2023 Goals and Progress Thread

[atoms]

My goal is to progress on getting the rest of the story done in the current project I'm working on. I left it for a few months but want to revise the story now.

For now, it's the full summary of the major characters and a bit of an outline but later I'll move to the scenes and dialogue.

I finished revising the main two villains today. Hoping to make progress on a subplot character next and then a much-needed revision for the first few protagonists, which are kind of a group from the very start.

I'm pleased with the revision so far. (No idea if it's good or not, but it's good for me!)

 

[wilpuri]

My original goal with Single Malt Apocalypse was release in winter 2022. The project started in spring 2020.
I’m glad I didn’t rush it into that goal, because the game is much better now.
My ultimate goal was a completed game released for people to play and enjoy. That goal is at hand! My first real game is out in August:

 

[BreakerZero]

My original goal with Single Malt Apocalypse was release in winter 2022. The project started in spring 2020.
I’m glad I didn’t rush it into that goal, because the game is much better now.

I had a similar situation. I've had at least two different core hooks (particularly considering that I originally started with a goal of releasing my game as an awareness project before the game itself evolved too much beyond that for any chance to retcon everything in reasonable time forcing a complete reboot of the project) and once I got the game set to the current story arc, I did the same thing myself. Needless to say, that didn't happen either. Then of course there's the bug fixes that I originally didn't plan for, plus the fact that Hollywood is on strike (or at least the writers are, for which I have a sense of solidarity) and not to mention localization matters, so I have absolutely no idea of when my project will even come out at this point. It's almost like the idiots that wrote Duke Nukem Forever at this point in terms of finding myself stuck in development hell, but I'm hoping that all of the extra time will be worth the effort, especially since I continued to make use of disabled characters just as I did in what I originally started with to at least keep a major portion of my original vision intact.

 

[wilpuri]

Then of course there's the bug fixes that I originally didn't plan for,

One of the biggest lessons in my game project was that at least 30% of the development time is fixing bugs, hunting typos and tweaking graphics. That is after you think the game is actually 99% done.

 

[BreakerZero]

One of the biggest lessons in my game project was that at least 30% of the development time is fixing bugs, hunting typos and tweaking graphics. That is after you think the game is actually 99% done.

In my case it's more like 80-90%, but the one major bug that was really trying my patience was with how the Xbox container app was processing my music selection code. But as I said in my update on the matter, I think that it's a difference between how the NW.JS and UWP containers handle asset management when integrating HTML5 code, in that loading the same music track repeatedly (even in a parallel event) is most likely being done several times into the RAM blocks.

This isn't a problem in NW.JS as it seems to be consistent with reusing what's already loaded, but what I believe that the UWP container is doing instead is to load the same asset across several RAM blocks at once, resulting in the same asset being loaded across the entire RAM allocation until it simply runs out of space for loading another copy of the asset. Next thing you know, the system has to close the game out completely just to clean up the mess. So what I did was to set a flag in the core scripts that tells the game when to load a music track, this fires at the end of a transfer command and is picked up by a parallel event defined on the destination map which contains the music selection code, after which the flag is turned off until it is needed again.

As for progress since then, I have finally completed the controller detection functions to pause the game on Xbox when the system menu is open (or if the controller is disconnected, the batteries run out etc.)

 

[BreakerZero]

More progress today with fixing up the code for the music detection, as I had a stopBgm call that I was trying to root out because it ****** up royally during the prologue. Turned out that it was a poorly designed addition to the performTransfer function that I didn't even need anymore, so I took it out (as well as some on-map calls that I missed during my previous set of updates to the music detection code). Only remaining issue is to figure out why a parallel event is not setting achievement flags properly on Xbox during gameplay (so that I can add it back to the pause menu and not just have it in the main menu when you haven't even started the game yet) but in the meantime I'm ready to stress test all of the changes that I made to see if it fixes the post-battle crashes that I was also having while testing on console.

UPDATE 6-17-2023 7:42PM: Found another bottleneck on Xbox while stress testing the game. Turns out that while the music fix is proving to be stable, I also had a variable that was being set to a ridiculously large number, which based on the fact that such a high value isn't being used on the maps that work properly suggests that a variable length issue may also exist on the console side of things. Thankfully I'm no longer using that variable, so I removed it from all of the maps where it was being set to that number and am preparing to run a final stress test on Xbox to see if I've fixed all of the crashes that I've been having prior to releasing a demo build.

