even know if I'll use it (because my final idea for alarm buddies is they have mechanical wings and little clock parts and gears on them)

2. obviously aesthetics is the last thing you're supposed to care about when making a game by yourself
But at the same time, if I didn't go all out, I would also lose motivation. But at the same time, now, I've put so much effort into this, I'm like "what if I mess up when picking colors and shading?" "What if I wasted my time?" You can't win 

3. There is no way I'm making my deadline of "finish something and put it in the app store before school starts"

4. I want to make a male alarm buddy after this. Been tired of seeing the same girl since March.

I don't have / use Adobe after effects, so I only rigged it in Unity. At the worst, I can put it on ArtStation and say, "Hey look, I can animate illustrations too!"

[awetos]

Finished this loading animation which took like 3 weeks
Why did I do it?
It is beyond human comprehension.

Now I just want to draw the cute alarm buddies and various clothes for them, and not code anything. I'm going to follow my instinct and ~be myself~

more higher res here: https://imgur.com/a/A6v363y
I'm... going to see if I can still finish something in 3 weeks and put it on the app store, and I can just continue to work on it during the semester. Perhaps it is myth that "I can't work on anything if I'm at school / work" We will see.

[awetos]

ANNNYWAAAYYY~~~



Bitch you thought I died, surprise, I still got them double thick thighs

I created a new alarm buddy sprite. I'm doing the opposite - I'm DE-SEXUALIZING MY ASSETS 

I learned what creates the greatest delay in gamedev - listening to what anyone else suggests. The only people I'll listen to from now on are investors and developers.

Of everything I give up on in this life, I don't want to give up on my game. The one thing I really want to experience in my life IS FINISHING MY GAME.