TBC Log 5/2/2024

So here we are, at the blank page. What do I have to say about TBC? A lot, but when I think past one second, an inner twinge reminds me that I wish I could keep my mouth shut. There’s the whole thing that’s like, “the more you talk about your work to other people the harder it feels to actually work on it.” I think I understand this, I’ve done this with smaller games ideas and shared them to death, but the difference with TBC is that I continue.

I traveled a lot last month. Whenever this happens, whenever my daily schedule gets interrupted, working on TBC gets so much harder. Its not because the code is harder to figure out, or that the vision is interrupted, its that I cannot comfort myself through hindsight. “I feel like I implemented this feature eons ago, and its still buggy!” I guess what I’m thinking about specifically with this is the creature birth system that I’ve implemented. It is complicated and has taken forever. I do think all the time i’ve put into it will pay out, and it will become a paramount part of the game (as intended), but sometimes I worry that it’ll never be over. I’ve learned, from this and from Genome, that it’s hard for me to see my work as something that’s made progress. I think its related to my ADHD, I sort of forget that a feature didn’t exist before I implemented it, so I feel like I’ve done nothing and that the current state of the game is square one (when we’re more on square two hundred). The way I’ve been trying to motivate myself to keep working on TBC recently has been showing it to different people in my life. I learned at the Game Center that running playtests is a way to keep yourself motivated. And for me, this is entirely true! So I’ve playtested a lot these last few weeks, getting feedback from friends and mentors, and I think its helped. One friend said something to me that has really amped me up, “I’m starting to see it! the vision!” And this gave me quite a lot of motivation. But still, when I playtest, often all I see are the bugs that detract from the experience I’m trying to cultivate.

Well, let’s get to the part that’s about TBC and its new features! Explicitly. The first thing I started to flesh out was the “dueling” system. In TBC, two creatures duel over different things. The currently implemented dueling situation is when the clan leader dies, the Ardent, and the player chooses for another creature to become the next Ardent when given a selection of potential creatures. The creature with the highest influence in the clan is next to become Ardent, or the player can click on another creature to promote, and then those two creatures will fight. This has been fun to code and is still in progress. I added in a shader that lets the player see through trees when they zoom in, which has been fantastic for my level design in the TBC map. I can now put trees wherever I want and I don’t have to worry about creatures’ visibility! I’ve been telling myself that I’ve been doing a UX pass on the game, which is true. So most of the features I’ve made/edited are centered around player comprehensibility of what’s going on. All of the feedback I’ve gotten is “there is so much going on at once in this game it’s hard to tell what to focus on.” Which makes sense. Usually when I hear this, I rebuke, “this is the sandbox version of the game! There’s going to be a sandbox version AND a campaign version.” This is not a lie, but it is maybe a half truth. I am terrified of working on the tutorial. Or, maybe less terrified, and more prematurely exhausted. I know that if I do the tutorial, it will force me to hammer out the features that are needed in the game. As I’m writing this, i’m somewhat convincing myself that I should drop everything and work on the tutorial next, haha. Oh, anyway, so accordingly the “other features” i’ve implemented during this pass… I’ve moved the creature “action buttons” into the middle of the screen so the player knows that they are there to be clicked one explicitly, instead of a thing the player notices after analyzing the UI for a long time. I ran into a nasty bug with it, I wanted the action buttons to follow the creature around when the player’s camera is zoomed out, but for some reason that doesn’t work with the widget I’m using? I spent a bunch of time researching the issue and ultimately found out that its a bug with the engine! So yippee! That means I need to design around the issue, not brute force it to work. So currently the three buttons are non visible when zoomed out and visible when zoomed in. I also implemented a thing on the screen that flashes words to the player when a creature is giving birth or a duel is starting (I’m in the process of naming the code language for the similarity of these things as “happenings” that can or cannot happen at the same time, depending on the game’s current situation). The most recent thing I’ve implemented is a boolean based system of switching on/off player input and UI things. This has been in an attempt to organize my code, and it’s worked a bit. Definitely significantly easier to search for the function I’ve created as a global tool than it is to search for singular booleans like “canUseLMB”. Honestly, the rest of my time has been bug fixing.

I’m going to AMAZE Fest next week. This will be the first games convention I’ll have gone to, along with my first time ever going to Germany, so I’m super excited (shout out to Miri for cat-sitting). I am going with my college friends and fellow game devs, Finn and Nate. I don’t know what to say about this other than I’m super excited, both for the convention and to see my friends again!