 

[SLEEPERER]

Almost cheating on myself by not writing progress here.

2023/06/18 Progress
Parallax mapping chapter 1: 55%
Dialogue system (Message box above player head and name, style).
Starting to implement quests.

 

[Prescott]

Recently added an NPC that you can pay gold to and she will give you hints on what to do next, as far as the main story is concerned. Having something like this in an open world game is very helpful and I received feedback from friends to put her in more taverns. She also has a side quest of her own to give if a certain item is obtained, which can turn it from a useless item into the most useful tool in the game.

I've been trying to come up with a solution to doors that don't have anything of value behind them. As in, they would be a complete waste of time for me to make something behind as well as the player's time because there won't be anything to do there. One character has the ability to pick locks, so there are plenty of locked doors that can be opened by her, so I was trying to find something to visibly show the players that a door won't have anything behind it so they shouldn't even bother clicking on it.

I had a friend recommend putting seals on the doors, like the Japanese styled ones. Given that those aren't used anywhere else in the game, I think it could work. I was also thinking about maybe making the doors grayscale, or lowering their saturation, to show that there was no need to click on them. If anyone has any other ideas it would be appreciated!

 

[BreakerZero]

Yet another bottleneck with the Xbox version that I had to fix. With the configuration of the map set to have a lot of common events to handle exiting from a village to the overworld I found that the number of events that have been defined on the map also crashes the game if there are too many definitions thereof, and I needed a way to determine which exit to use in certain cases (like between the west exit on a river town or out to the east), much less to process any sort of exit at all. Ultimately what I ended up doing was to use a control switch to detect if the player has arrived in the village, this activates a parallel event on the village map which replaces all of the prior exit definitions. From there I poll the player's map region and determine which exit to use: if it's region one, you're going out the west end; and likewise, region two is the east side of town. However, this was not a perfect replacement and did not stop the player from progressing past the detection point while still on the village map while the transfer was being initiated as is the behavior for a player touch event, so after trying several options (including barrier definitions linked to a plugin which didn't fire on a continuous basis like I hoped for) I ended up settling on a map event with a "same level" priority that is automatically placed one space over in the direction where the player is facing so that it acts like a roadblock to simulate the behavior of a normal player touch event. After this (but prior to actually initiating map transfer) the arrival switch is turned off to indicate departure (which was intended to happen immediately after the map transfer per the more accurate logic, but wasn't being detected after the map changed for some reason that I can only guess as to how the engine is programmed; however I was able to move it to occur just before the map transfer is processed and still have it work properly).

The only downside to this is that I now have to have to do the same thing for every map that I end up having this problem with, however I'm planning to do so on a rolling basis so that I can still use player touch events when possible and only use the alternative method when there's no other option that's available for doing so.

 

[BreakerZero]

I think I found the biggest problem with my Xbox version. After turning off the audio streaming plugin and changing everything to MP4, I no longer had the crashes that I was still having even after changing the exit processing method for the map in question. That being said, I did introduce a bug that crashed the game when exiting into the overworld under certain conditions, but I don't believe that it's related to the music issue.

As for getting the music back to using OGG files (since MP4 is unfortunately incompatible with audio looping) I have updated the stbvorbis.js files used by the erroneous plugin to the most recently available version which also seems to have fixed some visual stuttering with animated sprites used to represent enemies during battle, meaning that the version that shipped with the plugin may have had a few bugs that affected the HTML5 container used for porting things over to Xbox, although further testing still needs to be done to confirm this. But at least I know what the biggest issue was regarding the soundtrack.

EDIT: After double checking things I noticed that I misspelled the name of the Vorbis decoder files. This has now been fixed. Sorry about that!

 

[BreakerZero]

Unfortunate news to share regarding the Xbox version. No, it's not being cancelled - it just needs to be reworked with a major soundtrack change that uses full length tracks that are designed to loop back to the beginning when it reaches the end.

The good news is that I already have a multitude of tracks that fit this description, however I now have to do it with every single piece of audio in the game. The bad news is that the Vorbis decoder is the problem which is what has required this change, as it has a memory leak that I am unable to resolve without recompiling from the original C code which is beyond my current experience level. As a result of this, and as a stopgap measure, I will be making these changes so that the presentation is consistent across all versions of the game as required under my Xbox contract.

