root vegetable boy
CHORUS MACHINE DEV LOG #2 - DECEMBER 2023
Woah, 2024 already? How the time flies! December is a really busy time and I honestly felt like I didn’t get that much progress on the game done this month, but now looking over all my notes, I’m feeling really good about the direction I’m heading in.
Astute readers will recall that in November I built a dialogue system. In December, I took this a step further, making an in-game menu available for accessing your stuff/status/saves/etc! Creating an inventory also meant creating my very first items, which, well...
I had to fix a lot of infinite beef jerky glitches during this stage. At one point I had a really weird issue where you could consume an item but only if it was the most recent item picked up... any item consumed in the middle of the list would crash the game...
Eventually it all worked out, though. There’s even special text if you try to cram too many things into your pockets:
The other “big” thing I did this month was start etching out the barest beginnings of a combat system!! (I say “big” because let’s be real it is game dev. It is all big. I also got a bunch of the script/story done this month and that is HUGE, even if I cant show it off as easily)
I started with some light testing of bullet properties and physics, getting used to handling objects in this way, and then followed that with establishing how player movement and direction works in combat. In retrospect I probably should’ve flipped the order of these, but I stopped working on the bullets pretty quickly when I realized where my attention was needed, and everything is working out okay so far!
So I haven’t actually combined the bullets + aiming into actual shooting mechanics yet. This is a big goal for January, I’m trying to whip up some combat prototypes ASAP so I can make sure the game is Engaging and Juicy and Fun 2 Play.
I really like how the aiming looks and feels with a mouse, but there is some amount of awkwardness when moving from a non-combat area (where WASD dictates your direction) into a combat area (where you suddenly have your direction dictated by your cursor coordinates). Maybe it’s because I use a trackpad but I am always thrown off when moving from non-combat to combat… interestingly enough, combat to non-combat doesn’t stand out so much. As always, the list of things to continue testing is ever-growing!
This next month I really want to start focusing in on the combat. Previously I have been tackling systems that scared me less... something about coding combat interactions is just insanely intimidating to me. I’m feeling a lot more confident now that I have a dialogue and an inventory system under my belt, so I want to tackle this next challenge soon. I don’t want to get too deep into the art or sound until I’m certain I have a good mechanical foundation in place!
Maybe next month I’ll have some extremely rough playtests…? But who knows!
See you in February!
Originally posted January 1st, 2024.