Placeholders and stuff

Well, today i decided on something important, and that is when i should release a sort of "demo" of the game to get some feedback on my work so far. I will finish writing "part 1" and at least part-way "part 2" too. (Note. The game won't actually tell the player which part he is on, it's just something in my own head)

I will also make sure to add as much of code/functions to the game as possible both to prove i can actually do that, and to make it easier when i actually have an artist or non-placeholder sfx and music.

Starting to test and get feedback early on is very important, no matter how tempting it is to wait until the project is finished with revealing it to anyone. But just displaying it online does not mean i will actually tell anyone i know in real life about it, exactly because they're the only people i could convince to play the game as i watch, letting me take notes of how they're experiencing it and how it affects them, etc. Their opinions and feedback would be different if they actually knew that i made the game myself or had any relation to this game at all except "hey i saw this cool game and...."

Unless i figure i need their help, no one i personally know is even going to know that i'm a developer, until i've actually made the main project. Shh, don't tell anyone i said that ;)


So i decided the best thing i could do at the start of this day was well... code... even if i feel like i could write again, code suddenly got a higher priority for a while.

Today I:

Set a characters per second value (text rolls)
Set a default auto-forward speed
Inserted "scrolling credits" list.
Implemented Textbox background (i didn't actually make them, i just yoinked some nice ones from a guy on the Ren'Py forums that were lying around for free!)
Inserted a lot of extremely basic placeholder images and "animated" them (made them move around).


The last one really took some time because even if these aren't images i intend to use in the final game, it's important to get the animations and placements right.

I didn't get as much work done today as i'd have liked, but it was still definitely progress, and i learned a few nice tricks. Needless to say, a little progress is a hell of a lot better than no progress, every line written counts! and i wrote quite the handful of lines today. I also implemented the quite important Credits list (seeing as i'm using Creative Commons stuff the credits are a requirement if i'll release a demo in order to avoid upsetting someone.)

Note to self: before releasing any sort of demo, i must pick a font style for the game's text. I think it'd be cool to have a different font for each character, but that would be quite a lot of work so i don't think i'll do that for this game.

All the windows i need to have open while developing... i think switching to linux for development (workspaces are useful) would be something i should seriously start considering... grrrr but my linux is broken, stupid stupid soundblaster card! (It won't allow me to use 6 channels outside of speaker-test, every 3rd party application from alsa will only output stereo sound... *Cry*)

The biggest problem with going to linux would be the loss of Notepad++ (which is an excuse to try out Editra, or finally get used to Sublime) and photoshop (sure i have gimp, but i know how to use photoshop, not gimp! again... something that would take time to get used to) But the real problem is still alsa, damn you alsa! i'm way too lazy to dig into your code and fix you myself!

Update: After trying to sleep for 4 hours i ragequit on trying to do so, but it wasn't a useless 4 hours, these 4 hours i thought up a GREAT plan to try and convince a bigger company to teach me how to manage my own company by watching how they do things, in return for something of value that i would have at the time (something i'm 90% certain i will have). I also thought a bit about how i want to do a personal side project (kinetic novel, non affiliated with amodos game studios) and apart from this, i made or thought of how to make some aesthetic improvements to Yrja's Torment (while the plan was to write for a few hours then go to sleep, i got stuck when i got this great idea of code i wanted to implement to improve the aesthetic of the text, narrator text to be more specific)

The above reason is why i think i have better chances of creating my own company than actually finding a job to stick with, i can only work in my own time, and for that to happen i need to have the option not to work sometimes. I can work hard as all hell as can be seen from this blog, but i can't decide what time of the day will be used to do said work because i have limited control over my sleep schedule.