I will reevaluate the use of the Vorbis decoder in future projects once I get the necessary experience with compiling from C to JavaScript, but for now (and to minimize the duration of the required delay in shipping the game) I have chosen to replace the affected audio tracks so that I can ship in MP4 mode and still have a consistent presentation throughout the game in terms of seamlessly looping the music within the limits of the audio format.

 

[Ms Littlefish]

OK.

Working on a set of music that will come with 4 versions. Two are ensemble pieces, one 16-bit. Two are solo versions, one 16-bit. The solos are done, nearly half way done with the ensembles.

Gonna take a break from serious music projects to finish my string quartet of E.G.G.M.A.N for SA2:Battle. I super cereal. That’s something I’m working on.

THEN, I might finish one of my XP rearranges before. This will all probably take me most of July to finish, not gonna lie.

 

[SLEEPERER]

2023/06/25 Progress:
- Added disable and enable dashing system.
- Custom mouse cursor (draw cursor icon, change cursor on event).
- Disabled box animation when mouse click.
- Automatic hide cursor when idle.
- Added arrow animations for player direction when going to other rooms.
- Custom window skin.
- Made teaser video.

 

[BreakerZero]

Major plot twist regarding the Vorbis decoder. Turns out that there's a newer version available of the C-based source code than is provided to compile from in the stb_vorbis.js package, so I'm going to give that a try and see what happens. I do still need to compile it of course, but I've just about got that ready to go because I was going to investigate the memory leak with a fresh compile anyway.

EDIT: I got it to compile, but for some reason there's no sound whatsoever. I'm asking around on the stbvorbis GitHub for analysis and advice, which I think is because emscripten currently uses clang 13 and the c source is only successfully tested through clang 12. (Also, Ubuntu reports that the latest available standalone clang release is version 14.) I'm also planning to release it as an update from where the original stb_vorbis.js developer left off if I can get it to work.

 

[BreakerZero]

In the end, I was able to get things working again using a different decoder that is more up to date, however it only works on NW.JS, the Xbox container still has the silence issue (presumably at this point because of possible WebAssembly changes that are no longer being applied to the current WebView container in relation to the change to Chromium and further resources only being directed in that direction). As this is on the Xbox end, there is unfortunately nothing that can be done about this until the Chromium container for Edge becomes available in that manner. Therefore, I have no choice at this point but to change the entire soundtrack and give up all remaining hope of offering any sort of Mixtape DLC in relation to how that provision would have functioned until such time as the Chromium interface becomes available for use.

As a side note, the mixtape mode was originally intended to be used exclusively on an internal basis anyway and would likely require significant financial resources to actually release the DLC, so it's not a big loss on my end. It still sucks not to be able to even consider it as a stretch goal, however (and because my Xbox contract unfortunately requires all versions of the game to be equal in content and functionality, I legally have to abide by this parity rule and cannot add or remove anything from the game without breaking that parity, therefore I am making the lesser of the two changes in order to not delay my game's release any further). Additionally, any possibility of switching over to the Chromium container at this point would require both a complete rewrite of the C# portion of my Xbox build and major changes to how the JavaScript portion interacts with that side of the codebase, which as an indie developer is like asking for Sasquatch to walk into Downtown Seattle - completely and totally implausible at this point in the development process unless the change is mandated as a condition of release to even be published on Xbox (in which case the console version will likely have to be canceled owing to the available time, budget and resources that I have to work with).

 

[BreakerZero]

Originally I was going to add this to the previous post given the amount of time since then, however I decided that this was worth a full update given the matter in question. Anyway, after going through the entire soundtrack for my game project I was able to salvage a good chunk of the content with only small modifications to remove some of the looping code that I had previously added to the Vorbis files. After that, I had to make decisions on the ones that I couldn't change, or those for which I had legal concerns (specifically in regard for what's permissible with the RTP). Ultimately I only had to change three:

1. I updated how dungeon music is structured (I now only use four main tracks for this: one for normal dungeons, a second for boss levels like in Zelda games, a third for what you'll initially think is the final boss level and a fourth for the actual final dungeon, of which only the latter had to be changed).
2. All of the battle music has changed as well, including the boss themes.
3. Music played during the prologue and when in a town that's experiencing a crisis, as well as the castle theme.

