2023-04-30:
Quote from last entry: "And now I'm reworking the race functions, to make the NPC characters know how to stay on the road while driving on bridges over water. Gotta continue finishing this in the morning tomorrow."
my bitches. i fixed this now.
Plus continued on the intro.
Plus made character sounds/noises
2023-04-29: Various things
I finally made a bugfree method for lifting the player back up to land when drowning in the water. Or, it works everywhere except in the intro, apparently...
And now I'm reworking the race functions, to make the NPC characters know how to stay on the road while driving on bridges over water. Gotta continue finishing this in the morning tomorrow.
And also, I got a two months old idea of how to make my roads not blocky looking but naturally looking, even though they're being mathematically generated on the fly, working after just keeping it in my head.
2023-04-28: Music
Made music and sounds!
2023-04-27: creating the game
still on it man
2023-04-26: creating the game
i'm actually doing it now
2023-04-25: Structuring code
continuing the never ending structuring of code
2023-04-24: Structuring code
and more
2023-04-23: Made buttons for mobile
yes
2023-04-22: Planned more things, wrote some story, programmed sum things
Planned more things, wrote some story, programmed sum things
2023-04-21: Finishing the story, and planning some programming things
I have to structure things before I go on to the gameplay. I have a lot programming to do so I have to plan it well, and then I also have to do it.
2023-04-20: Putting the story together (fivece again)
No character to focus on today.
Now I'm done with the cooking. Time to sprinkle on some salt!
(This means, I have done all the hard work putting together the story to make it understandable and cohesive. Now I will add fun stuff to spice it up. I have a lot of jokes and notes lying around waiting to not be a meaningless blob in space.)
2023-04-19: Putting the story together (fource again)
Today's focus is DISONESTY, the ugly pig
2023-04-18: Putting the story together (thrice again)
Today's focus is ADELE.
And also other stuffz
2023-04-17: Putting together the story (twice again)
Today I'm focusing on HÅRASS
(image)
2023-04-16: Putting together the story (once again)
For the demo I'll release in the end of April
2023-04-15: Can't log in to my SSH server (so I can't program my game!)
fuck you Göteborgs Stadsbibliotek's WIFI!!
Update: I got it working in another way
So now I have access to my files and that made me able to create a SUNSET
2023-04-14: Splash screen
Made some cool splash screen effects. Trying to show something cool the few seconds when the game is loaded. Maybe show the game's logo rotating and jumping around while the terrain slowly and gradually pops in in the background.
2023-04-13: Dialog functions
added some functions to click through dialogs
and started redesigning some UI. i'm focusing on mobile so all buttons and interface will be BIG
added a fullscreen button. n1ce
2023-04-12: More ground textures, devloping the story, and looking at the project from a wider perspective
Why doesn't the cutscene code work??
Update: it works now
I hard-coded the NPC characters so they don't try to do stuff when they're far away at places where the terrain isn't created yet.
2023-04-11: Trees, bushes & grass
Thinking about sound design, title screen and just those small details that make the whole experience.
When I start Mario Kart 8, Mario screams "wahoo!" and raises his hand to the air, and funky swingjazz starts playing. Not a chance in the world you're sad after this. Every menu click gives not just a nice tone but a nice chord.
I don't want to be as good as Mario Kart, I want to do something different. Maybe skip sound design totally and just play short music jingles whenever something happens, like in Seinfeld, Friends and Scrubs? I think I'm better at music than at sounds so it might work.
I want my title screen to look different and fun. I want the player to feel "this is a special game. if I don't play it I will miss out on something", and I want the player to be sure they're about to have fun. And this should happen in about one second, because that's how fast people leave if they're the slightest uninterested. No one knows me or my game as for now, so it must be like this.
I've purposefully made my website (https://kbrecordzz.com/) in a color combination I don't think many others use. So when you see those colors together you think "kbrecordzz" (maybe). I'll do something similar with my game's splash screen.
2023-04-10: Even more world creation
As the title says.
2023-04-09: More world creation
Watching two friends try out my game got me thinking about car movement. Do I need to make it slower uphill because that's how hills work? Do I need to make the water unhabitable for cars because that's how water works? My game is about a bunch of animals having a car club so realism isn't really needed anyway. So I can do whatever I want, and I want it to be fun. But what is fun? During my friends' test playthrough all physics except gravity and moving the car forward and steering it were turned off, so they could do ridiculous things like driving up vertical walls and using volcanos as ramps to jump off from. That's more fun than NOT doing these things, right? I'm not sure what the game will become, but if stunt jumping from volcanos is more fun than consistent physics, it MUST be in the game.
