Lessons Learned From Feed The Plant

     Taking the detour of quickly making my spin on Flappy Bird was a very refreshing and fun experience. It's rewarding having a fun and simple game out there. It's a favorite among the people who normally playtest my games. I've proven to myself that if I were to make another arcade style game, simplification is the way to go. Feed The Plant was my chance to limit myself to a small game with no progression features or plug-in integration I wasn't comfortable with.

      It's pick-up and play nature has given me further insight into the bite-sized nature I have in mind for my future RPGs. Alongside that I learned a thing or two about shrinking my game file sizes, I practiced spriting to the point were I feel like I can draw anything, and I figured out an interesting bit about making app icons.

Have a postmortem-ish breakdown below.

PCT Open House - Spring 2014 (Gaming & Simulation)

     My college's open house happened on Saturday and some students and I volunteered to help with the Gaming and Simulation presentations and represent what BGS majors are capable of. I had a lot of fun and got everything I wanted and more out of the experience. Get the details of that experience below.

Making My First Debug Menu

      I never needed to use a built-in debug to make a game before because my previous titles were all small and arcade oriented. Making changes for testing was just a matter of changing a bit of code and running the game again. A complex RPG has a lot of things to manage and balance and the quickest way to test everything would be to sidestep rebuilding the game.

      Having a menu to change variables around will make it so that I don't have to change tons of code and keep track of what I'm messing with. Because of so much save data being involved, being able to mess with it all this way is the safest option. I don't want to risk messing up a system so fragile.

     I'll have a video of the debug tool in action once there's more to show. Right now there are just buttons with empty methods and changeable text.

Status Report #31

     Big things happening all week! It's been one of the busiest weeks of my life so far with an entire game being made, lessons learned, research done, and connections made. Nothing happened for Unicorn Quest other than a tweaked idea for combat, but a lot of things happened for Yotes Games as a whole.

     Today I'm attending my college's open house to help inspire freshman and convince parents that game development is in fact a legitimate job. I also had a change of plans and won't be attending summer school like I intended which may lead to Unicorn Quest having an early release.

Check out the Status Report below!