I'm awful at coming up with clever titles

I have a phone again!

Firstly, not sure if this is the right platform, but such is life when you avoid social networks, haha... but I apologize if you've tried contacting my cell over the past half-a-year or so. One day it just decided it would no longer run, and that was that. (I don't even know who's tried to contact me since- any messages from this dark period seem to have been lost to the throes of time, sorry!)

Not gonna lie though, it was a great feeling. Have you ever wanted to retreat from the worries of the world and hole up somewhere as a hermit, but still want to experience the comforts of city life? (No? Just me then?) There's no quicker way than losing your phone. No more feelings of 'phantom vibration syndrome' in my empty pockets; no more "oh no I haven't checked my phone in hours I hope I haven't missed any important calls"; just no more being permanently tethered to a little device! My anxiety and stress levels dropped so drastically that I really wasn't eager to replace the thing right away...

Now, of course, forgoing both a phone and a social network addiction in the modern day makes it much harder to actually be social. We've come to rely so much on the power of instantaneous communication that it makes people irrationally nervous to simply set a time and place and just meet (y'know, like we used to do). Thankfully, many friends and family have been gradually migrating over to Discord (a fantastic messaging service that, unlike Facebook, doesn't cost you your privacy), making it much easier to stay connected. (Also thankfully, Discord has moved away from its meme-filled 'for gamerz' appearance too, making it much less offputting for the average person.)

However, it's probably time I accept a little bit of stress- it's pretty important for motivating constructive behavior. It's been fun to ignore the real world, especially with all the madness that's been happening in it, but I really do want to finally complete the projects I've been idly blogging about so I can move on to bigger and better things. And there has definitely been progress on the Urban Tumbleweed project since the last time I wrote about it, but there's still more to do yet before I'm happy with it! Perhaps there'll be another update post coming soon, though I've said that before, so please don't watch this space too closely :P

***

Anyway, this was mostly just a quick post to test if anyone's actually going to read this. Feel free to get in touch again- my phone number is the same as before, but Discord is still my preferred point of contact.
(If you don't have my Discord, it's on my deprecated Facebook page; if you don't have my number, I probably don't know you; and if you don't have either, and we actually do know each other, leave a comment below I guess?)

Untitled Post to Reaffirm Followers That I'm Still Alive

It's strange how inspiration strikes, so suddenly, when it's least expected. And also how it leaves, in very much the same way.

So... I know it's been awhile, haha... I guess it's fair to say that blogging really isn't my cup of tea. I think, from now on, I'm just going to use this place for major progress updates only. Something about this format just doesn't work for me- if anything, it became a burden that I wasn't willing to continue carrying.

I have been doing a fair bit of work on my projects behind the scenes, but I've been struggling to make significant progress recently; without going into detail, I find it tough to get into a creative headspace without being completely alone, devoid of distractions, and there's been a whole lot on my mind as well. Nevertheless, I should hopefully have updates to provide soon for both my android game 'Urban Tumbleweed' and my minecraft modpack- so anyway, as I feel like I've probably said many times already... watch this space :P

Werk werk werk werk

UT
In preparation for the final 'gameplay mechanic' that I've been planning to add for awhile, I've implemented some major back-end changes to the save-file format, the level generation code & the game over action.
...Simply put, the player 'character'- the plastic bag- now persists in the level across runs! When you collide with a building or the ground, your position is recorded & recalled the next time you see that level segment appear. The idea will be that these 'dead' bags will slowly decay the more the game is played, but they should begin to pile up quite noticeably before that happens.
It's a bit like making a statement about earth's futile & looming trash problems, but without actually saying anything :D

Only problem is, now I need a few more images to represent the decaying player characters. If I were to just use a single crumpled bag image over and over, it'd be much too repetitive and would just look terrible. So I've been spending a fair bit of time sketching & illustrating various plastic bags, crumpled at different angles... it's surprisingly hard to even get it looking believable when they're shrunk down to the miniscule size they're rendered at in-game!

No screenshots this time because I'm really not happy with how it looks at the moment. Sorry :P Watch this space!


My (Minecraft) Modpack
Previously using the working title 'Ligpack', I've gotten quite heavily back into the development of my Minecraft 1.12.2 modpack. I suppose my fervour faded a bit when the 1.13 update was released, as I was afraid that people would've quickly moved on from the version I've spend so much time working in. However, it's now been over half a year since then & there's still no signs of a 1.13 release for Forge (the standard, yet unofficial, modding API)- and, as always, I just wanna get the damn thing finished already!

