Welcome to Friday Fun, the blog where I poke my head up from underground, let you all know I’m still alive, and hopefully entertain you with some bits about my project progress and game development experience.
Wow What a Week!
A LOT of things to report on this week, so I’ll try to go down them in order:
On Sunday, Caleb Eno streamed Prepare For Warp for the monthly COGG Let’s Play and we had a good long chat about the game, game development, and even a bit about Dehoarder 2. If you haven’t yet, you should check it out.
On Wednesday, The Steam Coming Soon page for Dehoarder 2 went live, allowing people to wishlist the game for the first time. If you haven’t yet, be sure to wishlist this game so that I know that it’s worth working on!
Also on Wednesday, I started re-releasing on itch.io a curated selection of my old back catalog from Kongregate, as I mentioned I would do in my last FF post. The game builds that are out on Kongregate have been defunct for quite some time, ever since Unity Web Player died. One could get to and download most of these games from my website, if one knew to look for them there. This re-release gives the games that deserve it a proper home in which to live. So far Dehoarder and E.A.R.L.’s Warehouse are live, with Deific’s Guide, Dirty Fork, and Werepenguin’s Escape all coming next week.
Also also on Wednesday, I released a sneak peek into the first few minutes of Dehoarder 2 gameplay.
Yesterday, I submitted both Prepare For Warp and Dehoarder 2 for consideration for the Indie X game showcase. Fingers crossed, this could be a significant visibility-boosting event for me, and I really need more of those.
Crafting and Cooking
Of course, progress is being made on the game itself, with crafting and cooking starting to take shape. Looking to keep consistency with the other mechanics present in the game, I created the crafting system to work in a way where you bring the materials to a workstation, and then use the workstation to transmute the materials into the finished products. Many other games operate crafting so that materials are drawn from a player inventory, but in Dehoarder 2, there deliberately is no player inventory, only what you can carry around with you and maybe a couple of tools (unless you count all of the house’s contents as a giant disorganized player inventory).
I’ve created a first set of recipes based on the empty vegetable cans already in the game, and there are now full can variants of each of those items that will be available for purchase at some point in a grocery store app. The items representing the cooked food have also been created.
The crafting system has design built in for it to be very complex and rich in its recipes and variations. Right now, there are only canned vegetables available, but at some point, I plan to add fresh and possibly frozen varieties of vegetables. Each of these could be selected to fulfill the requirements of the recipe, and each different selection would confer a bonus or penalty on the quality of the finished products. Recipes can also have extra ingredients which will increase the quality of items produced.
For the food items, I used DALL-E to create the textures for the bowls of food. I continue to be impressed with DALL-E. It was able to create all five vegetable textures with ease. The only issue I really ran across is that it was creating textures that were too zoomed in, but I was able to work around that by editing the first texture it generated to add a lot of blank space around it, and then re-upload that and tell DALL-E to fill it in.
This revolutionizes how I do background art for my games. It will only have minor impact for key art and set pieces, but for minor things like a bowl of peas, it makes high production quality much more accessible for me.
Building Buzz For Survival
Unlike Prepare For Warp, which was already well in-flight and had a promised and scoped release when I took Smiling Cat full time, Dehoarder 2 is still a prototype with no firm promise of release and a still open scope. Thus it needs to prove itself as a potentially viable product (and I need to prove myself as a viable marketer of games). I’m doing this for a living, so if Dehoarder 2 is not going to contribute to that, I need to know that sooner rather than later. Hence all of the efforts to start getting Dehoarder 2 out in front of people as soon as possible.
It was nice back before going full-time to be able to work on a project simply as a labor of love, however, in this current situation (which I created), I do not have the luxury of spending hundreds of hours on something for only a handful of likes and downloads.
So we shall see, in the coming weeks and months, whether Dehoarder 2 can pull its own weight or needs to be put out to pasture. I’m betting on the former; I’ve seen Dehoarder 2 resonate with too many people for me to believe otherwise. Hopefully I’m right.
Conclusion
I’ll go ahead and leave off there for this edition of Friday Fun. I think I’ve covered everything major that has happened. With my life so devoted to this effort, sometimes it can be hard to keep track. Be good to each other, and I will be back next week with another update.