JLJac on December 18, 2012, 09:14:57 AM:

High hopes, low expectations, please

Thank you! From here my development process seems like the most amateurish thing ever, but I guess I'm good at covering that up then haha! You write that you don't plan to start working on anything right now ~ if I could give you a tip I'd say this: Don't wait in order to create a huge project, stuff like that are probable to die in pre-production if you're a lone developer. When working alone it's better to just get started with a small project, because the only way to learn is to do. If you're a hobbyist like me the keyword would be small project, as everything takes (no joke) about 50 times as long as you think. Rain World was supposed to be a two week project. Right now It's been in development for 1.5 years, and is still most likely nowhere close to finished...

Update 125
A little menu stuff. Started touching upon saving and loading single player games.

jamesprimate on December 18, 2012, 09:16:07 PM:

personally, im psyched that the development is getting extended! it means more ideas and more polish! maybe... even MORE levels to make music for! 

JLJac on December 25, 2012, 08:37:52 AM:

Oh, you're in game college! o.0 Then I should obviously be on the recieving end of any exchange of advice haha! Maybe in my situation I shouldn't look at the gradual growth and feature creep as something bad, when doing this alone as a hobby maybe one could as well embrace the fact that there's no fixed deadline. I mean, there are a lot of people who have to cut in their projects in order to meet a deadline, and I don't. Plus, many indie game classics such as Cave Story seems to be the product of a fairly uncoordinated growth of a project.

Now of course I'm not alone any more, as I have James on board and he as well have hopes and expectations for this project. So I have to keep my s**t together to at least some degree! However, I'll of course take this:
as a que to keep pushing my deadline further and further away towards eternity ~ bad move James

Nah, just kidding

But, when we are on this lazy note, I should probably announce that I'm taking a christmas break, as you have probably noticed. And another thing - this spring I'm going on a longer trip, I'll get on the plane somewhere mid-january. James and I have been talking, and we're agreed that it would be impossible to rush a release until then, especially when taking things such as setting up a small website and the like into account. So instead the (already unspecified) release will be pushed two or three months forward into the next year. In the end this is a hobby, and as such I have to put life first, Rain World second. This said I myself don't think of it as something entirely negative for Rain World, as getting away from my screen and recieving some new impressions is good for my enthusiasm and inspiration, which in turn is what fuels the project.

In-between christmas break and travel break I hope to get some work done on the main menu, so that when I get back after my longer break full of inspiration I'm not met by a wall of user interface coding~ If I get a good chunk of menu made before I go that'll actually mean that most technical aspects of the game will be almost finished, and that means I can concentrate on giving it an awesome artistic presentation when I get back.

JLJac on January 11, 2013, 11:01:47 AM:

Thank you! The prototype isn't available anymore, because I'm not too proud of it when looking at it in the light of today's progress.

The day after tomorrow I'll be leaving for Africa! From there on I know nothing at all, except that I expect to be back 12 weeks later.

This may be a backside of game making as a hobby - Rain World is not my job, and it has to adapt to my life rather than the other way around. Still, the game is fueled by my inspiration, and only staying in my room coding doesn't give me any of that. So in that way, what's good for me is good for Rain World.

Thank you all for your interest and your help. Don't worry about the game, I've put way too much time into it to not complete it. I'll be back in shorter than you expect, and I will bring with me new inspiration and renewed energy.

See you in a bit!

jamesprimate on January 12, 2013, 09:29:59 PM:

worst case scenario, i have the alpha build! 

but i kid, JLJac will be back in a few months and in the meantime we'll hopefully be chatting about and improving RW.

Happy travels Joar!

JLJac on February 21, 2013, 10:47:00 PM:

Hello! This is just me checking in to let you know I'm alive and kicking. I've also actually been able to work a tiny bit on the game, starting to sort out how I want the menu to look like. Most of what has to be done is programming though, not art, and the african climate doesn't really encourage programming - it's simply too hot to think. I gradually get used to it though, and have high hopes I'll eventually be able to write some code.

Cheers!

JLJac on March 07, 2013, 01:12:30 PM:

Update 126
Made the basic setup for a level tier for custom mode. Basically there are two lists, one that displays all the custom levels and one that displays the ones picked for the playlist for this specific game type. When you click a level in the first list it's added to the second, when you click a level in the second list it dissapears.

JLJac on March 08, 2013, 12:42:19 PM:

Update 127
Tried to create a little bit of order in the complete and utter mess that's Rain World menu and options code. I have so much stuff from the old preliminary menu hanging about, together with three or four different solutions for everything, some preliminary, some not finished, others inbetween. Now things are starting to be reasonably tidy, at least to the point where I can understand what I'm looking at. I have a somewhat logical way of storing the state of the main menu, i. e. what options were selected, what pages were up and so on.

To give you a taste of what's up, imagine the following: For most game types there are two options that should be controlled by the player. These are the Spears option, which indicates whether or not spears will appear on the levels, and the SpearsHit option, which decides whether or not a player should be able to hit another player with a spear.

Now, these options need to be set and stored individually for each game type. If I change them in one game type's options page I obviously don't want them to be changed for all the other game types as well, I want to be able to custom tailor my play options for each game type.