One major change is that I've finally decided on a slightly more creative name for the pack...

BiblioTech! (Get it? Because it's about providing lots of guiding documentation & advancing through my artificial tech trees... and 'biblioteca' is the word for 'library' in most latin-based languages... well I thought it was clever, alright? :P)

I'm really happy with how that logo came out, too. You wouldn't be able to tell, but I spent days on that thing! It was really difficult finding two different fonts that were free to use, fit the theme & also looked good next to each other- honestly, most of that time was just tracking down fonts, trying them out for awhile, and then deciding they look terrible.
Even after I'd accomplished that, the text still just looked flat & boring. After a lot of manual touch-ups & minor details, I finally managed to make something that looks both sleek & simple. (And it looks even better against my main menu backdrop image!)

Aside from the ongoing general modpack development work of recipe changes, questbook writing & configuration tweakage, I recently made the fairly major decision to strip a moderately-major mod from the pack. After numerous posts on the /r/feedthebeast subreddit (the go-to place for modded Minecraft discussion) voicing their collective hatred of AbyssalCraft, I reluctantly conceded that the mod's just got to go.
I personally felt like I'd provided enough auxiliary documentation to help people find their way through the nasty, trolly mod, as I'd spent a few days researching it when I wrote the related quests- so it didn't feel right to just throw it all away; but on the other hand, it wasn't entirely necessary for my custom tech trees, it wasn't exactly the most entertaining mod to begin with, and I didn't want any potential players to miss out on the entire modpack simply because they saw that it was included.
It sets me back another few days, and it's like throwing out over a week's worth of work, but I do think ultimately it was the right decision to make.

~~~

So that's where things are now, mid-Feb, 2019. Thanks as always for joining me for my sporadic word spaghetti- let's see where this year takes us!

- Lig

Progressively Updating

It's been quite a while now since I've given a progress update on Urban Tumbleweed's development, and it's changed quite a lot since then- so let's just get right into it!

~~~

The interface has been improved, with fancy new fonts, icons & other extra details:

Birds have been textured, the wind compass looks ever-so-slightly less placeholder-ey, and I've added a bit of a subtle glow to the bag itself- because I noticed it could sometimes be quite hard to see on a small mobile screen!

Also, as you may or may not be able to figure out from the mute button on the first pic, I've added music & sounds too! Nothing completely self-produced, but I did do some editing of the impact, gusts, quacks & ambient sounds to get them exactly how I wanted them. The gust sound in particular has some special logic behind it- it'll play louder & lower-pitch as the player does bigger swipes, so that they really sound quite different to short, quick gusts.
(I also really need to add an actual 'pause' menu of sorts now, as you currently can't mute/unmute the game after you've started it...)

I've done a lot of work on the turbulence system, tweaking all the parameters to feel interesting- though I may need to adjust the difficulty somewhat still as I've been the sole tester & I'm probably getting fairly good at the controls as a result! Although, I did adjust the turbulence strength to scale depending on your distance- so it should be a bit calmer as you're just getting started. (Probably need to scale the chance of gusts appearing in the same way too, as they're pretty brutal when you're just getting going...)
The bag also gets lots more shaky at higher altitudes, though this is mostly just aesthetic for now- I'm considering adding in more dangerous aerial obstacles higher up too, maybe planes or something? Anyone got any good suggestions?

Also, look out for occasional dangerous duck formations! (...hmm, perhaps I need to stagger their animations, they're a bit toooo uniform like that)

Finally, I've just whipped up a quick 'test' screen to make it easier to look at each of my assets & make sure they're all correct- that all the hitboxes have been set up properly, buildings have been positioned correctly in their level set pieces, and so on.

