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[EuchreJack]

Will this be free, or will you be charging for this?

Ideally I intend to charge for it, unless unforeseen circumstances push me towards abandoning/early release. While I am an amateur still learning as I go I want to put in quite a bit of polish and provide something that people would feel happy paying for. That includes actual art and music done by other people. So maybe it won't be ready in a final form for a couple of years. I hope people will be enjoying it long before that for play testing and so on of course.

Thanks for the honesty.  I'd rather you charge for something completish rather than abandon for free.  It is certainly an awesome concept!
...Although music might be a luxury.  How long before the player mutes and boots up their music player anyways?
And Art just boosts the system requirements, which actually reduces customers.  But I'm still sore over not being able to play something I bought on Steam due to outrageous system requirements, so that is probably just me.

[Yolan]

That's OK.    It will still be a simple 2D, just hopefully with art that is a bit prettier to look at. It will run on a regular old laptop.

[scriver]

Posting to watch and share the obvious theme of the game.

[Araph]

...share the obvious theme of the game.

I second this motion.

[Yolan]

Hi guys. It's been two weeks, and I now have another developer diary vid to show how things are coming along.

http://youtu.be/igjE2qHhMAM　

Basically I've managed to set up a lot of the foundations for the core of the game. It's starting to come together.

There is now:

A menu system.
Smoother movement.
A GUI time piece (candle).
A functioning bar system with steins and barrels, serving and drinking.
Now has a shader system.
Gets darker as it becomes evening.
A working fireplace.
Tables.
Other under the hood stuff.

And other things I've forgotten or aren't visible. There are some variables operating behind the scenes now that I haven't really talked about, but which impact things in subtle ways (for example, guest mood).

I hope to have another development video up in two weeks showing table conversations and a few more guest types. The plan remains to have a working "playable" game within the next couple of months, after which I can start to flesh it out with guest types, story, balancing and polishing.

While I only update the webpage infrequently, I make little comments on my twitter every day. So if you want to keep an eye on how things are doing or send me questions, please follow @ (https://twitter.com/DanielOBurke).

[Yolan]

It's been two weeks, so it's time for another development diary. This is #3.


http://youtu.be/C1vJO4lPuNA


New Features:


- Candles and candle lighting for all the tables.
- The light cast by candles and the fireplace now flicker.
- If a lit fireplace goes out, the flame will turn into a glowing coal version for a while.
- The ability to send guests to any table, and have them sit at random in an empty position.
- Zooming in and out with the mouse wheel.
- A cursor.
- Shadows cast on the ground by your own character and by guests.
- Movement now also possible by holding down the left mouse button.
- Character no longer tries to walk towards objects clicked on for selection purposes.
- Guests now have uniquely generated names.
- Selecting guests will show their names, but also their mood and their gold (with unique sprites for each).
- Selecting barrels will also show what kind of drink is in them, as well as the drink quality.
- Selling a drink to a guest will now make the purse in the GUI flash, and play a sound effect of some coins dropping (sounds much worse with the recording software than it actually sounds!).
- Characters are scaled according to how deep they are in the room, in order to strengthen the sense of perspective.
- At day end there is now a fade-out fade-in transition effect.
- Adjustments/improvements to masking/selection code. - ARG!
- General code improvement/bug fixing - More ARG!
- New (but still terrible looking) character sprites


The changes made this week have mostly been about functionality of the interface rather than content. It is now easier to control your character and easier to interact with the world in general. There is also more information and feedback for the player to let them know what is going on. The result is that it now feels much more solid and believable to play around with. What exists behaves more like I would expect it in a proper game, and that's pretty exciting to see. Along the way I have been learning a lot about how GML (Game Maker Language) works, making more use of scripts and other techniques in order to streamline my code and achieve the effects I've wanted.

The next couple of weeks development will hopefully be spent getting people at tables to talk to each other, and allow the player to interact with / speak with guests. I would also like to add several new guest types, and remove any remaining odd behavior from the guest selection code before getting ahead of myself. Making the code more solid and modular is not as rewarding in terms of having something concrete at the end of it to show people, but it will save a lot of work down the track hunting down bugs and re-writing things that aren't flexible enough. I've got some of that done these last two weeks, but there remains some more to do on that front.

[MrWiggles]

ptw

[Yolan]

Delayed by a couple of days, but here is Dev Diary #4.


Newly Added Foundational Code

- A brand new object/guest selection system using pixel precise, reliable selection code that can handle object overlapping. What is on top is what gets selected.
- A brand new pathing system which makes use of grid based path-finding. Can be used by both guests and the player.

Major New Features

- A feedback system (makes use of the new masks developed for the selection system). When the player can interact with an object, it highlights and text appears in the GUI to tell the player what they can do. Makes interaction with the world easier to understand.

- A one-click action system (making use of the new pathing system as well as the new masks and feedback system). If a player clicks on something they can interact with, but are too far away to interact with it, they will walk to the thing and then interact. This removes the need to manually manuever the player around the play space in such a painstaking way.

