root vegetable boy
CHORUS MACHINE DEV LOG #1 - NOVEMBER 2023
Wow! It’s been a productive first month! I’m already feeling leaps and bounds ahead of where I started, and boy oh boy do I already have a lot to share.
For starters, I have full directional movement—I’ve only drawn 4 directions so far but working towards a full 8, and I am now Proudly Competent at fun GameMaker things like collisions, tilesets, parent objects, and sprite design. All that is to say: I made rooms you can walk around in.
Shortly after this I figured out room transitions, so Alda was finally able to get out of her basement. Everyone clap for her!!
Around this same time I also added a “functional” start menu: functional in the sense that it starts the game when you select “start” and closes the game when you select “quit” but non-functional in the sense that none of the selected settings do anything at the moment. it was mostly a way for me to start becoming familiar with drawing boxes & text into the game, a skill I needed to figure out for a LOT of reasons: dialogue, flavor text, general UI, basically anything in the game involving the written word.
After this I took a short break from text and textboxes (before eventually diving into a full dialogue system) by learning parallax backgrounds. The screenshots from these are probably the prettiest I have so far, I ended up showing off the final dialogue system in this room because it was such a delight to work on.
Out of everything I did this month, I spent the most time building and refining the dialogue system. It took a LOT of trial and error but I actually really enjoyed the process and I definitely feel much more skilled at this than I did initially! I have a system in place now that I feel really good about.
I also created my first sound effects (character voices specifically!) for the game using Argot, a vocal synth patch for Max/MSP that my friend William Blamkin created for his Master’s thesis. (Please check it out if you are interested! It’s pay what you want and open-source!)
In retrospect, it’s pretty thematically potent that the first sounds I created for this project are the main characters’ voices...
The dialogue system is pretty much complete at this point, and set up in such a way that if I want to go in and add more text effects it won’t be too difficult. I have a few goals loosely set for December: coding-wise I’d love to get a save/load system implemented pretty soon, and I’d really like to get the beginning neighborhood area in somewhat of a demo-able state.
I’m kind of my own bottleneck as there is so much art that needs to be done and I can only work so fast... thankfully, I have a friend helping me out with both writing and area design, so I’m not feeling too overwhelmed at the moment!
Thanks for reading if you got this far! I can’t believe it’s already been a month… I’ll see you in January 2024 with log #2!
Originally posted December 1st, 2023.