Friday Rambles and Game Dev Update 2024-12-20

It's the Friday Rambles.

Real Life Stuff:

I am back from my travels. Jogged. Kept busy.

Game Dev Stuff:

I again completely forgot that the Steam Winter Sale was this week. I whipped up a quick pic to promote the sale.

Ending the year of sales with a bang. Anyway, I hope I sell a lot of copies. it ain't cheap to translate all these words to 4 other languages.

I wrote some more dialogue for certain parts of the game, and then sent the updated scripts to the translators. More of my trusted playtester crew got back to me and the reaction was still positive. Good sign!

Now that I am free to work on stuff that's not the dialogue script, I've been going through my todo list of assets to draw, features to code, and bugs to fix. Chipping away at it has made me feel like I'm actually making some progress for once.

I added all the achievements for the new chapter. There are 25 of them (so far). I said I would only have a few, but I changed my mind. who cares. i spent forever on this update, and if you're going for 100% you're gonna go for 100%.

this is an achievement for finding the "hide UI" button, which is another thing i added (some time ago, i forget when). As you can see I also implemented a temporary toast notification system to test before I add them to steam during launch, and i'll probably continue to use it for platforms that don't have a native achievement system. ie. nintendo switch.

this new achievement system is built on top of the unlock system i made a while back, so i'll be able to populate a nice bonus gallery based on what achievements have been unlocked.

I improved the way the Penny can interact with things in the RPG sections. Now a speech bubble icon will pop up when you can talk to something or someone. It's mostly for mouse controls, because it was a bit opaque how you interact with something with the mouse (ie. it wasn't by clicking on the thing you want to interact with! super janky!) Now it should work as one would expect.

I'm proud of this one. Because in fact, you can't tell the difference at all! But previously, each log spawned by destroying a tree in Lumber Lass was an instance of an object, which meant at higher log counts, you'd be spawning 200 new instances in the same step. And since objects add a lot of overhead, it was slowing down on older computers. But now the logs are all drawn with a single object! Should use way less resources, and hopefully run better overall. i tested it with large numbers, and it feels good. I actually didn't, like, officially profile it or anything but it's probably better. i'll trust my gut on this one.

I made this gameover screen again. Eagle eyed Friday Ramble fans will notice it's pretty much the same as before. I tried doing a different flow where you were kicked to the title screen after a game over like in the original game (because i thought that was funny), and then could choose to restart from checkpoint when you pressed the continue button. but my original idea with the gameover screen + funny ending image ended up feeling better. oh well. i changed the background to black, so it's less blinding. at least i confirmed that i can generally trust my gut.

Other small stuff in my todo list that i fixed, that I can't really take screenshots of. noted here for reference, not that anyone cares because they're mostly all new features not fully implemented or bugs i introduced myself in this new update, so no one's seen them anyway. except maybe that one qol update at the end.

• confirm sound too loud on new title screen.

• "current" save slot wrong when loading from checkpoint after gameover.

• fever button doesn't work when controlling lumber lass with mouse only.

• ui icons not showing up while playing "the monday that never ends"

• dialogue from "the monday that never ends" not logged to dialogue history.

• credits not localized when viewing from new title screen

• character does a weird flicker when displaying dialogue with no name plate

• [qol update] pressing esc while playing lumber lass will now bring up lumber lass pause menu instead of settings screen.

I also drew some secret story assets that look pretty cool. And bothered Chance Thrash for some new sounds that are also pretty cool. And also added a bunch of other story related sounds. i think i'm done with all the necessary sounds, now.

Well, now that most of the low hanging fruit is gone, now i have to put in effort again, with actually building new features like the bonus/achievement gallery, and drawing the art. there's a lot of new art to draw, like a lot. i trust myself to be able to do it, though. maybe i'll share some new assets if they're not spoilers. (they're all spoilers).

The End

I did a lot this week. Probably going to take it easy the rest of the month, because I have a lot of holiday and family stuff to do, and the most urgent gamedev stuff is all done now. Maybe I'll even draw some pictures, or play a game or two...

Next week's Ramble is the last one of the year! I'll do a little retrospective of 2024, see how i did with my 2024 resolutions, and write out some new resolutions for the new year.

Thanks for your support, as always! See you next week!