I want my car's movement to be as easy and smooth as the movement in Doom, where you almost fly through the rooms super fast without effort. Which is how the car in my game is now with all physics turned off. My friends didn't seem frustrated about anything while playing. Because literally nothing stops the car's reckless driving through mountain ranges, oceans and barren washing machine filled desert wastelands. Maybe I'll keep it that way, even if letting the terrain restrict the player could benefit things. Maybe I'll create other ways to restrict the player that are more fun than bouncing into a hill.
2023-04-08: Made a volcano
Kill your darlings, because they'll come back to haunt you (I started this game project by making a couple of real-world inspired locations in 3D, among those was a volcano, but I scrapped that idea because it wasn't good, but now I re-added it because I thought it was good again).
2023-04-07: Sculpting mountains like I was Gutzon Borglum (the creator of the Mount Rushmore faces)
Norwegian mountain-range valleys (like in Rjukan) can be represented by a simple sine curve! (see video)
(video)
2023-04-06: tree+bush+grass+ground = cool
and Adele has cargo pants, a cool haircut and is a Pewdiepie fan now
Another thing I did: create a function for forming the game's terrain live so I can see my changes immediately. Because forming the game's terrain is the task of this week.
2023-04-05: Walls and floors
Made some more walls and floors.
And made small changes to a few characters. Sometimes the small changes add the most change, see the the pictures below - I just gave the panda "Daddy" a brown tie and eyebrows, and immediately his knowledge of old books and films rose with 1000%.
Inside me there are two wolves: The quality before quantity perfectionist, and the quantity before quality mass-producer. I put 3 hours on Daddy's tie but only a few seconds on less important items. You just have to identify where to put the effort and where to not, I think both too much effort on irrelevant things and too little effort on important things do more harm than good.
You'll see Daddy many times in the game, so the addition of the tie will be multiplied by how much he's in the game.
Also, here are two aesthetics I tried out
2023-04-04:
Today: Adding character, car & item sprites into the game so I can see how they look in faction action.
For this I also have to rework the system that "attaches" the character sprites to their cars in order to make things easier to work with. Right now I use an array of 4 cars which I place the different characters in (there may be around 20-25 of them in total). But with this system I can never be sure which character sits in which car, because they change in every scene, car[0] can sometimes be Dark Gandalf and sometimes Hårass and that's messy. I did it like this because I thought there would never be more than 4 characters on screen at the same time, which meant I could run the AI & physics code for the same 4 cars only all the time, which I thought was faster than doing it for 20-25 cars and also deciding what to do with the characters not in the current scene. But I've now decided this method is BAD.
So instead I'll create a long array of cars, one for each character, and an array that keeps track of which characters are in the current scene, so I can stop calculating AI & physics for the ones that aren't.
First, this pseudo-code controls which character sprite to "attach" to which car:
car[0] = Dark Gandalf
car[1] = Hårass
car[2] = Adele ...
Then, I can use constant values to avoid having to remember the number of every character:
const CAR_DARK_GANDALF = 0
const CAR_HARASS = 1
const CAR_ADELE = 2
And lastly, these variables control if the characters are in the current scene or not:
car_turned_on[CAR_DARK_GANDALF] = yes
car_turned_on[CAR_HARASS] = no
car_turned_on[CAR_ADELE] = yes
Then, the AI & physics loop will skip the ones that are turned off. The same performance as before but way clearer and easier to handle.
Also: Made the room walls better
2023-04-03: Putting the game together #2
Continuing to connect loose parts in the game plot to discover where to add more story/gameplay/ideas, and then creating graphics for these parts. This has become a very effective loop of creation.
Tonight my plan is to insert the character, car and item sprites I've created the last two days into the game, to see how it looks in actual serious action. Update: didn't do it.
Update: Made some walls and floors. These are for a date at a romantic restaurant:
(images)
2023-04-02: Putting the game together
Connecting parts of the game so I can play the game as it is from start to finish. From this I can feel if the pacing is right and if I need to add/remove some parts. It's also to be able to see what more graphics I need to create, and how the graphics I've already created look in game.
Also AI created more graphics assets.
Right now sitting in support with my music program/site Soundtrap so they fix the site (that I pay for!!) so I can make songs for the game.
2023-04-01: Random day
AI generated sprites for cars, wrote story, made some songs, programmed, came up with some gameplay ideas.
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