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so another 2 week project reportback.
after the prior two projects i kept working on the same thing.
(i've been wanting to work on another bigger project, but i've also been frustrated with always stalling out on bigger projects because there's so much stuff to manage in them. working on this project has been a nice compromise, in that there's not really a lot of graphics stuff to manage wrt pixel art, and so that's gotten me to get past the most tedious parts of 'engine-building' and into stuff that's at least something like 'gameplay'. so at this point hopefully it's clear that i'd like to turn this into an actual game that people can play, at some point.)
so previously, i redid the canvas code rendering as webgl2, and that made everything much faster, so that i was no longer struggling to cram in optimizations to keep the framerate above 30fps. now it's 60fps all the time.
what i focused on for this two-week stretch was menus. interactivity in games is mostly clicking on things in the environment, but just as important is 'clicking on ui elements', and so that means i needed to code in some proper ui elements.
i posted some early 'form' screenshots on tumblr, and some other stuff on mastodon. i got the 'new game' character creator working! i mean, it doesn't work in-game yet since i'm not writing the generated sprite to a texture & then using that for the pc sprite, but i don't think that'll present a technical challenge so it should be fairly simple to do later on.
i also separated out the 'inventory' handlers from the rest of the 'game interaction' handlers (stuff like 'use keyboard to move around'), so i could properly push and pop opened ui elements ingame, etc, etc.
i also fixed some major bugs with my map code, so now it's finally nearly acceptable performance-wise. it'll be a few more steps before it's all really ready to go, but it's a big step. i also did some bookkeeping stuff like setting up a git repo so that i can actually remember what i've been working on.
i've definitely entered the stage of development where what i need are assets. theoretically the next thing i'm gonna be working on is simple 'farming' gameplay -- time, plant growth, tile interaction like e.g., tilling ground or watering it -- and what that needs more than logic is roughly a billion game assets for each stage of growth, etc, etc. i've been trying to make the assets somewhat polished to keep training my pixel art skills, and also so the screenshots i produce look kind of nice, but it'll definitely be tempting to just add some scribbles to the asset pages while i work on gameplay stuff.
anyway we'll seeee how things go
after the prior two projects i kept working on the same thing.
(i've been wanting to work on another bigger project, but i've also been frustrated with always stalling out on bigger projects because there's so much stuff to manage in them. working on this project has been a nice compromise, in that there's not really a lot of graphics stuff to manage wrt pixel art, and so that's gotten me to get past the most tedious parts of 'engine-building' and into stuff that's at least something like 'gameplay'. so at this point hopefully it's clear that i'd like to turn this into an actual game that people can play, at some point.)
so previously, i redid the canvas code rendering as webgl2, and that made everything much faster, so that i was no longer struggling to cram in optimizations to keep the framerate above 30fps. now it's 60fps all the time.
what i focused on for this two-week stretch was menus. interactivity in games is mostly clicking on things in the environment, but just as important is 'clicking on ui elements', and so that means i needed to code in some proper ui elements.
i posted some early 'form' screenshots on tumblr, and some other stuff on mastodon. i got the 'new game' character creator working! i mean, it doesn't work in-game yet since i'm not writing the generated sprite to a texture & then using that for the pc sprite, but i don't think that'll present a technical challenge so it should be fairly simple to do later on.
i also separated out the 'inventory' handlers from the rest of the 'game interaction' handlers (stuff like 'use keyboard to move around'), so i could properly push and pop opened ui elements ingame, etc, etc.
i also fixed some major bugs with my map code, so now it's finally nearly acceptable performance-wise. it'll be a few more steps before it's all really ready to go, but it's a big step. i also did some bookkeeping stuff like setting up a git repo so that i can actually remember what i've been working on.
i've definitely entered the stage of development where what i need are assets. theoretically the next thing i'm gonna be working on is simple 'farming' gameplay -- time, plant growth, tile interaction like e.g., tilling ground or watering it -- and what that needs more than logic is roughly a billion game assets for each stage of growth, etc, etc. i've been trying to make the assets somewhat polished to keep training my pixel art skills, and also so the screenshots i produce look kind of nice, but it'll definitely be tempting to just add some scribbles to the asset pages while i work on gameplay stuff.
anyway we'll seeee how things go
