the fun side

Ah, the best laid plans... ...Mine, specifically.

I haven't really talked about it anywhere, but back in October, I got mysteriously ill. I went to the doctor and he just shrugged and made a noncommittal noise and was like, "that's weird but you're probably fine." (I'm not though.) I had been having some sort of weird anxiety attacks (I think partially hormonal) and my blood pressure was super high, and I think it was spurred on by some other weird health problem I'd been having. As these things go, I kept getting sick (a bunch of weird episodes and then a cold and then more weird episodes maybe brought on by the cold?), but I think I'm mostly recovered now. I'm back up to at least 80%.

I had thought that being stuck in bed for a week would make it easier to work on the game jam, but it turns out, I couldn't even properly look at a computer screen for like, a whole week, which meant I couldn't do my work, so I spent the next week of FYG jam catching up on work. TT_TT That's not to say I haven't worked on my game at all. I don't think the progress I've made can be called impressive by any means, but in true Sydney fashion, I've spent some hours doing a bunch of nitpicky work to make stuff run "just so."

When I started it last year, I had thought that I would make something like a short visual novel with pretty limited mechanics game-wise, but somewhere along the way, I lost my damn mind and thought, "what if I made the game bits more fun? more aesthetically pleasing? more like other cool games that I have played and enjoyed?" Unfortunately, I guess I committed to this train of thought because that's what I spent the whole jam doing and I guess that's what this game is now.

In the 20 or so days I had to work on Nana Soup last year, it was more of a regular shop sim, where the inventory in your store could be used to make recipes to give directly to customers. The recipes were all set in stone and could not be improvised (except if you had certain items, like a cure-all that would basically be a one-time instant success). However, my initial vision had been that you could swap in other ingredients if you didn't have enough of the correct ones, but I wasn't quite sure how to implement that without coding in a complex system for substitutions (or a very shallow one that may not really feel good as a player).

The old and new recipe screens. there's some UI missing from the second one still.
Graphics still unfinished in general. The idea I had earlier this year--which I began picking away at on a whim, not really sure if I would commit to it--is what I've been working on for the past few days, where each ingredient has certain properties, and you must combine ingredients with the correct properties to make recipes. So instead of saying you need 3 aloe, 2 cotton, and 4 sugar, I would say the end result needs to be a soothing, sweet, soaked cotton ball, which could be made by combining any ingredients with those properties (though some would work better than others). The system is pretty simple. It just takes the top 3 properties of the ingredients you've combined and judges how closely you've come to the requested item. _{Well, it's a little more complex than that, but not very...}

The other thing I've been doing was learning about source control. I can't decide whether I really like it or not. I was doing it myself manually before by leaving large sections of commented out code _{(which is a pain to do in python by the way since there are no multi-line comments)} or saving multiple files like "fruitwheel.gd," "fruitwheel2.gd," or "fruitwheel2b.gd" with comments at the top of changes, bugs, and to do lists, which is honestly not that far off from how something like git works, except that I had to revert any changes manually and it's more difficult to compare files. I do honestly like that feature of git--the ability to compare files--and theoretically, if I ever used my other machine to develop games as well (or had other people I worked with), the online repository would be really useful, but I'm... a little unimpressed, I guess. Haha.

I don't know if it's just because sourcetree (the GUI i'm using with git) is not very good at visualizing things or I just don't understand how it really works, but I've been having issues with branching and reverting changes and also not accidentally overwriting my entire repository with the thing I didn't want to do that with. But perhaps I'll improve with time...

Anyways, I think I'll try to finish my most recent commission quickly to give myself a nice long holiday this year and see if I can make some good progress on my game (and hopefully not get sick). See you on the other side!

Stay fresh!

Also look at my newest dnd character. She's a lizardfolk cowboy ranger.
I haven't played her yet, but I love her already.