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Web Dev Side Missions

Web Dev Side Missions
I decided to actually take a break from some Sky Sisters stuff this week just like I told myself I would! I spent some time messing around with a web project that I've been meaning to try out. I'm working on building a Pathfinder character sheet that just runs off HTML and Javascript (and some other stuff to save and load the data.)

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I dug into a framework called Milligram which has been super handy in regards to getting a decent looking UI up and running quickly. Web development still feels super weird to me as it's combining like 6 different technologies into a single thing. Combining HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, MySQL feels like a giant mess but somehow it all comes together.
webdev
Posted October 27th 2016 1:13 AM (General)
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Doodle Post

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doodles
Posted October 25th 2016 11:25 PM (Doodle)
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Dev Log: Remaining Stuffs

Dev Log: Remaining Stuffs
October is passing me by way faster than I thought! I think this month has proven to me that I'm temporarily out of juice for Sky Sisters. I put a lot of energy into the game toward the end of the summer, and then there was PAX, and then there was the post PAX rush of new features I wanted to put into the game.

Now sitting here in front of my visual studio window I find that I'm totally out of energy. There are some things left to work on still, but I'm not feeling that kick of inspiration to finish them. I know that I have to continue to work on things no matter what I'm feeling, but I also don't want my total lack of energy to show in certain parts of the work.

For now the remaining tasks are pretty simple except for more polish and bug fixing. I need to be doing sound effects which I might tackle if I'm feeling up for it, but I'm not exactly an audio designer and I'm not sure if my chippy sounding effects are really keeping up with the high res art of the game. It's easy to get away with low fidelity sound when the graphics match, but when it comes to high res art it just sounds a little off.

I also need to figure out how I'm releasing this thing! I have maybe a few options in the form of publishers if I wanted to go that route, but I'm still feeling pretty anxious about it. I know that Sky Sisters is a pretty weird game, so I'm not exactly expecting it to sell any sort of crazy amount of copies. I've had fun working on it though and that's enough for me for now.

I suppose this post was just meant as a small vent, and also as I wrote this I'm trying to figure out what exactly it is I want to work on next. I think I might dig back into the secret final boss of the game and see if there's any way I can spruce it up.

If all else fails I'll dip into another project for awhile as that usually makes me feel better, but right now the only side project I have that's worth working on is the new version of Otter that will use FNA instead of SFML. We'll see how that turns out!

I'm just constantly reminded that creating stuff is super dang difficult.
dev log sky sisters
Posted October 25th 2016 11:24 PM (General)
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Doodle Post

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doodles
Posted October 20th 2016 2:22 PM (Doodle)
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Dev Log: Progress Markers

Dev Log: Progress Markers
One of the things I realized when watching people play Sky Sisters is that people need some sort of indicator for how far they've gone in the game, and what's coming up ahead. Most of the time play sessions went well enough, but I wanted to more clearly indicate the pacing of the game.

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I decided to change the pacing of how often boss fights happen. Before it was kind of an arbitrary and slightly random method. It would count how many "event bags" the player went through and then spawn a boss every so often based on how many completed bags there were. This ended up in varied pacing as to when a boss would arrive, and I didn't like how sometimes a boss would show up at 2 minutes and other times maybe 4 minutes. I changed it to be a strict "when the players complete X events, queue up a boss fight," and this seems to be working out better.

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This little progress bar indicates how far along the players are until the next boss fight. It is hard to tell sometimes if knowing exactly when a looming threat is coming is good or not, but I think in this case it can be a good tension builder. The players can also know if they just survive for a little bit longer they can defeat the boss and take the exit portal.
dev log sky sisters
Posted October 20th 2016 2:22 PM (General)
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Doodle Post

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Tried a little comic thingy.
doodles
Posted October 19th 2016 10:53 AM (Doodle)
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