This is something I've been doing year after year as long as I can remember (like 2 years I think) so I might as well keep up the tradition. It's time to go over 2015 and figure out how much of a mess it was! It's going to be a wonderful trip down memory lane three months at a time...

January

To start things off for 2015 I signed up for toggl which is a neat time tracking thing. I only use the free version and I've been tracking things in broad categories, but I think this turned out to be a pretty good idea because I can finally see how much time I'm spending on various things throughout the day, week, month, and year.

This month was also apparently when I first prototyped the game idea I'm currently working on now! So I've already been working on this game for about a year... I don't know how I feel about that. Time goes so fast and I hate it.

Toward the end of the month I worked on a tool to use Google Spreadsheets to sync data with my games. I ended up making an external tool for Visual Studio that can end up parsing a google spreadsheet and turning it into a .cs file full of data. A lot of people seem weirded out by this but I guess when you're working solo having all of your assets embedded into the code with autocomplete and intellisense options is really handy.

I also was able to finish a new splash page for my website which features my game first and my blog second. I felt like a lot of people were probably coming to my site to find my games so I wanted to put those first and foremost.

February

February was heavily spent on the new version of Super Sky Sisters which I have... uh... still failed to release. I also worked a bunch on Otter and pushed a lot of neat updates.

(What's great about writing this post is that I'm going back and looking at what I posted and I'm totally rediscovering what I was doing that month.)

I also dove into more shader stuff for Sky Sisters as I worked on the background sky for the game. What's funny now is that I don't even know if this will end up being the final background for when the game actually does come out someday.

Not a whole lot else other than more Super Sky Sisters work going on for February, which in retrospect seems really nice. Focusing on one thing for a month feels pretty good usually!

March

Some part of March was spent at Game Developers Conference, and if I recall correctly I got super duper sick this year. Recovering from traveling and getting sick took a little bit longer than usual, but I did get back into it and continued work on making some cool boss monsters for Sky Sisters.

More work went into the menus and making them feel all neat and stuff with a fancy transition. Having a cool transition that isn't just a fade out and fade back can really add a lot of personality to a game!

Another whole month spent on one game? What a miracle. Toward the end of the month I was laying out the rest of the menu and hud stuff, like stats and hud options and everything a real video game needs.

Things were looking pretty good at the start of the year and I was doing a lot of work on Sky Sisters! But what will happen next? Will I keep up this pace or will I be side tracked down a dark path into oblivion? Find out in the next episode.

Work continues on this dice RPG thing that has been in my brain for a long time. I've been working on a lot of stuff but neglecting to post about it, but here's a quick shot of some recent progress:

At the end of the battle if any enemies dropped any new dice for you to grab you can choose to add them to your dice bag. So right now the game uses a generic dice inventory user interface that can be loaded with different sets of dice. The dice that the enemies drop are loaded on the left side, and the player's dice bag are loaded on the right. You can also bring up your dice inventory any time in the overworld screen, and I'll actually probably end up turning the dice inventory screen on the overworld into the main menu that shows all your stats and what not.

It's been a lot of fun working on this prototype and hopefully that continues for awhile. I figure once I hit a wall with this I can go back and finally finish Super Sky Sisters like I was supposed to a billion years ago.

This week has been pretty productive but I've neglected to keep up on my blog posts! I'm making pretty good progress and I've started trying out organizing my task list into week by week chunks. I'm trying to figure out the best way to keep my motivation up when I know I have a billion things to do, and I think just sorting tasks on a per week basis is a good start... maybe more on that some other time though!

For now this post is about using Otter's debug console to help run through battles in my current prototype.

I have a bunch of commands for manipulating the stats of different actors during the battle, and also some debug commands for stuff like winning an entire battle (for testing all that end of battle result screen type stuff.)

Also as I worked on this I realized that not a lot of people know about the debug console in Otter, so hopefully my next post coming up will be an Otter example regarding the console.

Some things are starting to take form in my current prototype. You may be able to see what is going on now more clearly:

Some elements may be familiar with stuff I've posted over the past ... year? Ugh how does time keep moving so fast. Anyway, I have most of the basic battle stuff down now and I'll be working on some more menus and such for when a battle ends. There is a little bit of an "overworld" right now but it's just a big grid with some monsters to fight.

I'm going to hold back talking too much about it still and just keep working on stuff to hopefully show in animated gif form!

Working away at this weird RPG-ish prototype. Now I can walk around a grid map of some sort and fight an actual monster (red rectangle.)

You can see maybe a little bit of what's going on with this interface for the battles more clearly now. This is an idea a little bit inspired by a bunch of board games that I've played over the years and I'm curious to see if this idea has any hope of working digitally.

Still got a lot of stuff to do before this is playable but I'm well on the way!

Still working on this prototype for some kind of RPGish battle game. I've been reworking some parts of the little UI framework I whipped up for it, and also changing some stuff around and probably breaking stuff in Otter as I come up with new ideas of what I need out of the engine.

Right now it's super basic and I'm hoping to have a playable battle pretty soon. I've been making a lot of use of YAML for crafting the data for all the different pieces of the battle.

I'm pretty excited about the potential of this idea but I'm totally not sure if it's just going to be really dumb, so I guess that's why I'm taking the time to prototype it. I don't want to go into too many specifics of what it's going to be since I find that talking too much about my ideas kinda erodes my motivation sometimes, and also I don't know enough about what the idea is yet...

So I've been working on this prototype some, and the rest of my time is still being spent on the logistics of changing states and addresses which is for some reason a giant pain in the butt. If I ever make a boatload of money my first employee will be someone to just take care of life crap for me while I just work on games all the time.