Minor New Features

- Sound effect for the fireplace. The stronger the fire, the louder the effect.
- Tables now have shadows under them.

Bug Fixing (as always)


The last two weeks saw a big breakthrough in two areas I really needed in order to make this game do what I want it to do - reliable selection (the previous system was really only (poorly) simulating an actual selection system), and actual path finding (also only simulated previously with a more crude system). These are both in now, and working nice! The path-finding still needs some polish, but I can happily move ahead and onto more interesting game features while knowing that things work well-enough. The foundation shouldn't need any fundamental redesign.

[Yolan]

Time for another developer diary. This is number 5. :-)

Major New Feature

- Basic conversation framework. Guests will talk with each other if there are two or more people at a table. Guest "tweets" have different categories which depends on their mood. Merry guests might tell stories or jokes, less merry guests might grumble or speak of rumors. If you are within earshot, a text box is displayed. If not, a sprite. Guests will now have their mood influenced by the speech of other guests. The change is now shown by a sprite displayed above their head.

Minor New Features

- Added new sprites for the player object, showing the direction the player is facing.
- Guests will not have "full" steins in their hands (with froth) all the way until they finish drinking. Rather they will change to the "empty" (no froth) stein sprite version after a while to show that the contents is being depleted.
- Filling a stein with ale no longer happens instantaneously, but takes a little bit of time (currently a little over a second.) Accompanied by a little animated sprite displayed above the player, which shows a stein being filled. Something similar can be created in the future for other activities which take time.
- When you receive money from a guest it will now display the amount received as a sprite above the player.

Improvements

- Guest information is now provided with a simple mouse-over instead of having to select them. Reduces the barrier to getting important information.
- Mouse over code developed for guests has been incorporated into other surfaces such as tables, so if you are mousing over a guest who is standing by a table which has a tankard on it that you can pick up, you won't have both the table and the guest highlighting. Out of those things which can be highlighted, only that thing which is directly under the mouse will react.
- Completed firewood sprite, so it now fully depletes. Added woodchips drawn underneath.
- Improved player feedback for tables: Tables now have a variable for their population, and will check this variable when you are mousing over them or when trying to send somebody to a table.
- Objects which can be carried, stein (empty/full) and wood are now incorporated into the relative character sprites, so that they look more natural (are being actually held), and scale when the sprite scales according to where they are in the room (depth scaling for sense of perspective).
- Long running issues with collision fixed. With the new pixel perfect system the player will no longer be stuck inside objects as before. Did ruin a few smaller things though... Two steps forward one step back with this. ><
- Tweaking of path-finding code to make smoother and more bug free.

Bug Fixing

- Discovered and fixed a long running bug with assigning people to tables due to improper use of the random number generator



Starting to break new ground with adding features now that a lot of the key systems are in places. Looking forward to introducing new guest types in the next video. In the near future I want to add an income report at the end of each day, and shopping options at the start of the next.

[Yolan]

Vilanat has done some fan art. ;-)

[scriver]

Very nice!

[Yolan]

Time for dev diary #6. Quite a lot of new stuff to show off.


== Major Features ==

- There is now an icon system for guest needs. Right now that means simply drinking, but later could include food and shelter. When a guest doesn't have a drink, an icon will appear at the top of the screen. Icons slide along and stack on each other properly. This system allows you to immediately have the information you need about how many people need serving. You can also find out which icon represents which guest by mousing over it, which makes that guest become highlighted.

- There is now a barmaid. When idling she will walk around the tavern sweeping. She will also collect empty tankards from the tables and return them to the shelf for you.

- Guests will now smoke pipes sometimes. Each smoker is adding to the total amount of smoke in the room. As the amount increases clouds of pipe smoke will increase in number and become more visible, wafting about. By the end of a busy night the inn might become quite smokey.

- Guests now actually sit down instead of standing next to their tables. Perhaps not a "major feature" from a gameplay perspective, but required a significant amount of work integrating/adapting sprites properly with the tables and benches when sitting. It wasn't enough simply to make the guest sprites shorter.


== Minor Changes ==

- The glove cursor is now drawn to GUI, so it goes -over- GUI elements like a good glove cursor should.
 
- There is now a cellar door. That goes nowhere....

- Added a circular glow effect to the candles.

- Added a proper debugging mode that I can switch on and off, making various cheat buttons active for spawning things and changing different variables.

[scriver]

Mysterious cellar doors! The beginning of many an adventure!

Speaking of which. Will the game allow me to hire beginner adventurers to kill rats in the cellars? I feel that would be a very important feature.

[Yolan]

Lol. Sounds like a good mini plot. Rats are coming in at some point. There should be one or two scurrying about when there still aren't many customers.

EDIT: Incidentally, I am keeping the original post updated with a list of videos done so far. I've also added a self-introduction written from the perspective "protagonist" of this game.

[Parsely]

PTW.