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Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical

Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: More Hairstyles and New Make-up

Last time, I reported that I had finished creating nose options and had started on creating new hairstyles for my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project called Clown Alley Creator, a creativity tool about creating your own fun clowns.

Sprint 2024-14: More hairstyles

Completed:

  • Create hair options

In Progress:

  • Create make-up options

I continued working on hairstyles. Drawing hair is kinda hard.

But I think I did a decent job:

Clown Alley Creator - buns with highlights

Clown Alley Creator - split-dye bob

Clown Alley Creator - top swirl with highlights

I have ideas for more clown hairstyles, but I wanted to move onto make-up. I started out by replacing the smile.

It originally looked like this:

Clown Alley Creator - close-up view of Punny

But now smile make-up looks like:

Clown Alley Creator - new smile make-up

It’s…well, frankly, it’s a work in progress. I know I want some shading, but even then, this art is not making me smile, and I want another crack at it.

So this coming week I will focus on updating the existing make-up options.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

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Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical

Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: New Noses and Hairstyles

In my previous report, I added the ability to name your clowns and started work on providing more production-ready nose options for my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project called Clown Alley Creator, a creativity tool about creating your own fun clowns.

I finished adding noses and started on hair options this past week.

Sprint 2024-13: More noses and more hairstyles

Completed:

  • Create nose options

In Progress:

  • Create hair options

In this project, you can choose to customize your clown’s nose, hairstyle, and more. I was using placeholder art and options up until two weeks ago.

I’m quite happy with how the noses turned out, especially once I added shading, and now that I’ve worked on changing the placeholder hairstyles so that they are production-ready, the game overall looks and feels so much better.

Clown Alley Creator - gallery view

Clown Alley Creator - close-up view of Punny

I just wish I could also do the same with make-up, eyes, and more at the same time, because otherwise it feels like part of the game is more done than the other.

I like the idea of planning my work such that the game is always “done” at any given point, but now I am doing the work in a way that feels uneven. I’m not quite sure if there is a better way to plan the work of adding the production version and variety of options for a given type of customization. Working in a way that I would add a nose option, then a hairstyle, then an eye, etc seems weird.

Anyway, I’m fairly pleased with how the hairstyles are turning out. So far each hairstyle has two variations. One allows for a secondary highlight of color, and the other variation is what I have now learned is called “split-dye” and reminds me that sometimes game design really livens up your browser search history.

Clown Alley Creator - pink hair with highlights

Clown Alley Creator - split-dye hair

Having production noses and hairstyles, the clowns are looking much better, but I can’t wait to work on the make-up to make it more cohesive.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

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Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical

Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Naming Your Clowns

Last time, I reported that I had added an options menu with audio toggles and a menu for choosing custom eyes in my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project called Clown Alley Creator, a creativity tool about creating your own fun clowns.

I continued adding new features this past week.

Sprint 2024-12: Name Your Clowns

Completed:

  • Allow player to name clown
  • Update navigation buttons

In Progress:

  • Create nose options

Up until now, each clown was identified merely by a number, and when you looked at a particular clown up close, that’s what you would have seen:

Clown Alley Creator - close-up clown view

Today, if you go to add a clown to your clown alley, you get prompted to name the clown first:

Clown Alley Creator - prompt to name your new clown

If you don’t, you get told you should:

Clown Alley Creator - prompt to name your new clown

And finally, when you view your clown, you see that clown’s name:

Clown Alley Creator - clown view with clown's name

When I first started working on this project, I had envisioned a set of navigation buttons at the bottom of the creator mode, but it was premature, and some of the features they represented got cut.

I finally got around to removing and updating the buttons:

Clown Alley Creator - new creator mode navigation buttons

If I get to it, I would also like to add a button for hats and accessories, but we’ll see in a few weeks or months how things are going.

Finally, I ended the week by updating the existing four nose options and creating a bunch more, which required adding navigation for submenu pages.

Clown Alley Creator - multiple pages of noses to pick

Some of the noses are a bit more textured and sparkly:

Clown Alley Creator - multiple pages of noses to pick

I’m not quite finished creating the various noses, plus I’d like to add some shadows to the existing ones.

Still, I am at the point in the project where much of the feature work is done, and so I am focusing on adding more and more options for each of the submenus in order to provide players plenty of ways to make their own clowns.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

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Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical

Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Clown Skin Colors and Eyes

In my last report, I worked on audio sound effects and music in my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project called Clown Alley Creator, a creativity tool about creating your own fun clowns.

Since then, I’ve added an options menu and a few more customization options for the clowns you can create.

Sprint 2024-11: Options Menu

Completed:

  • Create gear icon for options menu
  • Allow player to mute SFX and music separately
  • Allow player to choose skin color for clown
  • Create eye options

I started the week working on adding the ability to mute and unmute music and sound effects from within the game, which is why the theme for this sprint was “Options Menu” instead of skin color and eyes, which ended up taking up the larger amount of time and effort.

There were already buttons to toggle audio from the main menu, but the player may want to do so while the game is running, so I created the gear icon and created a modal that pops up over the top of everything.

Clown Alley Creator - options button

Clown Alley Creator - options modal

Then I decided it was time to work on clown skin colors. So far the default was that you were creating a white face clown, but not all clowns have white make-up for a face.

For now, I just used the sample colors I’ve been using for everything else, which aren’t very realistic skin colors or even realistic clown make-up colors, but I’ll work on adding those skin tones and such later.

Clown Alley Creator - a clown with blue skin?

I also wanted to give the player options for eyes. The neat thing is that, assuming my math is correct, now it is possible to create over 9 billion unique clown faces with just the few options currently available! That’s a lot of creativity potential!

Clown Alley Creator - some clowns with unique eyes

And of course, over the next few months, I’ll be adding more and more variety to each menu, so you’ll be able to create your favorite clowns with just the right noses, make-up, and hair styles.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

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Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical

Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Colors, Music, and Sound Effects

Last time, I reported that I was adding primary and secondary color options for each selection in my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project called Clown Alley Creator, a creativity tool about creating your own fun clowns.

After a somewhat productive week, I not only have finished creating most of the functionality the game needs but also added music and sound effects to make it feel more complete and real.

Sprint 2024-10: Clown Faces

Completed:

  • Create color picker for nose
  • Create color picker for hair
  • Create color picker for make-up layers
  • Create background music
  • Create button press sound effects

You can now not only choose a custom nose, hairstyle, or make-up layers, but for each of them you can now choose a primary and secondary color.

Clown Alley Creator - selecting primary and secondary colors for each option

Clown Alley Creator - selecting primary and secondary colors for each option

Clown Alley Creator - selecting primary and secondary colors for each option

Clown Alley Creator - selecting primary and secondary colors for each option

Now, please (PLEASE!) keep in mind that this is not the final art that I plan to ship with this game when it is released. The point is that each selection can be customized by having two separate colors available if you wish, giving you plenty more options for your creativity.

Normally, audio doesn’t necessarily find its way into a game until the end of a project, but I’m making good progress. As I said, most of features are finished, so in a way it already feels like the end of the project.

And I found a really nice music track on SoundRangers.com during their last Black Friday sale, so I had to get it and think it fits perfectly in this game.

You can hear and see the game in action this clip:

Even with just the test sample of options for the nose, hair, and make-up and six color options I have so far, it is possible to create over 1,000 unique clown faces!

In the coming months, I am expecting that most of the work will focus on creating the many pieces of art for more such options, giving the player a much greater variety of ways to create their own perfect collection of clowns.

And I will get to enjoy the sounds I’ve added whenever I run the game to test out any such changes.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

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Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical

Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Creation Mode Layers and Colors

In my previous report, I allowed the player to choose make-up in layers in my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project called Clown Alley Creator, a creativity tool about creating your own fun clowns.

After doing some end-of-year review work and writing a post about it, I got back to finishing up the layer work.

Sprints 2024-8 and 2024-9: Clown Faces

Completed:

  • Create make-up option and submenu

Started:

  • Create color picker for nose

If you’re paying attention, you might have noticed that I said I already completed the make-up submenu work last time.

But I realized I didn’t have a better place to capture the idea of adding the chosen make-up icons in the appropriate boxes on the screen, which is what I had left to do.

Clown Alley Creator - layer boxes now show icons

I also added an option to clear your selection.