All other such music (in particular the normal tension theme prior to non-final boss battles; the cutscene music; the normal, non-crisis town theme; the music for tragedy scenes; and the castle crisis music) are all unchanged.

 

[bookco]

This is my first time posting in this thread, so my approach will be very general. I’m taking a day off from game development and am feeling chatty opposed to cloistered (anyone who checks out my profile will see that I’ve been fairly active on here, mostly relying on the scripters for support—don’t worry, those growing pains are subsiding and I’ll be including them all in the special thanks for their efforts).

My goal for 2023 is to finish a playable demo of my first full-fledged RPG Maker project and to release it on itch.io. I have owned various iterations of the product, including a Super Famicom cartridge at one point, but never got past experimentation and head scratching. That being said, RM has always been fascinating to me, so I am taking to it much more quickly than my previous attempt with making a 2D game in Unity.

I don’t think I’ll be done with the game by the end of the year, due to my ambitions, but I think if I can implement the key features by then (day/night cycles, skills up to lv50, Druid wild shape and creature summons) then I can release something that feels like a finished product, which is just missing more hours of gameplay and dialogue. And that will be a good feeling indeed.

I am not much of a pixel artist, so I am using free assets. Though I do like to draw, so that may change. If it does, my project may be delayed further. The ‘hundreds’ of enemy types I am wishing to implement in a D&D-esque fantasy setting? All redrawn as pixel art? Yeah, I’ll wait until next year‘s thread, perhaps.

 

[BreakerZero]

This is my first time posting in this thread, so my approach will be very general. I’m taking a day off from game development and am feeling chatty opposed to cloistered (anyone who checks out my profile will see that I’ve been fairly active on here, mostly relying on the scripters for support—don’t worry, those growing pains are subsiding and I’ll be including them all in the special thanks for their efforts).

My goal for 2023 is to finish a playable demo of my first full-fledged RPG Maker project and to release it on itch.io. I have owned various iterations of the product, including a Super Famicom cartridge at one point, but never got past experimentation and head scratching. That being said, RM has always been fascinating to me, so I am taking to it much more quickly than my previous attempt with making a 2D game in Unity.

I don’t think I’ll be done with the game by the end of the year, due to my ambitions, but I think if I can implement the key features by then (day/night cycles, skills up to lv50, Druid wild shape and creature summons) then I can release something that feels like a finished product, which is just missing more hours of gameplay and dialogue. And that will be a good feeling indeed.

I am not much of a pixel artist, so I am using free assets. Though I do like to draw, so that may change. If it does, my project may be delayed further. The ‘hundreds’ of enemy types I am wishing to implement in a D&D-esque fantasy setting? All redrawn as pixel art? Yeah, I’ll wait until next year‘s thread, perhaps.

Sounds quite a lot like my own approach, except for the assets which in the case of bosses and some of the normal enemies are largely off either a support fund membership subscription or the works of artists who have made their assets freely available - everything else is either straight RTP from various editions of RPG Maker, purchased as DLC for said editions, or have been reformatted and/or adapted from said editions for things such as battle animation.

Well, okay... there are at least two exceptions: one is the fact that I modified the gas mask generator parts to a more self-contained style of oxygen delivery system (like the kind you'd see when the fire mitigation crews are trying to contain an inferno that's rising from within a burning house), the other is that I did some amateur sprite work to give one of my characters the visual equivalent of a blouse and jeans. But everything else is pre-made.

 

[Avery]

My current goal for this year is to finish and prepare the advent calendar in time. That project is very near and dear to my heart, but it is also always an immense amount of work and time that goes into it - from brainstorming to creating to actually setting up the posts every day.

I think I wanna "leave" July with six days set up - that is 25% of the content and would also give me a solid backup. If anything happens I could cover the four advent sundays, christmas and st nicholas day with that.

I can't go into detail what I am making cause that would defeat the purpose, but I have enough wips to easily meet that goal, I just need to bring them to completion. Why is starting stuff so much easier than finishing? xD

 

[Ms Littlefish]

Why is starting stuff so much easier than finishing? xD

As someone with over 1000 unfinished music sheets…I am rather ill equipped to even theorize.


Progress update…
Kinda took a small break from my more serious project and got about 20 bars of E.G.G.M.A.N in E Minor for String Quintent (upgraded to include a contrabass, lol).

Slow progress this week.