Update time friends. These come around so fast! I’ve doing something this week that I don’t do nearly enough. I’ve been playing Samphi for extended periods of time. Let’s have a quick chat about that.
It’s funny what making games does to your perception of them. Since I’m always under the hood of Samphi it’s easy to slip into seeing it more like a piece of software than a game. This is bad for a whole plethora of reasons.
The worst consequence is that I don’t really play the game much. I mean, I’m always programming it, but I’ll code a feature, test that feature, then move on. I never see the full picture. Take for example the last update, re-designing the fishing mechanic. I coded that, tested it, and never realized that it broke the entire crafting system … this was a massive eye opener.
I decided that every now and again It would be really good for me to take my programming hat off, put my gamer hat on, and just play the game for extended periods of time. This lets me access game balance, bugs, overall structure; everything that I feel I’ve been missing thus far. It’s easy for me to think Samphi is going well because my code works, but is it fun?
So that’s what I’ve mainly been doing, just playing the game! It’s been fun!
Here’s a house I built:
I’ve also been planting trees in the area to my left so I can create a forest! I use too much wood!
I’ve found so many bugs and points of improvement from this that I think I’m going to do the same for next week as well. So the next build, v0.2g, will contain mainly bug fixes as opposed to new features, but it should help address game balance. :)
Here’s a list of everything I’ve found/changed so far:
- Resolution is now saved and re-applied on loading the game
- Added ability to scroll through resolution options with arrow keys
- Fixed issue with fish where they could get stuck out of water
- Changed the chance of getting a worm from guaranteed to 1/10
- Cut the chance of fish spawning in half. Was 1/20, now 1/40.
- Fixed issue with icons not being deleted when their quantity hit 0
- Fixed issue with crafting menu that could cause you to loose your items
- Fixed issue with ladders that meant you couldn't climb up/down them properly.
- Fixed issue where placing last torch would crash the game
- Fixed issue where you couldn't place bed on wooden blocks
There was a post this week that brought up the fact that Samphi is frame locked at 30fps. It’s the first time this has been mentioned so right now I don’t have much of a response or any info to share, but I figured we could at least start the conversation and get it out there.
Samphi is indeed frame-locked to 30 fps. It’s to do with how GameMaker works. In typical game engines, you keep your logic updates separate from your rendering updates. That is to say, you draw the game and update its logic at different rates. That’s the best way to do it. Unfortunately, GameMaker doesn’t work that way. If I increased the fps to 60, the game in its current state would run twice as fast. There’s been other games, big games such as Need for Speed, that suffered the same problems.
In order to move Samphi over to 60fps, I would need to re-evaluate every constant value that the game uses as it’s tied to the fact it’s updated 30 times a second. This is doable, it’s just a large-ass job, so don’t want to undertake it unless there’s a large call for it. Attest not yet. Someday I’d love to see Samphi running at 60fps, but for now, I think content should come first.
That’s it really. Sorry I don’t have anything super exciting to share, but I’m just spending some time refining what’s already here. There're huge issues I’ve found that I would have just never know about. The biggest one so far I think is the fact that you couldn’t climb down ladders … So I need to spend more time playing and fixing these issues I find.
So next week I imagine the post will be pretty similar to this one. I’ll share the full bug list for what’s been fixed, it will be long, then it will be back to business adding features. :)
Let me know what you think, and enjoy the weekend friends. Have a beer, you earned it. Ciao!
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