Once that work was finished, I noted that I definitely have some clean-up work to do, mainly in terms of how the icons look kind of awful when tinted a particular color as it applies to the entire icon and not just the relevant make-up part.

But I’ll worry about splitting the icon up into multiple images later. For now, I am finally adding a color picker menu.

Clown Alley Creator - color picker menu

Basically, there will be a primary and secondary color for each option. So far, I have created the menu to choose a color, so this week I anticipate finishing the color selection menu, saving the player’s selection, and updating the clown previews to show those colors.

I will start with the clown nose, but a lot of this work will overlap with the rest of the chosen options, so I anticipate having the ability to choose colors for every option soon.

The main trick will be separating the nose, hairstyle, and make-up into a main colored part and a secondary highlight/texture part, but that just means each option requires two sprites to be rendered instead of one, so it isn’t much of a trick anyway.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

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Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical

Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Clown Make-up

Last time, I reported that I had implemented clown noses and hair and was starting to work on the more complex layered make-up menus for my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project called Clown Alley Creator, a creativity tool about creating your own fun clowns.

I made great progress on it and think I’ve had a surprisingly productive December so far.

Sprint 2024-7: Clown Faces

Completed:

  • Create make-up option and submenu
  • Create clown preview make-up cut-outs

Much of this week’s efforts felt like a bit of a struggle, and I’m not sure if it is because I felt like I couldn’t focus on the work or if it was just because it was complicated.

Picking a clown’s nose is just choosing from a set of options, but I had envisioned the make-up menu to be made up of multiple layers.

That is, you don’t just pick a single make-up option. You can layer make-up on top of make-up, allowing you to mix and match options to create a clown face the way you want it.

Clown Alley Creator - make-up submenu with layers

As you can see, there are potentially four different layers of clown make-up available. I created some sample options that include the mouth as a smile or as a frown, a teardrop on either side of the face, and buckteeth.

Here you can see a clown face with a frown and a left teardrop.

Clown Alley Creator - make-up submenu with two layers of menus

To finish up this work, I want to show the icon in the box corresponding to the layer it applies to, number the layers to make it clear which order they go in (I think bottom to top is intuitive, especially for people who use art programs like Gimp or Photoshop), and finally choosing colors.

Right now, make-up is defaulted to a blue color just so I can see it differentiated from the hair and the nose, but I want to allow the player to choose primary and secondary colors for each option. What this means is that the various sprites for the clown face will need to be split into primary and secondary versions. In the case of hair, maybe it look like streaks of color, and in the case of make-up, perhaps outlines around the mouth and teardrops and such.

With Christmas coming so soon, I doubt I’ll be as productive as I’ll be spending more time at family and social events, plus I’ll want to spend time creating my annual year in review blog post. Still, I feel like I’m ending this year having made some great progress on this new project.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

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Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical

Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Giving Clowns Hairstyle Options

In my previous report, I got the spine finished for my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project called Clown Alley Creator, a creativity tool about creating your own fun clowns.

I continued to build upon the work, focused on finishing the Gallery view and adding hair in the Creator mode.

Sprint 2024-6: Clown Faces

Completed:

  • Paginate gallery view
  • Create Clown Specific View
  • Delete clown
  • Create Hair & Make-up menu
  • Create hair option and submenu
  • Create clown preview hair cut-outs
  • Create Clown Specific View

As I said last time, I pretty much have everything in place that the player might do.

And yet, there is always something to enhance or improve.

For instance, the Gallery View allowed you to see 12 clowns at a time…but only the first 12 clowns.

So I added pagination in order to see more of them.

Clown Alley Creator - gallery view pagination

You may also notice that I added eyes to the clown faces. It was getting weird not having eyes, and while eventually I’ll let the player select eye options as well, for now it looks less strange.

Since you can add new clowns, you should be able to edit and remove clowns, so I added a close-up clown view with those options.

Clown Alley Creator - close-up clown view

Eventually you will be able to name your clowns and see that name instead of something like “Clown 6” in the title bar.

Editing just opens up the clown creator mode with the existing clown’s settings instead of a completely new clown. I’m very happy with how easy it was to do. In fact, I feel like this project has been surprisingly smooth sailing in terms of writing just enough code to not be wasting time while also writing good code that is easy to expand and extend.