I've been meaning to do this for awhile & really should have gotten around to it sooner, but at least it'll help with finalizing the last few assets & confirming that everything's been coded correctly.

~~~

In the next week or two I'll be making the Game Over sequence a bit more spectacular. It's now got a decently satisfying 'thwack' sound (or a 'quack' sound, depending on what you hit...), but it should hopefully become much more visually stunning too! I also hope to make it clearer to new players what you actually need to do, either with a help screen or a simple toggleable 'tutorial' mode- so, as always, watch this space!

Hooray for progress :)

- Lig

Back to Work!

A moment of motivation smacked me in the head recently, so I decided to grab hold of it & finally get around to implementing the 'turbulence' system in Urban Tumbleweed that I'd mentioned awhile back!
Basically, one of the major missing things that was still missing from my desired 'feel' for the game was, well, actual 'wind'- randomly blowing around, occasionally changing direction & the like. Of course, not only does it look great, but it makes for interesting gameplay too- you might get unlucky & have a random gust blow you into the side of a billboard, or you could get lucky & hitch a free ride on a perfectly-angled breeze!

Perhaps the easiest way to explain it would be a direct demonstration:

(Check it out, no more horrible .gifs, I've finally upgraded to video-recording technology! ...and apparently twitter doesn't support videos. Eh well.)

If you watch the makeshift 'wind indicator' in the top-left, you can see what's going on a bit easier. The wind slowly varies in both strength & direction, and has two 'states' that can also occur which will radically affect it for a short time- gusts or direction changes.

I made the wind strength more likely to pick up if it's low, and more likely to calm down if it's strong- leaving it all up to random chance didn't make it very fun in practice. The direction, however, is all up to random chance- so on average, it should tend to not change overall by too much.

On top of this random 'noise', there's a small chance each tick that the turbulence enters one of the two aforementioned states- 'gust' or 'direction change':
A 'gust' causes the wind speed to spike for a brief (random-length) moment, before dropping back down again (and the dot in the wind indicator turns red to represent this).
A 'direction change' causes the wind to rapidly change bearing toward a new (slightly random) direction (& the wind indicator dot turns cyan).

As with everything still being worked on, more tweaking is needed to get all the lengths & strengths feeling 'right'. The demonstration above is really not an 'average' situation, by the way- the game's not actually that slow now, I was just lucky enough to have the wind rotate upwards & then increase in strength consistently enough to hover me in place (and I just thought it looked pretty neat).
Any rate, it's definitely feeling a lot more interesting now, if I do say so myself!

(Oh, and I also actually implemented a proper high-score system that'll actually save the data, encrypted, to a local file, regardless of device... but y'know, that's not quite as interesting to show off :P)

~~~

Originally, when I was first imagining how this game would look, I'd wanted to get some really detailed animations going to make the bag really look like it's dancing around in the wind. I've since come to realize that- without having the budget to hire a professional designer- I've really gotta just play to my strengths; those being mathematics & physics, apparently.
It is actually coming out better than I anticipated without having an animated sprite, so it's probably a better idea to focus on simplicity in design anyway- especially if I want to see this released before it gets abandoned!

- Lig

Crafty Distractions

... I've been having a lot more fun with the latest Minecraft update than I thought I would ^_^'

If you haven't played the game in some time, now's a great time to return! The world's gotten a whole lot more atmosphere to it now- the oceans aren't just devoid of life, the open night sky is something to be feared once again, and the whole idea of 'waterlogged' blocks is a complete gamechanger. There's actually quite a lot of minor changes & additions, and it's honestly just fun to play & figure out new things once again.

