Hello, hi, howdy, how's it going, hoi, guten jour, konnichiwhatsup etc. Sorry if I seem curt with my greetings, I'm in a bit of a rush today, what with needing to finish all of the things I said I was going to do but haven't yet. See that? I am capable of getting to the point without waffling! Once in a half-dozen blue moons, anyway. 😅
As mentioned I have, to all in tents and porpoises, nothing finished to show you this time. There are several contributing factors at play against me, including but not limited to:
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Moderate-to-severe back and neck pain lasting a solid 3-4 days
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Tension headaches lasting a wobbly week
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Unexpected family gatherings
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*Ooh, shiny*
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Animatics take way longer than I thought
Besides all that I think everything's been going rather well.
Okay, so the video I promised to be ready last Sunday, the cat's out of the bag (well, it's still in there, but it poked its head out) is an Outliers animatic. In the time I've managed to work on it I've actually been very proud of my productivity: I've worked in a fast, focused way without pushing myself too hard, whilst also ensuring the balance of quality to expediency is well-suited to the needs of the task. I can't say as I'd change much, if anything, about the time I've worked on it, so it's simply a failure of Manager Crispy for setting such a short deadline. Gold star to Worker Crispy though. At least that's all true for the time that I have been working on it.
You see between working on the animatic and commissions I might have gotten a teensy, tiny, eenie, weenie, portion-of-a-cup-of-a-smidgen-of-a-fraction-of-a-tad distracted making a roguelike JRPG-style dungeon-crawler. Okay, yes, yes, I know, I'm a fool, what's new? But I'm also very pleased on my progress with it, even if I've subsequently forbidden myself from touching it until the long-suffering Chaos Chess is complete.
I could justify my excitement by waffling about the design ideas that spurred it, that it stars my OCs with unique and strange classes and abilities based on their personalities, that the game is blend of puzzle game and RPG, that it was a test-bed to learn how to use Godot, that it's a modular project with small minimum viable product to get going and designed to be slowly added to as time passes, and so on, and so forth, and so spiralling. But suffice it to say it was a distraction of considerable scale. What scale, you ask? Well here's a brief summary of what I've implemented:
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Added characters with health, stats & elemental resistances;
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Added customisable weapons, off-hand equipment & armour with stat and resistance changes, with restrictions for which characters can & can't equip them;
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Added major & minor 'moves' usable in battle, with in-battle animation logic and ability / inability to be learned by individual characters;
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Added damage system, including stat calculations and elemental damage / resistance changes and updating health bars;
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Made in-battle move selection menu displaying character's learned moves, with checks for whether a move is valid, ability/inability for a move to select unconscious targets, whether a move should target the party or enemies by default, multi-target selection, in-move sub-commands (selecting items, spells, targets, support for custom sub-menus, etc), attack name display bar and elemental / healing-coloured damage indicators;
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Made enemy prototypes, targetable in battle with modular scripted AI (the old-fashioned custom-coded kind, don't worry) capable of wielding equipment and fighting with modular move-sets;
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Added battle initiative system and visual timeline of turn order, as well as a functioning 'delay / skip turn' move;
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Added customisable battle formations with specific position data for enemies readable by AOE moves;
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Added inventory, basic inventory menu, in-battle 'Use Item' move designed to accept item-specific code / moves all selectable via self-populating scrolling item menu.
Not an inconsiderable amount of work for something that looks like this.
Again, this is off-limits to me until at least Chaos Chess is complete, but as an exercise in learning how Godot works (the open-source game-making engine I'll be transferring to post-Chaos Chess) it's made me far more comfortable in that workflow. Anyway, let's put it on the pile with my roguelike Choose You Own Adventure game and move onto something more purposeful.
Our morning streams have taken us into the bright and beautiful world of Height Chart territory! Long have I wanted a little corner of my website where you can look up any of my too-numerous OCs to discover/remember who they are, and now it's becoming a reality. We've doodled a small selection of twenty or so to get us started, with more to be added as time progresses. Many more. So many more. It'll get up to a hundred or so by the end of the year. 🥴
On the topic of morning streams, I've also made the rare executive decision that there will no longer be a morning stream on Thursdays. This comes from spending two serendipitous Thursday mornings in a row chilling voiceless in Discord working alongside friends and realising I like that much better, thank you muchly. This, at the very least, affords me an entire day of the week in which I am not expected to stand in front of a microphone. Thus hereon we have Thursday morning chill/work hours in Discord around what would otherwise be stream time.
Our evening streams continue unabated, having slain the demon that is the Dark Souls II randomiser (after discovering that the key I needed was behind a hidden door I didn't know existed) and firmly planted our feet into the variety of shoes worn by Agent 47 in HITMAN III / World of Assassination! It's already a very silly, delightful time, as expected. Sometimes I ponder about how strange it would be to explain to someone who doesn't play video games how much simple pleasure and satisfying puzzling I get out of a game where you assassinate people. Ho hum.
Saturdays find us trundling on troll-hunting and (when lag allows) diggy-diggying in Return to Moria. And finally our wonderful weekly wind-up Wunday woodle weams continue (when power cuts allow) in their sometimes lackadaisical and oft silly form.
Righto, I hope that all passes inspection and compliance regulations. By the time the next update rolls around I ought to have completed a sizeable commission, readied up that animatic, possibly scribbled another comic, aged a year, and maybe, just maybe, dug around behind the sofa to rediscover my lost ability to focus. But you know better than to trust my time-keeping by now, surely. 😉
Thank you as every for your oh-so-generous support, it's highly appreciated through words so diverse that my thesaurus is threatening strike action.
Look after yourselves,
Crispy 💜