Game Progress #3: Back To Drawing For A Bit. (Patreon)

I literally can't pull myself away from it, I'll have an idea then I'll have to do it *right now* otherwise my brain won't shut up about it or I'll forget what it was I wanted to do. I do try to write stuff down but I look at it later on and I think to myself "What the fuck is this shit" or what ever it was Louis Armstrong sang about.

The psychiatrist won't let me increase the dose of my medication at the moment because I've lost weight too quickly, which is about 8 pounds since I started on this project. It's mostly because I get so tangled up in what I'm doing I just forget to eat and the medication just numbs my desire for food in general. It's a double edged sword but I really enjoy what I'm doing at the moment.

As for the game progress itself I've pulled apart how text functions yet again, now I'm able to get things to automatically respond when certain characters, words and phrases show up, I'll use the comma as an example:

I just have to program the action once and that's it, less clutter to deal with as the scale of the project increases. In video games you work smart, not hard. especially when it's an industry that commonly has """optional""" unpaid crunch time. I put optional in quotes because if you don't agree to do it you just get let go at the end of the project and replaced with someone who will.

It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately since I've started with this; none of this is easy at all, it's incredibly difficult and time consuming. It's why I've always been self-employed because I like to put my time and effort into things that mean something to me, not because there's a pay cheque being dangled in front of me on a fishing rod. It's basically why I spent so long making stuff for TF2; I was just really passionate about it.

Anyway back to this; I spiced up the menu a bit. I didn't like how uniform and uninspired the main window was looking and wanted to give it a bit more personality. It was based on a night club in France called Titty Twister. I wanted something moody that worked with the neon signs. I was adamant on having a character that was a skateboarding snail somewhere in the game, here they are huffing back a fat dart, I was just going to go with a photorealistic snail, but having a helmet worked into a shell just said a lot more and gave them actual character, which is important because they're gonna be used for more than this. Overall it still needs some work but the style I'm going for is getting there.

This is something new I added just yesterday; there's an object that allows you to dynamically store, edit and call images which can be used later on. I decided to use it to make drawing tools so the player can draw something then have it referenced later on in the game. You can save whatever you draw to a PNG. I think it could do with at least one undo option, but that's another day's work.

I haven't tested calling the image back yet, so I hope it isn't an absolute pain in the ass to do (it will be). I wanted to keep it simple so the only colours it will use are black and white. Think back to what drawings on the miiverse looked like.

Anyway I think that's probably it for now. I'm gonna try and take 5 out of working on this for a bit, I was grinding so hard because I wanted to get a demo out but I underestimated how much time this would actually take, not to mention the countless headaches and eyestrain, I need to spend more time outside. I've been getting back into practising my ukulele and I have drawings that I wanna work on.

Sorry I didn't post much in terms of drawings in August, hopefully during September I have a little more control over where my interests pull me. Thank you all for sticking around! Here's something I drew with the tools I made just for this post: