12/31/23

Time Worked: 4 hours, 15 minutes

A good end to the year.

Put in a lot of time today and made walls that look pretty nice. Especially compared to grey squares. The simple lines really really make a difference. Art is fun!

This is gonna be a great year. I feel really good about the fact that things picked up this month. It's a good way to start 2024. I feel that this game is coming together one little piece at a time. In total, between this and EndSoldier, I'm sitting around 315 hours total. Pretty sweet! I am proud of my dedication and especially proud of the fact that it has been pretty sustained. There wasn't really much cram supereffort time, it was just consistent effort over months.

Here's a little chart of about what this last year looked like (hours spent per month):

Ya know. Maybe it's soon time to put this up on itch.io or something. As a place to just continuously update, practice devlogs, and maybe get some players. Of course, we are still very early. But I think that it's starting to become cohesive. I think this new high speed iteration is a killer strategy, and I have to keep it up. Have to focus my effort each day on things that make the biggest difference.

Hell yeah. 2023 Joe, see ya later. It's been fantastic. 2024 Joe, it's your time. Make it happen. You got this!!!!

12/30/23

Time Worked: ~ 2 hours

Today I worked on adding Barricades. Originally I was thinking of having sandbags with directionality, but I have been rolling with this idea of implementing things quickly and going for simplicity initially. So, the sandbags with 4 directions per tile was more complicated than simply a full-size tile that's considered "barricaded". The idea is that it's either a trench, or a little bunker, or something. I think it gets the idea across.

I still need to make it able to be placed on top of the wall, then there's also artistic representation.

In the long run I'll probably need to improve this building system. I think some type of grid where you can always check what grid coord the actor is in and then what blocks are there, and what affects those blocks have would be necessary. Perhaps can add in directional sandbags later. But let's see what happens, this is simpler for now.

Once I make them placeable on top of walls as well, I'll be doing artwork for the walls which will be fun and interesting. I like doing artwork so far. It's a nice break from programming.

Then I'll be making my next set of tasks. I have been feeling that a more art-heavy pass might be necessary because right now if I were to show anybody it's pretty hard to tell what's going on, and also I need to keep working on my art skills in order to get better.

Loving this fast-paced iteration. And I'll be going part-time on January 8th and beyond, so this game will hopefully really start to take off then.

Later!

P.S., the hexagons are the barricades, just haven't done any art yet.

12/27/23

Time Worked: Like 2 hours

Today was pretty gewd. I got up here and got to work once again. Having a good time with this thing. I feel really good that I got the bones of a bunch of features in recently. I'm going to move on now that I've fully implemented the new pistol art to the last two tasks - a little environment art and adding sandbag buildings. Then I'll make another iterative pass on things.

Hell yeah! 

12/26/23

Time Worked: 1 hr, 45 mins

Wooooh, intense day. I just had to deal with insurance and stuff about my car burning up, and also needed to get an MRV done for an ongoing health issue. Medical stuff is hard for me because I can become extremely anxious sometimes, especially a medical scan like that. Fortunately it was open but it was just hard for me to overcome. And just the concern about what the heck is wrong with me; what the doctor will say whenever they get the results.

Oh well.

Today was pretty damn productive. I didn't feel like it, but here I am, I did the work. I decided to do some of the gun artwork next because I felt like I needed a break from all the coding. And I really feel like what I made is pretty sweet. The picture attached to this post is what I'm going to use for the handguns for now. I had looked at different science fiction handguns from things I like such as Warhammer, XCOM, Rimworld, Halo, etc. But I decided eventually I didn't really like basing my stuff on any of that, and that I just wanted to make a somewhat original fictional pistol.

I did use the Sig P320 XFive Legion (a gun I shoot for competition) because the thing just looks cool as hell. It's a very large pistol. So I literally just took a picture of that and traced over it in Gimp, then took some liberties to make it less of a straight-up-copy. And I like the result! Pretty sweet! Pretty heavy looking and plenty of little details. Excited to do whatevers next. I may just use this for now and not do any more weapon artwork yet, do it iteratively. We'll see tomorrow. This really only took me about an hour of serious work which is pretty damn quick.

Later!

 

12/25/23

Time Worked: 2 hours, 30 mins

Today went really really well. I got a little exhausted halfway through, but I pushed through and was able to get persistent leveling etc for troops which actually was pretty sweet to play with. I'm getting those flashes of "oh this would be cool" or "hey what about this idea" which is good, it's the vision returning. 

But yeah just chuggin along man and I really like the way things are going. I really like this quick iteration thing - trying to finish a task per day or two and making them as simple as necessary to do that. It really keeps things fresh.

I think this is the first time where I really felt inspired in a while. I guess part of it is once I added in this leveling, it just felt like something clicked in the gameplay. So that's really cool and inspiring. Can't wait to see what happens next!

Now I'm off to play some Barony.

 

 

12/24/23

Time Worked: ~1 hr, 45 mins

Today I did alright. I finished up the ability to equip troops with weapons and now have started on stat progression (lvls and shit). It will be pretty sweet to see how that turns out! Gonna do something nice quick and simple. That's kind of the motto recently and I think it's really working out for me. Just gotta keep puttin in the work dawg. 

In other news, my Jeep lit on fire today. 😥

12/23/23

 Time Worked: Like 1 hour

Did some good work today. Finished up the recruitment screen and started working on the equipping screen. This is kewl. I think adding the ability to equip dudes will make them more interesting. I also think them actually persistently dying and leveling up will make things more interesting as well. I am excited to see where it goes!

Little tiny iterations ftw.

Here's the recruitment screen currently.

12/20/23

Time Worked: like 2 hours 

I am a little too stressed to write anything. Health issues going on.

Just getting very basic stats (Accuracy, Speed, and HitPoints) implemented.

It's kinda cool. Looking forward to being able to equip troops.

I like this very short task iteration style.

12/19/23

 

Time Worked: 1 hour, 45 mins

So I did do work on the 17th as well but I was lazy and didn't write an update. I gotta stick to it!

Today I have been working on implementing the recruitment system, but just a very basic version of it. Right now, if you hire some dudes,  then that many actors with those names will appear in the mission. There is no persistence i.e. if they die it doesn't do anything and there's no different stats or costs or descriptions or anything. But one step at a time.

I like this new kind of idea I have about being aggressively iterative and simplistic. I.e., for this recruitment system I'm not trying to make "THE Recruitment System", I'm just thinking "What can I do very quickly that will get the basic feature working?". I know I will come back to this because it's an iterative process. I am trying to iterate across these mechanics:

•  Realtime Battle
• Turn-Based System
• Recruiting
• Equipment
• Character Stats
• Character Progression
• Artwork
• Deployment Selection
• Customization
• Character Personality
• Events

And I'm not necessarily always doing all of these things each "sprint", but I am trying to look at all of them and create at least one very barebones ticket for each of them if I feel it's necessary. Then once I've gone through all those, I'll create new ones in these sections and keep them simple, but build on what I've already done.

The idea is to keep things simple, keep moving forward, not get stuck, and keep things interesting.

Anyway here's the recruitment screen, it's messy and the descriptions don't work and talk about weapons because I've been lazy and didn't update the text yet. 

Onward!

12/15/23

 Today I did a little I don't have time to write rn but I did it!

12/14/23

 Time Worked: An hour, maybe 1.5 hours?

Today I just cleaned some stuff up. While I had thought about adding a "In Cover" sprite or some UI to designate the cover status of an actor, I looked over my to-do from a month or two ago and saw the iterative type of process I was going for, so I'm gonna follow that. Going to be adding in bones of different systems I want in the game, and they are going to be buggy, but they are going to be there.

And I'll fix what bugs are necessary along the way. I may just see if there's a like one-day solution to displaying status of cover for a character. But if it's longer than that I'll just do it later. 

12/12/23

 Time Spent: Like an hour

Today I added name markers for allies and  health indicators. I'll show it tomorrow!

12/11/23

Total Time: 3 hours, 8 minutes

This is probably the longest I haven't posted on here. I basically ended up not working in November. I was traveling for probably 2 weeks total and that was kind of derailing, but I also was already slowed down a lot. I think it was because I was working on the AI stuff and it's just been a big challenge because I'm new to that. 

I am a little frustrated with myself for taking so much time off the project. 

But I am not going to focus on that. Can't do anything about the past other than recognize it,  and I need to focus on doing my best now.

Anyway I have decided to continue work on the project. I have basically pushed through the big ass AI mess that I had created at this point; so that's really good. I just have to kind of keep looking ahead and keep putting in the time and that's all that anyone can do in these situations.

I am once again feeling that fear, that "am I fooling myself?" kind of question popping into my head about regarding myself as an indie developer. Wondering if I'm making a mistake spending time pursuing this. After all, it would really suck if I am doomed to always just be "trying". I feel this way because I haven't been putting in the work - I always feel this way when I'm not doing what I should be doing. So really, it's just my conscience being honest with me: 

"Hey, I know you really want to be a game developer, and right now your actions aren't really reflecting that. Are you sure this is what you want to do?"

And my answer is yes.

Anyway here's a GIF of some enemies blowing up wall segments.