Aug 2023 Update

Nearly a month has passed since I released this tech demo/alpha and compared to my previous projects, reception seems quite a bit more positive.

Work on the game has been steady but somewhat slow due to only having an hour or so during weekdays to work on this. I’ll try to make a dev log at the end of each month or so to let everyone interested in this project know what's going on.

For the first half of this dev log I’m going to elaborate on what I’m aiming for with this project and the second half I’ll be diving into my progress and development related news.

Summary of Goals

As some of you may have figured by the present visual elements and my list of planned mechanics, what I’m aiming for is something like Ruin Factory and Stardew Valley. This game won’t be as elaborate as those games, but it will share quite a few elements. To be honest I wanted to make a full fledged farming sim (with eroge elements), but I came to the realization during the brainstorming phase that I may not be up to the task for such a grand project. So I downsized what I had in mind to something more manageable in scope.

I still want to make that ‘farming sim’ I had in mind, but this game will be a good way for me to build my experience and develop systems and code that I should be able to reuse. It also allows me to practice and polish my artwork.

The scope of the gameplay loop for this project will largely revolve around grinding for better gear, improving your home/ buildings/skills, making bank and capturing/breading monster girls. There will be a bit of story as well, but nothing epic.

For those of you what were hoping for a new monster girl in the next update, I’ll have to disappoint you. My plan is to get all those boring, but necessary systems in place and try to work out as many bugs as possible before I add more monster girls and biomes.

My next release goal is to implement combat and collecting mechanics.

-I want to get the character controller polished up and implement combat mechanics

-Have an in game menu so the player can exit the game without having to click the X in the corner

-Implement an inventory system capable of looting drops, managing items and equipping the player

-’Nodes’ to harvest from

-An ‘enemy’ or two to combat
                                                                                                                                               

Current Progress

After the release of v0.10 I started working on expanding the character controllers functionality.

(Note: Frame rate was just left as default so the speed of the animation will differ when it is put into the game engine)

I’ve added the run and strafe animations to the character controller, the attack and equipment animations are still a work in progress.  There is also a battle stance that will activate for a few moments after the PC attacks.

The strafing animations took quite a bit of time to print and configure in the game engine as I have to repeat each of the 8 cardinal directions for every direction the player is facing. I’ve decided to also incorporate blocking into the strafe movement. The equipped shield will lower or outright negate damage done in the opposite direction. Movement speed is also slowed wile blocking/strafing.

The run animation was already in the game, but I didn’t have it set up during the initial release. In most farming sims the character runs or jogs everywhere, I don’t think many players care, but I always felt this is tad ridiculous. So I plan to break this convention. Instead the walk cycle being slow and boring I will be making the walk speed equivalent to a power walk. The run cycle will be OP and allow the player to escape dangerous situations but will slowly drain stamina, I may even have an exhaustion gauge as well. The player will eventually be able to offset these disadvantages with skill upgrades and use run more liberally late game.

The attack animations are going to be redone at some point, but for the purpose of getting the mechanics implemented these will suffice.

I also tweaked the walk cycle animation a little bit as I felt it was somewhat ‘wooden’, idle was also redone as I needed to accommodate for equipment on both animation cycles. The animation for the PC will likely be redone before I make a v1.00 release as there are little things here and there that I’m noticing now and they are bugging me....

Another problem I noticed, that I should have foreseen, but I’m so out of practice that I didn’t, is the over consumption of memory. RAM in particular.

(Note: RAM usage on the right side is just for the character controller and nothing else. RAM doesn't care about the quality of your pixels, only how many you have.)

MagiWar was horribly un-optimized due to large amount of unneeded empty space (alpha) surrounding the colored pixels. I like large sprites, but they tend to eat up ram like crazy. When you have as much animation as I put into my projects it becomes a problem that can’t be ignored as most people don’t have a computer with 24 + gigs of memory.

Unfortunately I haven't found an easy solution around this other than cropping the alpha from the frames. Although cropping takes a fair bit of time, the savings are real. The RAM usage in the above picture could easily be brought down to around a 1/4 via cropping.

The extra alpha is sort of a by-product of how I do my artwork. I could remove it during the printing process, but then I run into problems later if I need the extra space for something like a spear that can easily go out of bounds.

When I redo the PC animations I will likely be cutting frames out of each animation cycle. The results will be less smooth animation. Since I’m using an anime style for my artwork, the choppiness shouldn't be that out of place for most players.

Basic setup for the inventory has been laid out. I’m more or less going to copy what I had done for MagiWar, but I’ll be incorporating the shop and external storage into the inventory screen this time around. The cursor and BG images have been done but there is still a lot of work to do. I made 4 different player inventory grids that will represent backpack upgrades. The medium backpack is shown in the images. As I go along I’ll add more graphical elements to the inventory.

And that just about covers my current progress. Now I’ll just go over a little bit of my workflow. If you’re not interested in game dev related stuff you can skip this section. 

For this dev log I’ll do a brief overview of how I create my character sprites.

All my sprites start off as 3D artwork (using Blender). The first steps are more or less the same as any 3D workflow (Modelling, Rigging, Texturing, Animating). 

For the sake of time (this dev log is already a wall o text) I’ll be skipping over the above and focusing on just the setup and ‘printing’ phase.

After the animation is done I set up my camera at an ‘isometric’ angle and set it to orthographic instead of perspective. I prefer orthographic because it slightly skews the image giving an air of imprecation.

Since I’m going to have character customization in this game I’m making use of sorting layers to separate elements like the characters cloths. To avoid most clipping problems I create a holdout material that makes those mesh parts invisible and also cuts out (puts alpha) pixel data on things like a swords handle where the fingers and hand would normally hide it.  This creates  a seamless transition between the overlapping elements.

After rendering each element in a specific cardinal direction, I drag and drop the frames in specified folders to be used later in Godot(game engine).

Then I rotate the whole armature 45 degrees and repeat the whole process for each of the 8 directions.