At the same time, there's another factor of complexity - that some gametypes should forcefully override these options. For example, in the competitive game type you should be able to decide whether spears hit players (it has a huge effect on the gameplay, making the difference between a game where you try to outsmart each other and catch flies and one which is about fast reflexes in quick, brutal duels). In the cooperative game type I might not want this option to be available, because fighting lizards together becomes way too easy when you don't have to worry about hitting each other.

So, I need to store a lot of options separately, and I need to be able to override options, both of which I need a logical, reasonable system for which doesn't tie my brain up in a knot every time I look at it.

As I've mentioned, programming UI:s isn't at all my favourite thing. It's a lot of hard work, and you don't really get anything spectacular out of it. The greatest possible achievement for an UI is "not annoying", which seems like a not too exciting purpose to strive for. I'll get there though, as it's a necessary step in making all the good aspects of the game visible.

JLJac on March 10, 2013, 01:02:37 AM:

Update 128
These UI updates are so boring I almost feel ashamed to post them... Anyway, here we go: Today I made a scrolling list! It displays 15 items, and if you go to the bottommost item and click down it brings up one new item. If you reach the very bottom it brings you back to the top. The same goes for clicking upwards. For mouse users there are little arrows at the bottom of the list that makes the list scroll. Yaaaaaawn.

My next game won't have a menu system, it'll just have an external text file were you can input your preferences in a terribly complicated code language.

JLJac on March 10, 2013, 11:02:19 PM:

Update 129
Today I messed a little with keyboard/mouse controls for the menu, and how it'll know which one is currently in control. When it comes to the point where I start trying to implement joysticks I might do something with that as well.

jamesprimate on March 12, 2013, 03:08:36 AM:

YAY! Glad to see the devblog back up and running 

JLJac on March 12, 2013, 07:23:04 AM:

 

Update 130
Managed to get the new menu connected to the actual game, meaning that it's now possible to start a custom game again. It also creates a playlist out of the levels you have choosen, and srambles it if you checked the little "shuffle" button.

JLJac on March 12, 2013, 02:02:16 PM:

Update 131
And I finally connected the World game mode to the new menu as well, and started outlining the framework for continuing a game from a saved file. Also when running around in the single player world a bit for the first time in ages, I found a bug where a spear would re-appear if you lodged it in a lizard and that lizard then fell off a cliff. It was easy enough to resolve, the problem was because the lizards are created earlier than the spears. First the lizard object is created, and asks "is a lizard with my ID reported wounded/missing/dead in world memory?", and when it finds itself it deletes itself from world memory, as it is now loaded on the actual level. Then the spear would be created, and ask "is there any lizard in world memory reported to have me stuck in it?", and the answer would be no, as the lizard had deleted itself. So, the spear would appear on the level. The problem was solved basically by changing the creation processes so that the spears are created first, stay tuned for the bugs that will arise from moving the chunks of code around.

JLJac on March 12, 2013, 11:04:06 PM:

Sir, with all due respect, your post worries me a little. I don't remember putting out a public demo, and I remember spending almost a year implementing a gazillion details, so if all of those have dissapeared and given way to "minimalism" I have a problem.

JLJac on March 13, 2013, 07:32:34 AM:

Lol 

JLJac on March 14, 2013, 09:54:45 AM:

Update 132
As the new menu and the game are now connected I've started to mess around in the actual game a little bit again. Today I discovered that a problem I thought was solved was in fact not, which is always annoying. The problem is about the how the levels are supposed to have multiple entrances in custom mode, but only one when playing world mode. Because of this I set them up with an "activeEntrance" property in world mode, and shut down every other entrance, making them empty lizard holes. This works wonderfully when entering a level, and also when exiting it, if you exit through the leftmost entrance. If you exit through any of the others it returns an error which I feel perfectly confident I know what it is, but which has roots deep down in everything that has with inter-level connectivity to do. Which in turn makes me think that I should probably rewrite all that stuff...

But then again, I can always stack ugly hacks on top of each other There's nothing like changing a problem of today into a problem of tomorrow!

JLJac on March 14, 2013, 10:30:46 AM:

Horrible hack: applied!

The solution completely relies on that swarm rooms only have only one entrance, which is - in my defence  - something I plan to stick to. Still, a beautiful solution would be dynamic and work in all scenarios, even those that are not included in the game. Still still, in my mind a beautiful game is a game that ever gets released...

jamesprimate on March 14, 2013, 08:14:56 PM:

now this is what we like to hear! 

JLJac on March 15, 2013, 01:14:17 AM:

Why don't you just keep it coming, sooner or later you'll know what's the right amount 

JLJac on March 20, 2013, 03:32:09 AM:

Oh, wow!
I found out because my email was suddenly overflowing with notifications that people are subscribed to me on youtube... She says she hasn't been able to reach me, that's no good. I'll send her an email, I guess. Sooner or later I ought to make a website for this thing, so that stuff like reaching me won't be an issue.

To the people from Rock, Paper, Shotgun,

Welcome!
A few months ago I got the idea I should go to africa, and well, here I am. Because of this development of RW is somewhat slowed down, but I count on being back on a more regular schedule within a month.
Until then there's quite a lot of material back in the thread, if you're interested. Glad to have you on board!