Hey friends! Been a long old month, with a lot of Jamie's feedback to work through - let's get into it all! [hr][/hr] [h2]Story Time[/h2] So one thing I started working on while I had some free time was swapping between the boring bug fixes to do some nice drawing for a change! I'd been thinking about a nice way to introduce some background for the game when starting out, and wanted to do something a bit more detailed than just the postcard APICO uses, and something with a bit more style. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43848552/aab8a3dcbbfaa79175dfce91493d9c704e82c164.png[/img][i]hey guys whats up[/i] I started scribbling in Aseprite to roughly flesh out each of the story frames, and then used the void/beast colours throughout to make it a bit more stylised - only using a bit of green to represent the goblins. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43848552/292441401c86ee9b515161d39713fb15ef6fd681.png[/img][i]ooh a fresh pie?[/i] I wanted to have it so combined all the frames gave you a rough idea of the story without words - however there would be a couple sentences with each frame just to start building up the lore, I just wanted to make sure that they all worked without text. All in all I ended up going for 5 different panels that could take us from an "in the beginning, there were beasts" to a "now its your time to do this shit" type flow. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43848552/2293f428b7bad150d882d4d660f7a1453bac1220.png[/img] I'm really happy with how they turned out, and it was fun to just have a bit more of a loose approach to drawings vs my normal militant style. Hopefully it should help set some of the tone from the get go and make for a nicer introduction than just a wall of text! [hr][/hr] [h2]Award-Winning Chef[/h2] Now I'd warmed up the ol' drawing muscles I went ahead and also drew the Witchelin Stars - these would be the little tokens that each beast would give you once you've met and maintained all their orders. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43848552/f6e2c0aa2ee26bae32a7fb5b1f834ba5847704a0.png[/img] The pun was right there so we had to, but I spent a bunch of time trying to draw something that matched the name and also looked like something that would exist in the real world as a sort of logo / graphic that the chef could show off. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43848552/d1b72584e69568366db3853f6b8e5e37b8b2172e.png[/img] In-game I'd use the magic void filter to replace the hat of the witch star and the signature of the beast so that it had the nice void effect and feel a bit more alive than just a static card. I could then add these into the game as pickups when you speak to the beast, and finish off the whole "order complete" part of the gameplay to give it a bit more fanfare than just okay you're done with that one NEXT [hr][/hr] [h2]Where Am I[/h2] With these new graphics done and the intro added in as a glorified slideshow presentation, I worked through a bunch of the bugs and issues that had come up from Jamie's second round of testing. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43848552/cd8d4917e04917f3248b577bbd30aa4f6ed6e69c.png[/img] [i]gettin p. tired of this word[/i] Also yeah fun fact I do little patch notes all the time even when it's internal builds only I or Jamie see! Helps to keep track of where things are at each time I send a new build, and it's also nice for my own personal sense of achievement/progress through the bigger slogs. Anyway with that done I moved onto adding a map, which I'd been putting off for a while as I was worrying about the size of the world being too large for a map surface. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43848552/f615026d7a81fc9b26901c19a19a5caf3b5b275e.png[/img][i]first pass showing just blocks being rendered on the map[/i] However what I quickly realised is the demo world is reasonably large but it's not that large, and it all fits nicely in a 256x256 map. We'd still need to be able to pan and zoom but the actual original map wouldn't take up much room at all. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43848552/f9804857f2e55f27d9ef9b64d8cecd27f479df47.gif[/img] [i]please, put me out of my misery...[/i] Panning was easy enough, and a basic zoom was fine, but trying to get the zoom to be based on the mouse position and map offset took me far longer that it should have and several thousand brain cells were lost in the process. Once I finally worked that out I could then enjoy the horror of working out which exact tile on the map we are hovering over based on the mouse, zoom, AND offset so that we could not only snap the highlight to the tile but use it to show the tooltip as if your mouse was over that thing in the real world to allow for quick checking. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43848552/439bd16a0eb2c4bf95e8e5a893b19bf99052a855.gif[/img] [i]finally my suffering is over[/i] Finally I then made it that we drew a flashing dot for any machines with an error (so you can quickly check for issues), and also a seperate wire layer that you could toggle on and off with shift. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43848552/15ca842c94f03d572568dd3c68e6a367a22da467.gif[/img] [i]really happy with how this turned out![/i] Although it's basic enough, with the tooltips letting you hover essentially anything in the world no matter where you are that should be useful enough alone - and then the wire map with your resouces should help plan out even the most absurd factories. Might be some other layers I add to this but honestly for a demo I feel like this is enough just to help people make their way around the world and their own (literal) spaghetti factories. [hr][/hr] So that was that for Snacktorio in July! A decent chunk of the bigger items ticked off, leaving me now with "just" the tutorial segment, all the fancy particles + SFX, and then the final finishing touches on all the books to make sure it all has the quintessential terrible TNgineer puntastic writing. Next month I'm going to dig into the tutorial area, as shouldn't need to do too much extra just a lot of planning and writing for the guide character that takes you through it all. ~ Ell [This post was released early for Supporters]