v0.3.0 Housekeeping

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Hi Everyone,   I'm back from the dead. My last post was well over a year ago, announcing v0.2.0. v0.2.0 was a bit of a mess, strung together to make nice looking GIFs and screenshots. The code was an absolute nightmare, and there were some fundamental problems with my engine that really worried me about the reality of this becoming a game. It became really daunting to work on, and I ended up falling out of the project entirely for a few months.   During this lapse in progress, I was able to spend a lot more time making pixel art. A lot more time writing. A lot more time with the piano. A lot more time playing other people's games. It was a needed reminder that I was making a video game because video games are made out of the things I enjoyed doing, not the other way around. So, here we are. Version 0.3.0, and its quite the doozy. Grab a snack because this is going to be a long one. Highlights  World Design We have a new town! The town design has been fleshed out pretty well no
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v0.0.1 Inventory Update

Hi Everyone!

 
Its been just over a month, which means its time for another monthly update! These past two months have been a bit slow, but luckily this is my last week of any kind of traveling for work so I should be back on my regular schedule.


This month I have a fun announcement, I've decided to consider the game as it is as an early release version, v0.0.1. I've decided to take up classic semantic versioning, vX.Y.Z, where an X iteration is a major overhaul or milestone, like full release. Y signifies major updates and content expansions, and Z signifies smaller updates and bug fixes. This update is the inventory update, a smaller update that contains a significant amount of UI work, and some actual things you can do/interact with in the world.


First and foremost, let me introduce you to developer mode. This is what I am looking at about 99% of the time I'm actually running the game, I've just decided to call it something. As you can see, there's quire a bit going on. Developer mode will be locked in the final release, but this gives you a good idea about my work flow when making the game. Developer mode shows me current day time, frame rate, collision calculations, as well as some visual aids (colorful rectangles) for debugging various features in the world. This can be hard set by running the game in Debug mode in VS17, or it can be triggered in the command prompt. All current text is the Pixel-Maz font from
oh-the-irony.org. I found it several years ago as free to use and I'm quite fond of it, but it looks like their website is down now, so that link goes to where I got it on dafont. 


The command console is very heavily inspired by the way that it is implemented in Nez, but I changed a few things for stability (Nez's console is not supposed to even build in the release version of the code) and personal preference. This has been in the game for quite some time now, but this is my first time actually showing it off.


A bit more relevant to the actual update, the inventory! The inventory system is finally in a good enough place to share. Most of the UI screens are placeholder textures I drew up while I think of something that matches a bit better. As you can see, you can now pick up items, put them in your inventory, move them around, the works! 



I've also added some brewing machines with placeholder textures, and some working menus, as seen below. You can probably tell that a lot of these menus have changed since you last saw them I simplified most of them since they're placeholders anyway for the sake of my sanity while coding them.

 



A lot of the work done this month on the brewing system came out of figuring out the inventory system, hence the incomplete look. This is still in a very preliminary stage, but worry not, that gives me the perfect segway into the last thing I wanted to talk about: what's next.


As you can see, the UI system I've built is basically working and ready to be tested out a bit more rigorously than just some test items. I mentioned earlier that this is version 0.0.1. The next update, v0.0.2, should be the May update, and should give the player the ability to craft the very first potion. Implementing this should pose challenges which I will dedicate future versions to fixing, all in preparation for v0.1.0, the full brewing update, hopefully coming sometime this summer.


Stay tuned!


Nick










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