Devlog 4 - AGS Is My Friend Again

Cripes, a new todo list. I have been busy!

Well, readers, several weeks in to spending a little bit of time in AGS daily and it's starting to feel comfortable again. I've gotten a lot of value out of just lurking on the AGS forums, reading answers to tech discussions and seeing the insights there, and just getting hands on time with the editor and engine. I'm also still trying to get the core Old Skies stuff finished up and ticked off, but of course the list magically grew a fair bit in the last month. That's the nature of to-do lists after testing. I'll get there. I'm slightly less tired than I was this time last week, but only slightly. I have enough dark chocolate (85%, the good stuff) to get me through one blog post, at least.

Design

It's amazing how much ideas change once I try to make them work in engine. I think some of the issue is that my long gap between making things come to life has made me forget what it's like to conceptualise an idea, build it, and then tweak it just right. Another issue is that I am probably trying to do things slightly differently both to what most AGS games do and what I tried to do in AGS in the past.

For example, after implementing one idea this week and trying it I immediately knew that it felt awful, and that I had to change things. This was a rare, happy occurrence where after I went for a walk I realised how I could change it both to remove the issue I was having and improve another element I wasn't happy with, but it did caution me - things that seem like fun in my head will not always be fun in game. Every little element of an adventure game probably has nuance to it, down to how we walk around scenes.

Programming

I am sorry to say that I have found myself to be very bad at mathematics now. In trying to do some maths based operations I found myself very quickly overwhelmed by fairly basic ideas. Because of this I am re-learning maths, just a little bit every day with my morning coffee, because I seem to have forgotten the vast majority of it. Sorry, Mr. Ford, who always encouraged me to be an illustrator and didn't yell at me when I drew cartoon owls riding strange tricycles in the margins of my calculus exam. I think you might have been onto something with the illustration thing, though. Happily, my old Ti-83 graphing calculator still works after all this time. I'm doing the long division on paper with a pencil, though, because I'm trying to get my head comfortable with doing it again - in short, I'm training to get fit for maths.

In terms of standard AGS stuff, though, it's going well. Here's a quick fire effect I built in AGS before maths class one morning. It can follow objects or characters or even the mouse cursor as seen here:

Time to build Flamethrower Quest

The background is an old one I had done a couple of years ago for a nice tribute series. I have a bunch of other effects and variants I want to build, but am limiting myself to a little bit of fiddling each day, which is the only way the actual work gets done.

Art

I've painted the first scene for the game. It looks good and I am happy with it. No doubt I will be polishing it in tiny amounts for a month. I had to change a bunch of stuff once I saw it in engine, and I decided to do a bunch of parallax effects and things because why make the first scene I've implemented in an AGS project in years simple? It probably seems funny to consider drawing a single scene a nice milestone considering how many scenes I've drawn for other people's projects but it still feels like a good one. I think this game will look nice.

Summary

Probably the biggest criticism I would have of myself this week is that my goal setting habits have diminished a little bit now that I'm trying to draw, animate, implement, test and tweak all at once. I tend to find my work practices a little more scattered and less focused. I think now that I'm getting a bit more familiar with implementing in AGS, though, I can probably go back to working steadily through a checklist and making measurable progress. My biggest criticism of myself last week was that I overextended myself, tried a bit too hard to re-learn AGS and didn't get enough sleep. The gig that I mentioned that I hadn't done enough practice for went great, but I was definitely a little over-tired and made a few mistakes that were just "Didn't get enough sleep, brain forgot how this part goes". I've been better about all of that this week.

I am still finishing up Old Skies, a bit each day, and I'm very close to having the fundamental stuff done. I know I've been telling people this for weeks but I keep taking care of all the extra stuff that keeps popping up on the "important things to do" list and that list is still nearly all done. Dave has been putting the trailer together (as opposed to the "teaser trailer" which already exists) and it looks good. I'd redo so much of my work on the project if I could. That's always true. I'm proud of my work on the game, nevertheless.

Thanks for reading. Wish me luck with the mathematics study. And send more dark chocolate, it's all gone now.