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Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Finding Reference Art and Addressing Annoying Infrastructure

In last week’s report, I was still taking my high level ideas and concepts for my yet-revealed Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project and trying to make them more specific and implementable.

Since then I have enough to start actual work.

Sprint 3: Pre-production and initialization

Planned and incomplete:

  • Finish initial design document
  • Create save file
  • Create player character
  • Create [redacted] environment layout

Ok, to start with, obviously I didn’t get anything finished.

That said, I did spend much of the beginning of the week looking up references to help inform the art style for this project, both for the characters and the environments they spend their time in. It was also informative to read some background on some of these environments, and while I think it will ultimately help me create a better world, I also worry that there was still too much absorbing input and not enough creating output.

I spent time learning about the pitfalls of games that this project is likely to be compared to, especially when it comes to how those games and the companies that made them handled things like race and inclusion. More on that topic another day.

And I started to work on creating the initial save file, since persistence is going to be a very key part of the game from the beginning.

Unfortunately, I got slightly sidetracked. Since the code is my own, there is a bit of infrastructure related to how I handled menu-related things that is quite clunky. It is old code related to my understanding of the IMGUI concept, and it has been bothering me for a few projects now, and I finally decided to address it. EDIT: I realized that my attempt to address this clunkiness wasn’t well thought out and so I ended up reverting my changes. Ah, well.

Otherwise, I’ve been creating doodles of the environment and of potential characters, and I think I’ve got a good idea of what at least one of the characters in the game will look like.

So it has been a weirdly fruitful week while simultaneously feeling unproductive. I knew I had put too much on my plate when I started the week, at least if I expected to finish it all, and I’ve done this a lot.

On the one hand, when it comes to planning the week, I should plan what I can get done by the end of the week. I should have planned less.

On the other hand, I think what I captured in this list is a chunk of work that I want to get done together. It is less of a set of goals for the week as a set of goals for an initial playable milestone.

So, another clunky thing is that the way I handle project plans is a bit clunky, at least when it comes to how I actually try to manage the project. I should either plan less for a week, or I should find a better way to identify these collections of work for a given milestone.

Anyway, I apologize if this kind of background information is not interesting to you, but if you do like it, then you’re welcome!

For now, know that I have started coding for this project in earnest, and I am looking forward to being able to share more about this second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment game.

Remember, sign up for the GBGames Curiosities Newsletter below if you want to be the first to see what I’m working on.

Thanks for reading!

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