『dungeon b2』devlog 5/21/18

hey everybody!!! i've been out of town & country for the past couple weeks but now im Back In Action and jumping headfirst into something really cool!!!

when i say "really cool," that can only mean one thing... that's right, you guessed it: a fake 00's-era mmo patcher!!!!

ok, look. this kinda stuff is integral to the experience, i promise. even small files took forever to download back then, so reading the patch notes and checkin out images in the launcher was a very healing experience while you waited for your game to finish updating. anyway, i wanted to do something like that for the game-within-a-game of dungeon b2, so today i threw something together! here's how it went.

first, we start with a basically microscopic sketch. this launcher design is actually a bit closer to late 2000s/2010s mmo launcher design than the likes of RO's original patcher, but i decided this kinda thing would be more fun to make and look at.

humble beginnings! here's some patch notes. fun fact: that desktop is actually a screencap of my own actual desktop in the year 2004. i knew this image would come in handy someday.

next i blocked out the placement of the various images n buttons, and coded in a fake loading bar! when i first put in the loading bar i had it smoothly easing from 0% to 100%, but that felt really weird... so what i ended up doing was having the actual number itself ease smoothly, but the visuals update randomly anywhere from every 0.25 seconds to every 1 second. it finishes its fake download pretty quickly, currently - i think once i have more stuff to look at in the launcher i might ratchet up the fake download time so the player has a chance to look through all the launcher junk without feeling rushed along by the big ol play button. this "download" only occurs the first time you launch the game, so on subsequent plays it'll skip right to playable!

aaand here we are! we've got a bunch of temp gfx, some buttons to bring up different news items, a banner bar that cycles through a few items of interest, and our fake patch download. this thing's pretty much done codeways, just gotta fill it with proper content!

ALSO just in case it's not totally clear - this isn't a real launcher that runs outside of unity! the game has a fake ingame desktop that the launcher and game-within-a-game run in front of. i haven't decided how much you'll be able to do in the fake OS, but i always really like when that stuff is fleshed out, so... we'll see.......

ANYWAY!!! this is my second day back home and i slept p much all day yesterday to recover from jetlag curse, so this is my first day back to work. i'm gonna keep hammerin away at dungeon b2 this week so i can get yall somethin' to toy with this month!!

well, bye!!!!!!!