One of my favorite things about the 1.13 update is the introduction of 'data packs'- user-defined .json files to modify the game in various ways. I've been having lots of fun creating & sharing my own custom recipes with reddit, so I've decided to catalogue my packs here on the blog for a bit more 'permanence'- you'll see there's now a 'links' section to the right, which I plan to extend as I release more stuff! I've put a whole lot of thought & effort into these recipes, and I'm pretty proud of what I've come up with- I feel like they really do extend the game to reduce tedium without affecting any core gameplay! Please do check them out if you're a fan of Minecraft :)

~~~

Other than being completely & utterly distracted, I've been trying to be a bit constructive as well!

- Occasionally working a little more on my modpack; though, as I'm still waiting on the fix of a fairly game-breaking issue (which has a workaround, albeit a rather annoying one), I've had to accept the fact that it's not going to be releasable in the immediate future, at least until this bug gets fixed, or I change the pack & remove the offending mods... something that I really don't want to have to resort to at this point in the development cycle!

- Coming back to Urban Tumbleweed, I've hit the realization that I'm trying to put far too much effort into the building designs. It's going to be my first released game, and your first things are always your worst, so I shouldn't be wasting so much time trying to get everything to look 'perfect'- after all, the whole point of this project was really just for practice anyway! I'm beginning to mock up a few new design styles that will be much easier for me to produce, I just need to settle on one that works with the game's theme.

- More projects in the works- I've got some miniature ideas for more smaller games to work on. It's actually quite easy to come up with huge, grand ideas for the best game ever, but such ideas will never see the light of day in the hands of an independent developer; the hard part is compressing your ideas down into the most valuable parts, or as they call it in the industry, the Minimum Viable Product (or MVP). I want to work towards one of my grand ideas for a management/simulation game, but since I've never made anything of the sort before, I think I'll start by making a very simple version of the game first- largely to reduce design effort! Most of all though, I'm just finding it tricky to find inspiration to work on the Urban Tumbleweed project, as it's not really a type of game that I play often, so I'd really like a different style of project to work on as well. Still need to collect & organize my thoughts on the matter though, so watch this space :)

- Lig

Pause, Part II

So yeah, there was no way I was gonna get it all finished in a week...

I've been plagued by some game-breaking bugs that took a few days to identify & deal with, and I've been raising issues all over the board recently in hopes that they'll get fixed in time. TIL that simply raising issues on other people's github projects counts as 'contributions' though:

Makes me feel a bit better about blowing all my time on this project! Unfortunately, there's still a couple game-breaking issues that definitely must be fixed before I can publicly release anything, as well as another minor issue which would be much more annoying if I were to release a not-quite-complete-beta version. I'll probably have to start working on contributing some pull requests too at this rate, if I want to see this released any time soon...

Anyway, slowly plodding on with gradual progress. Realistically, as long as no other bugs spring up (I hope I haven't just jinxed it by saying that...), I should be able to get to the end of my todo-list in a couple weeks' time.
Blegh, I hate deadlines anyway.

- Lig

Press Pause

I've kinda hit the pause button on the ol' Urban Tumbleweed project, as I focus on getting my modpack released (I just want to actually finish something!). I'm pretty rubbish at following things through to completion without giving up halfway, but this time around, the light at the end of the tunnel is getting brighter and brighter... :)

So, Minecraft version 1.13 - known as the Update Aquatic - is scheduled to be released in a few days' time (on Wednesday, so I guess Thursday for us earlybird NZ'ers). The update itself doesn't overly concern me though, my 'vanilla' server hasn't been online for months- what does affect me, though, is the playerbase's divided focus between 'vanilla' and 'modded' gameplay. For a lot of people, the reason that modded Minecraft is so entertaining is simply because there's more 'stuff'. It's a sandbox game by nature- sure, there's a bit of progression & nowadays a few 'end-game' features too, but the reason it's so popular is because of the sandbox aspect- and Mojang are particularly slow at putting out new content, and content is what it all comes down to. As a result, I feel like a large proportion of the playerbase pays less attention to the modded scene when a new update is released, especially one as massive as 1.13- because the game becomes fresh again, and there's entirely new ways to play (underwater bases will be much more viable, the trident offers both new combat & travel mechanics, not to mention the 'fluid' system has changed fairly significantly...).
On top of all that, I'm aware of at least one or two other modpacks in development that could compete with mine- with focus on polish & providing a helpful & informative gameplay experience for players of any skill level- so I'd really like to stop dragging my feet & get mine out first :P

But I digress, most of you readers probably don't care about any of this, so thanks if you're still reading ^_^' I did want to try to release my modpack before the 1.13 update released, but it's actually arriving sooner than I expected- many people have been expecting it for months now, but personally I thought that the developers still had a whole lot of polish to apply. But hey, deadlines are pretty great for getting things done quickly, right? It's pushed me to make a serious amount of progress over the last week too, and I'm pretty confident that I should be at the point now where I'm happy to put out a public release by the end of the week. I've tied up so many loose ends, and I'm noticing my todo lists gradually diminishing- it really is a great feeling!

If anyone reading actually is interested, here's some sneaky previews- first thing you'll see when you fire it up, my custom main menu:

(It feels a bit more colourful in practice than it looks, honest... I mean, each of the buttons lights up in a different colour when hovered! Amazing, right? :P)