Anyway, finally I added the hair menu. I had some concerns about how to actually implement hair. Clown hair/wigs can be quite wacky, extending quite a ways from the clown’s head, and I wasn’t sure how to approach it. Do I create separate sprites for the top and sides?

For now, I’ve created larger sprites. Basically, the head shape is one size, and the hair sprite is much larger, which allows for the hair to be fairly big if it has to be while also covering any part of the head that needs to be covered. Here are my mock-ups:

Clown Alley Creator - hair mock-ups

Clown Alley Creator - hair mock-ups

Clown Alley Creator - hair mock-ups

And here they are in the Gallery view:

Clown Alley Creator - clowns with different hairstyles in the Gallery

I ended the week getting started on the make-up menu, but I was also trying to figure out how to allow the player to customize colors for various options.

Clown Alley Creator - Hair & Make-up menu with Hair, Nose, and Make-up buttons

Clown Alley Creator - mock-up of color picker

Clown noses should not just come in red, and I think being able to choose primary and secondary colors for hair would be great, too.

But I feel like choosing colors is getting ahead of myself, so that’s on hold for the moment.

The biggest thing I’m trying to figure out is how to implement make-up. I’ve already decided to allow the player to do so in layers, which means making it clear which layer they are working on as well as the ordering of those layers. I mocked up this tabbed view, with the idea that you are currently selecting options for a given layer, and I think it should be intuitive that the layers are applied in order from top to bottom.

Clown Alley Creator - make-up menu mock-up with tabs

I need to do more work on this menu’s design. I expect it would be nice to move layers up and down, which means I need space for buttons to allow for it. I like buttons because expecting the player to know something like drag & drop is an option is harder to communicate, and I think too many modern UI elements are inexplicably hidden from the player, presumably to keep the interface looking cleaner or something.

It’s been a joy to see this project get more and more finished while at the same time feeling like it is always in a good state to be considered done. Last week you could customize noses for your clowns, and this week you can pick clown noses and hairstyles. Assuming I have time to work on the project as we head into the deepest parts of the holiday season, I expect to make it possible to choose make-up options in layers after this coming week, and after that point I’ll introduce color options. Each week, I’ve managed to make the game richer and fuller.

Of course, there is a difference between something being “technically” releasable and something being “marketable.” It is not unusual for projects to struggle with or even ignore being able to create a release until the very end of the schedule, so I feel really great about the way this project has been going.

I anticipated that December would be a slow month for me so part of my schedule assumes I’ll be working on these mock-ups and figuring out flows into January. Even so, I’m impressed with what I’ve put together in just the last couple of weeks. Soon after I’ll switch my focus to creating lots of options for each submenu, allowing a player to create potentially thousands of unique clowns using the existing menus. Then I’ll be polishing things up, testing things, and getting it ready for an official release.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

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Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical

Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: The Spine of the Game Is Done

Last time, I reported that I was focusing on getting a thin slice of work to create, load, and view the clown faces in my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project called Clown Alley Creator, a creativity tool about creating your own fun clowns.

I focused on creating the infrastructure to support this work.

Sprint 2024-5: Clown Faces

Completed:

  • Create nose option and submenu
  • Create Finish modal
  • Update Gallery View to show all loaded clowns
  • Create clown preview nose cut-outs

I had a fairly productive week, and I am very, very pleased to say that I finished making the game already.

Or at least the spine of the game.

What I mean is that the work I did this week cut across almost all aspects of the project.

As of today, you can start creating a new clown, choose from among a few customization options, then save the clown with those options, then view your creations in the clown alley gallery.

That’s pretty much the scope of this project. Anything else after is content and polish, with perhaps some extra features if I decide I have time for it.

Here’s a video that shows pretty much everything you can do in this game so far:

Now, you might think, “That’s it? You can’t say you are finished making the game yet!”

And you’d be right in that all you can do at the moment is pick from among four nose options. Clowns are more than red noses, obviously. While I could technically publish this, it would definitely feel unfinished and wrong to do so.

