TBC Log 9/4/2024

    This month has, honestly, been a bit of a slog. I’ve been working on “sandbox settings” for what feels like years (probably 2 weeks) and like, they’re worth it and important, but getting there is such a trek. A lot of different kinds of programming knowledge, like organizing where data is saved so that it can be accessed in other scenes with different objects, its sort of a chaos nightmare especially for a brain like mine that isn’t the best at keeping track of things. Also, the debugger doesn’t work on my laptop??? Which is terrible??? I am on my way to the east coast, though, and I think I’m going to get a good amount of playtests in while I’m there which is really exciting. Will help me figure out what direction to point in so i can lock in and blast it (maybe lacking a more graceful nuance).

    I’m sure I’ve done other things as well on TBC this month. Yeah lets list it. I hooked up the “drag and drop” interactions, so creatures will do actions that are prioritized to them dependent on their skill in that action and their “enjoyment modifier” which tells the player how much they enjoy doing such prioritized actions. I wanted the animals to do this sort of meandering in the background while the player does other stuff. But i’ve implemented a drag and drop system for all the creatures. When they get picked up by the player and then released, if they are released onto an object where creatures can do actions at, they will do that action instead of their prioritized action once. If the player wants them to keep doing that action, they can increase the priority level of the action in the action control system. So maybe that’s something i’ve done since the last dev log. Another thing i’ve been working on is the skeleton of the puzzle system. Briefly, puzzles are things creatures do or try to do if they’re dropped onto a “puzzle object” by the player. For example, there’s a tree blocking the wolves from the rest of the Valley, so a really strong wolf, or multiple very strong wolves, need to work together to hoist it back to its perpendicular position. There is a page for the puzzle systems that can be opened and looked at pretty easily. All in all, these are the main things i’ve done this month in relation to working on TBC.

    Separately from myself alone, Pat and I have been working together to figure out a logo that matches the game style. We’re getting there but its taking time. A design goal we have is for the logo to make sense with the plastic doll aesthetic of the crocodile, which somewhat conflicts with the PBR technique used in the logo. My theory is that if we add some gloss it could be good. Below is how far we’ve gotten with iterations on it.

    We’re not just working on the logo, but the aesthetic cohesion of the game in its visual entirety. So I tasked Pat to make a pitch deck around such a goal. They got back to me with info in droves, talking about diegetic/non-diegetic user interface design, finding old fonts from the 19th century on different waybackmachine-types of websites and then from books their partner happened to have on printing type.

    The font we picked together is the “Hunt Rustic” font. Needless to say, after lots of research and iteration, Pat and I together are slowly but surely figuring out TBC’s aesthetic identity.