Developer Diary 24 - The buying Experience (Patreon)

Now that the rough outline for jobs has been implemented, I have begun work planning for the opposite of earning money: spending it!

In my head this game was always meant to be fairly simulator-like, so I am trying to get the experience as close as possible to reality as I can. This means that each buying situation is meant to be unique.

Some of these experiences are easier to capture, and I will be starting by focusing on two: tanning and hair salon.

The tanning salon is meant to give you the option to spend some time in the machine tanning your body. Since tanning takes time in real life, you cannot simply get the darkest tan right away, you need to build it up and also keep up your tan, or you will gradually get pale again. There will also be an option to get pale faster, but I haven’t worked out the details for that yet. Perhaps this should be a feature for some goth location, where you spend some time in a coffin or something :p

The hair salon is a little more complex. I had the idea for a long time to implement a proper hair growing system, with different ‘stages’ of length. I have figured out all the details (will remain a secret for now) and implemented the code for the growth. This means your hair will grow as you play, and you are not able to immediately have very long hair, if this is what you want for your character. Each length will have a few different styles to choose from, giving you plenty of options to work with. When you go to the hairdresser you can choose between cutting, styling and coloring. You can also buy a hair-growth serum which will boost your hair growth quite a bit.

On another note, I have discovered a free shader in the marketplace that allows me to color graphics using code. This allows me to add a lot more hair colors without inflating the file size of the game. This technique can also be used for clothing if I can figure out how to easily render multiple colors using this technique. This is perhaps not possible and thus clothes might remain colored sprites. I will have to experiment, but for the most part this is very promising. The hair sprites will take up 10 times less space then they do now, which is great.

Finally, I have spent most of today adding small but important bits of code, including code that allows me to move the character around on the screen. This is actually a lot more difficult than you think because of how complex the player character really is (it consists of over 50 separate parts) and not everything is drawn in the same way. Specifically the eyes and skin tones have given me issues as I work through figuring this out. Once it is implemented though, I can lower the character for specific situations (for example: sitting in the chair at the hairdresser).

Thank you for the support as always and I will see you next week.

~Albatross