Freshly Squeezed Progress Report – Taking a Turn

In last week’s report, I mentioned how I accomplished very little due to transitioning into the new year, and I expected to get the work done in the next week.

Sprint 5: main game loop

• Create toy
• Create toy dispenser
• Create shipping container

I did not get all of the work done last week. I have a toy, and a created a toy dispenser that spits out toys onto the conveyor belts, which carry the toys along the line each time you press the Advance button. If the toy isn’t on a belt, it doesn’t move.

The dispenser takes a queue of toys that are initialized at the beginning of the game. Right now, the logic is to dispense a toy if there is one in the queue, but I think in the future I can see changing it to allow me to dispense a toy at a specific timing. Perhaps I can even have it dispense more than one toy at once.

The Advance button kicks off a new turn, which currently starts the following sequence:

• If a toy dispenser has a toy in the queue, dispense the toy.
• Move any toys along the conveyor belts.

And…that’s it.

I did not create the shipping container for it to fall into yet.

On the one hand, I know I only allow myself to dedicate the equivalent of at most half a day’s work across an entire week, so getting things done slow and steady is the norm for me as a very, very part-time indie game developer.

On the other hand, it feels like I should have something more playable by now, yet another week has gone by in which I don’t. By my count, I’ve already put in over 40 hours into the project, which means if it was a 48-hour game development competition on a weekend, I would not have a game ready to submit by the deadline.

Looking at this past week, I know I spent some time making the toy move along the belt smoothly and redrawing the dispenser when I realized how awful it originally looked, but it wasn’t the lion’s share of the work. I probably could have saved some time not worrying about the dispenser’s looks, opting to focus on getting an ugly shipping container into the game instead, but I still wouldn’t have anything more interesting for the player to do by now.

My goal for this coming sprint is to not only add the shipping container but to add the ability to hire a worker and place one on the factory floor next to a conveyor belt. Once the worker is there, the next step will be to get the worker to pick up a Bad Toy from the belt, then get the worker to separate the toy parts.

Thanks for reading!

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