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posts filed under: general

Dev Log: Sky Palettes

Dev Log: Sky Palettes
Back to chomping away at small tasks in Sky Sisters. One of the things I've been meaning to do is go back and make new palettes for the skies. When the players go through a portal that leads to more action the sky palette will undergo a big shift. This helps in showing the players that they're making some sort of progress, I think! Here are some of the new skies:

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I'm still using a shader to color the sky that uses a color look up table. I just load up a grayscale image of the game's background in Photoshop and then mess with a bunch of settings until I get a palette that I like. I then export a little strip of color that ends up being a 16 x 16 x 16 cube of color, and the game then uses that to colorize the sky in real time. I will never be able to make a game without shaders ever again.
art sky sisters
Posted November 17th 2016 5:37 PM (General)
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Exciting Web Application Gifs

Exciting Web Application Gifs
I'm realizing that I find web development (to a certain extent) pretty relaxing but also still productive. It's still coding which is pretty fun, but it's waaay less intense on my brain than video game coding. I find myself able to work on web development sort of stuff for 6 or 7 hours a day which is about double of what I can do for video game programming usually.

Here's some exciting things I've added to my Pathfinder character sheet web application thing:

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Got a sweet health bar working to show how close you are to losing your character forever!

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Tracking all the skill points for making those very important D20 rolls. Also I have the ability to add custom skills for all those knowledge and perform checks.

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Armor tracking is important when praying to not be stabbed by a dragon's tail.

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And the rest of the combat goodies.

The last things I have to go are weight tracking, and the spell list. After that I might add some more features like a game master or admin interface to see all of the sheets, or possibly a basic account system to track your own character sheets. My plan is to release it to the public for people to use on their own servers (I don't want to end up hosting a billion character sheets if people are actually using this thing.)

The fact that I can work on web stuff for so long during the day I think has a huge impact. I often feel like I'm not being productive enough because of how many hours of game development I'm able to do day to day. Since I can do a lot more hours per day with web development I end the day feeling like I was way more productive even thought that might not necessarily be the case!

I should talk more about this kind of stuff in its own blog post though, probably.
webdev
Posted October 31st 2016 10:45 AM (General)
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Pathfinder Web Dev

Pathfinder Web Dev
Progress continues on my Pathfinder character sheet built with HTML, Javascript, php, mySQL, and css! Oh boy I love when I have to combine five totally different languages into a monstrosity. It's working out quite well though!

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I've built some cool systems to save and load the data on the sheet with some jQuery magic. I feel way more comfortable using jQuery than I usually do for some reason. I think something about it really clicked for me working on this for whatever reason. Maybe all my time in C# land has improved my programmer skill levels.

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The thing I'm most proud of right now is a generalized system for adding and removing things from a list. One of the limitations of our character sheet in PDF form is that we can't have dynamic sized lists of things. Things like our characters feats, abilities, gear, skills, and especially spells all suffer from hard limits in the PDF, but over here in the magical world of javascript I can make a list be any size by adding and removing rows on the fly!

I even worked out a system to save lists into the database and load them back out no matter what size they are. The best part is that I made it totally general case so whenever I come to a new part of the sheet that needs a dynamic list that can be saved and loaded I just have to add a submit button that's tied to the right javascript functions, and away it goes!

I think this break from game programming has been good for my brain so far.
webdev yay!
Posted October 28th 2016 9:02 PM (General)
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Web Dev Side Missions

Web Dev Side Missions
I decided to actually take a break from some Sky Sisters stuff this week just like I told myself I would! I spent some time messing around with a web project that I've been meaning to try out. I'm working on building a Pathfinder character sheet that just runs off HTML and Javascript (and some other stuff to save and load the data.)

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I dug into a framework called Milligram which has been super handy in regards to getting a decent looking UI up and running quickly. Web development still feels super weird to me as it's combining like 6 different technologies into a single thing. Combining HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, MySQL feels like a giant mess but somehow it all comes together.
webdev
Posted October 27th 2016 1:13 AM (General)
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Dev Log: Remaining Stuffs

Dev Log: Remaining Stuffs
October is passing me by way faster than I thought! I think this month has proven to me that I'm temporarily out of juice for Sky Sisters. I put a lot of energy into the game toward the end of the summer, and then there was PAX, and then there was the post PAX rush of new features I wanted to put into the game.

Now sitting here in front of my visual studio window I find that I'm totally out of energy. There are some things left to work on still, but I'm not feeling that kick of inspiration to finish them. I know that I have to continue to work on things no matter what I'm feeling, but I also don't want my total lack of energy to show in certain parts of the work.

For now the remaining tasks are pretty simple except for more polish and bug fixing. I need to be doing sound effects which I might tackle if I'm feeling up for it, but I'm not exactly an audio designer and I'm not sure if my chippy sounding effects are really keeping up with the high res art of the game. It's easy to get away with low fidelity sound when the graphics match, but when it comes to high res art it just sounds a little off.

I also need to figure out how I'm releasing this thing! I have maybe a few options in the form of publishers if I wanted to go that route, but I'm still feeling pretty anxious about it. I know that Sky Sisters is a pretty weird game, so I'm not exactly expecting it to sell any sort of crazy amount of copies. I've had fun working on it though and that's enough for me for now.

I suppose this post was just meant as a small vent, and also as I wrote this I'm trying to figure out what exactly it is I want to work on next. I think I might dig back into the secret final boss of the game and see if there's any way I can spruce it up.

If all else fails I'll dip into another project for awhile as that usually makes me feel better, but right now the only side project I have that's worth working on is the new version of Otter that will use FNA instead of SFML. We'll see how that turns out!

I'm just constantly reminded that creating stuff is super dang difficult.
dev log sky sisters
Posted October 25th 2016 11:24 PM (General)
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Dev Log: Progress Markers

Dev Log: Progress Markers
One of the things I realized when watching people play Sky Sisters is that people need some sort of indicator for how far they've gone in the game, and what's coming up ahead. Most of the time play sessions went well enough, but I wanted to more clearly indicate the pacing of the game.

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I decided to change the pacing of how often boss fights happen. Before it was kind of an arbitrary and slightly random method. It would count how many "event bags" the player went through and then spawn a boss every so often based on how many completed bags there were. This ended up in varied pacing as to when a boss would arrive, and I didn't like how sometimes a boss would show up at 2 minutes and other times maybe 4 minutes. I changed it to be a strict "when the players complete X events, queue up a boss fight," and this seems to be working out better.

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This little progress bar indicates how far along the players are until the next boss fight. It is hard to tell sometimes if knowing exactly when a looming threat is coming is good or not, but I think in this case it can be a good tension builder. The players can also know if they just survive for a little bit longer they can defeat the boss and take the exit portal.
dev log sky sisters
Posted October 20th 2016 2:22 PM (General)
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