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Welcome to yet another devlog for our game ^^ This sprint has largely been about fisxing a lot of weird bugs, but there are also some pretty neat large-is features at the very end.
This devlog's topic -- Cake Clubs!
Last friday the devteam had our monthly cake club! For those not in the know this game team was originally a cake club. Well it still is. This time we convened at script writer Elmo's place. He baked us some excellent pineapple pie from his historical cookbook. I believe this recipe was from the 1700's?
The club works so that the baking turn rotates to the next club member every month. Since we are four people everyone get's to bake once every 4 months. This is not actually that much baking in a year, so despite the fact that the cake club is soon 6 years old, we are by no means professional pastry chefs :P
Cake clubs are great! I recommend every dev team starts a cake club, even if it's virtual. There was a time when one team member lived in Norway temporarily, so we had to make the cake club partially virtual. It worked quite well actually, so I do recommend this even if your team isn't local.
We do have this (unspoken) rule that during cake club we don't discuss our game project, or if we do, its lighthearted and jokes, but no work allowed! It's good to have some time with your team when you talk about things besides the project. For us it's quite easy since we are a pretty tight friend group and we do loads of stuff together even without the game project. This sometimes brings it's own problems. Conversations about money and project finances are always a bit iffy between friends, but we prevail.
Marketing:
💠 Our current wishlists stand at 123 (+11) I hope they keep con rolling in even if slowly ^^
Art:
💠 Vivi and Hani have been hard at work creating pixel art characters for our demo. Thet first made a crude version of each sheet to make sense of how many characters we need in total for the demo. Vivi made me promise to stress that these are still very much WIP
Story:
💠 Elmo has been finalizing our chapter 1! Years after starting this project, I will be able to start implementing the text into the game ^^ (That will also let me stress test our dialogue system implementation with real script)
Programming:
💠 I fixed a bug where characters would start drifting from their tiles if they repeatedly took damage
💠 I fixed a bug where the enemy turn would start twice at the same time if the player skipped their turn
💠 I fixed a bug where the attack animations would get stuck for infinity, if enemies had no space to get knocked back
💠 I fixed a bug where the Health UI could go to negative numbers
💠 I fixed a bug where knockback amounts were calculated incorrectly
💠 I fixed a bug where a dialogue loop would continue forever, because the player would exit dialogue and the same input would restart it
💠 I fixed a bug where character portraits would not show up if the player restarted dialogue immediately after finishing
💠 I optimized our character portrait assets by making sure all texture sizes are divisible by four
💠 If you knock an enemy into another enemy, the otherenemy now also takes knockback damage
💠 I added dynamic lighting into the game and made sure all the UI assets would ignore the lighting. I love dynamic lighting in pixel art games ^^ This is still quite mild stuff, but I think the lighting immediately makes the game pop a bit better. (Also please ignore the unfinished fire effect
💠 I added a blur shader that blurs everything behind characters during dialogue scenes. I will configure this so that the player can adjust the strength of it, since not everyone likes how it looks
That is everything for today! I hope you have a fantastic week ^^ Thank you for following our development journey
-Hanuli from Salmon Snake Games