Clown Alley Creator - picking a nose

Clown Alley Creator - saving the clown

Clown Alley Creator - clown face gallery

But what else do I have to do? Adding more nose options is just adding more options to the existing menu. Adding color variations is just a different menu and a different variable to save and load. Creating better art is just replacing the existing art. And everything else from hair styles, skin colors, and make-up options are just variations of the same kind of work I’ve already solved.

Basically, instead of adding features and hoping it all comes together in the end like in many projects, I’m in a position of confidence that this project is always shippable from here on out. It just becomes a matter of how much I want to keep investing in it before I actually publish the game.

Now I still anticipate some challenges. Choosing mutually exclusive options such as clown noses is different from picking options that can layer on top of each other such as clown make-up. My code easily handles the former but would need to be changed to accommodate the latter. And I haven’t even touched on the UI problem of communicating to the player that these interfaces would behave differently.

But it is still early in the project’s schedule, and I have time to solve these problems.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

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Categories
Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical

Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Plans to Create Clown Faces

In my last report, I finished creating navigation menus, only to rethink the prioritization of my project’s tasks for my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project called Clown Alley Creator, a creativity tool about creating your own fun clowns.

I started this week by focusing on how to work on things differently to make it more likely that I can ship something in the six months I originally wanted to.

Sprint 2024-4: Clown Faces

Planned and incomplete:

  • Create Hair & Make-up menu
  • Create hair option and submenu
  • Create make-up option and submenu
  • Create nose option and submenu
  • Create Finish modal
  • Update Gallery View to show all loaded clowns
  • Create clown preview nose cut-outs

I did some rearranging of my backlog and created a subset of tasks much like how I described in my last report. I didn’t expect to actually get all of these things done in a single week, especially not in a week with a major family holiday such as Thanksgiving, but I did like that this list captures what needs to be in place for the spine of the project to be in place, something I can build upon.

Unfortunately, I decided to keep my high level features/tasks as-is rather than rewrite them to more accurately reflect what I was done. It’s not an issue to work within, but it is harder to report here because it looks like I got nothing done.

In reality, what I actively worked on and finished looked more like:

  • Create Hair & Make-up menu with only the Nose option
  • Create Nose submenu

My thinking was that while the entire subset above makes for a good spine, I can get there pretty quickly if I focus on the simplest thing. Rather than provide a bunch of hairstyles or make-up options, I could create a couple of noses.

So my big goal is to make it possible for the player to choose a custom nose from among at least two options, see that nose in the clown preview while doing so, save the clown with the chosen nose, and then see that clown in the gallery: a thin slice/spine for a game about creating clowns!

I imagine if I hadn’t traveled to see family and instead had a normal amount of productivity last week, I would have some better screenshots for you today.

Clown Alley Creator - Hair & Make-up menu

Clown Alley Creator - Nose submenu

Part of the reason for the lack of finished tasks is because I recognized the need for a way to define my menus better than simply hardcoding the buttons into place on each menu.

I originally was writing entire functions to create and setup each menu. It could work, but it is a lot of manual work that risks looking inconsistent from one menu to the next. Instead, I could write an algorithm to lay out the options in a reasonable way, which led to me wanting to make my menus a bit more data-driven.

So two major things came out of this past week’s efforts:

First, I made the menus more data-driven. The menu titles, the submenu titles, and the menu button options and their locations are defined somewhere, and when the menu is created, it is able to grab all of that data and put it together.

It still has some things that are hardcoded, though, but the point is that it does go through this indirection in a way that makes it easy for me to replace those hardcoded values with values that are defined separately.

And second, I think I keep relearning that sometimes the first step to abstracting and generalizing is to get something concrete in the place first. Having a nose submenu with actual nose options hardcoded into place would have informed how to generalize such a menu better than me trying to generalize it upfront.

Doing the generalizing upfront risks creating a tool that I feel stuck with or have to work around rather than one that feels useful and helpful.

Anyway, I will continue to work on the spine of creating a clown with saved options that I can preview and load.

And since we just started the last month of the year, I also need to remember that December is usually one of the least productive months for me (more family holidays, after all) and that I shouldn’t expect to get a full month’s worth of effort out of it. Getting that simple spine in place before the start of the next year will feel like a pretty big win, I think.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

Want to learn about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and download the full color Player’s Guides to my existing and future games for free!