And (aside from recipe changes & the entire custom 'tech-tree',) this is where the bulk of the effort's been spent- the highly-descriptive 'quest book' system, documenting all the stuff that, unless you're already a veteran, you'd normally have to go and research yourself to figure out how it works:

Honestly, I've never really cared whether or not this is 'succesful' in any way, or even if anyone else actually plays it (though, I know from experience that it's way more polished than about 95% of the competition out there)- I'm just finally proud of what I've accomplished, and I feel like that's the most important thing!

Let's see if I can keep my word & finish what I want to finish by the end of the week... watch this space, and see ya next week :)

- Lig

Come sway away

Took a bit of a break from artwork (& tending to my ancient fruit fields in stardew valley... ^_^'), and decided to do some nice, wholesome maths instead.

The 'ambient' floaters have now got a bit of sway to their style, with a bit of a parabolic motion offsetting their original position, a sprinkling of acceleration & deceleration, and just a pinch of rotation. The end result is pretty close to what I was aiming for, though I feel like it needs a bit of tweaking still- but there's always time for that later!
It equates to a little something like this, though the .gif format really doesn't do this any justice at all:

It's busier than it would normally be, for the purpose of demonstration. These sort of details will hopefully add a bit of activity to the otherwise cold & empty background, without being too distracting or looking out of place- might need to mess with transparencies to achieve that, though.

The hardest part of working on a project without someone else managing you is, after completing a feature, trying to figure out what comes next! Of course I've got an overall idea of how I want the end product to look, but figuring out all the little steps to get from point A to Z can be pretty tricky. For that purpose, I've set up a simple little Trello board to help me keep track of what I'm in the middle of working on, and ideas I'd like to flesh out in future. Considering getting an actual physical agile board, too- it's harder to get sidetracked if your project's always in view!
Let me know in the comments below if you have any tips or suggestions on the matter of self-management :)

- Lig

art update

Well hello there, many thanks for sticking around! :P So I've decided to write up a quick blog post to break the radio silence once again. Turns out art really takes a long time to do, especially when you have no idea what you're doing! (Who knew!) And, unlike programming, you can't just google how to do something & copy-paste the answer from stackoverflow...

So I've been trying to work on improving the general aesthetic of the game, and have recently been learning some valuable lessons about scale:

Ugh, I didn't even want to show this until I'd at least replaced all the buildings on the first screen, but then I noticed it's been two weeks since my last blog...

So uhh... yeah, still needs work. Lots of work. I wanted these buildings to look old and/or abandoned, not horrifically ugly & disproportionate. But hey, first attempts and all, and it's good to start replacing some of the art I've nicked with, y'know, actually my own work.
Also, a bit hard to tell from the simple & low-quality gif recording, but I've been making the transition between menu & gameplay much smoother, because why not!

Anyway, kinda embarrassed how little it seems like I've achieved since the last one, just hoping that I'll get better & more efficient with practice!

Maths & Bugs

Trying to find the motivation to do some linear algebra! I added some basic rotational physics, but then noticed I'd forgot to account for edge cases...

After the console logs started filling up with NaN's, I remembered a bit of mathy-knowledge from high school- you can't exactly calculate the slope of a vertical line, that'd be dividing by zero!
(Obviously, right? Egh, who even remembers this stuff anymore. Let's be honest, I just google the formulas & plug in the variables. :P)

Bonus: here's a sneaky peek of my scribble-book, which has now become shamelessly filled with simple graphs & entry-level algebra.

Not sure where my motivation has gone lately, but it seems to be returning now at last. Hopefully I'll be able to get the physics finalised soon & start focusing more on the details.

- Lig

Title Screen

Development continues slow & steady; plenty of bugfixing, platform issues & other things that don't really result in much to show off, but there's definitely cool stuff in the pipeline.
Thanks to an awesome friend, I've begun replacing some of the graphics, starting with the 'player'- though now I really gotta work on the physics before that bag looks right. Also, I've always felt that there's nothing quite like a main menu to make your tech prototype feel like a game- so I figured it's about time I added a super basic one:

So yeh, we're working with the title 'Urban Tumbleweed', and the game involves using gusts of wind to blow a plastic bag (or other stuff... TBD) around a cityscape, trying to stay aloft as long as possible while avoiding obstacles. Your wind power is limited & can be replenished with powerups that are found around & amongst the buildings, thus requiring the player to dodge & weave a little bit in order to stay in the air.
There's more to the idea than this, but I'm not going to give the rest away just yet ;)

- Lig

'Regular' Update

I must confess, I've been slacking a bit recently... I didn't even write anything last week! On a totally unrelated note, Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom is a bloody fantastic game. If you're intrigued by the idea of a modern JRPG with exciting combat & a whole kingdom management side to it, I'd definitely recommend checking it out. I didn't even play the first game in the series, and can attest that it's not an issue. (Warning, it's dangerously addictive though...)

---

In productivity-land, more work has been done on making the game more of a... game.
The 'camera' system's been refactored & reworked so that I can pan it around as the player reaches the edges of the screen... well, that would've been the smart thing to do, but really I'm just shifting the entire world relative to the player to make it look like the 'camera' moved. Yeah. Hey, it all looks the same in the end ;)
There's a whole lot of little things too- a bit more of a start to the levels, more buildings & random endless generation, a score, and other text:

Definitely need to sit down for some solid planning time now, there's a few different routes I could go at this point. It's probably about time to get some proper art done too, to start shifting the style towards what I'm aiming for... we'll see if that goes anywhere soon :P

- Liggledy the Higgledy