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.
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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
