Huh. That went surprisingly well.

Last time, I set some goals that I thought for sure would be ambitious, but either I was on a roll this month, or I over-estimated the work involved. Maybe it was a bit of both.

Code

The code updates are the main event here. I got other things done - as I said I've been ahead of schedule - but code was the highlight here.

First of all, the code clean-up was finished, and it was a big success. As it turns out, throwing all the scenes and scripts into a single folder was a nightmare for keeping things organized. Putting everything into their proper folders definitely helped me keep track of things. Coming up with a consistent naming scheme was also helpful.

After that, I set my sights on new features. I added a progress bar to the egg, to give the player a rough idea of how many clicks are left before it hatches. That turned out to be a great suggestion from an acquaintance of mine. He play-tested what I had at the end of February, and something about his play pattern told me that a copy/paste feature for the breeding interface was a must. So that was also added this month, as well.

There were a lot of things tied to only the first species on the list, so it would break when you try to do basic things with any other species. A lot of those have been "fixed" - they aren't 100% complete because they'll show a blank sprite. But, at least it won't crash because it's trying to load a sprite that doesn't exist.

Speaking of those features, one of them was the egg hatch functionality, which has been completely reworked. Now the hatch popup has a neat new animation, and has a way to cycle through all the new morphs you've discovered since the window was opened.

The GIF compression kind of doesn't show the animation all that well, but you can see that the thing that you hatch starts of small on top of the egg, flies up above the top of the screen, then falls back into frame while the menu slides in. The animation just doesn't look as smooth here as it does in engine.

I hooked up the upgrades to give actual bonuses, and added a few that weren't there before. I felt like the current loadout was a little too basic, and wouldn't give the players enough options to deal with the exponential growth of the prices.

So, the upgrade options are:

- licenses to unlock new things to hatch (that are worth more)
- Individual boosts to the sale price of exotics that you have unlocked
- Individual time reductions for incubating and breeding different exotics
- A global click bonus that scales up how many clicks every input is worth
- An increase to intern click speed
- An intern organization boost

The organization boost might need a bit of explanation. The way interns work is kind of like the cursors in Cookie Clicker - you buy them and they click for you. Right now I have it set so that interns will click one after another until you run out, then there's a long pause, then they start clicking all over again. What re-organization does, is it organizes the interns into groups of a certain amount - let's say 50 for example. That means that the first 50 start clicking at the same time as the second 50, and so on and so forth. So, you can get more clicks in a shorter period of time before you have to wait for the delay.

I created an options menu, but I realized it kind of doesn't go anywhere yet. There are only 2 options - a sound slider and the ability to turn new morph discovery pop-ups on or off. Since sounds won't really be in the game for a while, it seemed like it would be fine to leave the options menu for later.

It's a decision I've also made about the tutorial menu. I really want to see what players can intuit without any help, and what they might struggle with before adding in tutorials. The tutorials are going to be in the form of optional emails. But, for testing purposes, I do want to see what needs to be explained and what doesn't.

Art

As far as art assets go, I did a touch-up on the first species that I finished. In-engine, it didn't look as good as I thought it did originally, so I tweaked their patterns a little bit. I also completely re-drew one of the patterns. I think it just kind of looked lackluster, and I'm much happier with the one I changed it to. I might add to it a little bit before the final launch, but for now it looks fine.

I've also added small icons for representing the morph in the breeding menu, so you can see at a glance which morphs are being combined. This was always the intent, but I used a question mark I had laying around while I made the assets.

I also finished the patterns for the second species. This month is going to be heavily focused on finishing all the sprites I need for the remaining 2 species. Of course, these might get touched up before the final release. But I do want to keep that to a minimum. Hopefully, the sprites will be mostly ready for prime time before the end of April.

I've also added a few assets for UI elements, along the line of the buttons I started making. They are a bit too wide right now - I'm not sure how I miscalculated it when making the sprite that goes behind them. I might make it wider or make the buttons narrower. Either way, I'll figure it out before the beta goes up.

I think I've also decided on a few things that I want to change before next time. For example, the buttons are going to need drop shadows to distinguish them from the background.

What's next?

Well, a good portion of art assets are next on the itinerary. I don't think that art needs to be 100% done for this to be ready for releasing the alpha build. People know it's not finished, so I don't think people will be too worried about some buttons not having the proper textures. I've seen plenty of games put out there to see what people think with obvious placeholder assets in place. So, I'm  not worried about that. But, I do want the first 4 species finished. Which, now that I think about it, shouldn't take THAT long, all things considered.

The hardest part, the base sprite, is already finished for all 4. The way I do patterns is I duplicate the base, and then "cut out" the pattern. So, I just have to make all the cutouts I need. The pattern cutouts that I made for the breeding menu are done with a similar process.

Creatively, though, I'm drawing a bit of a blank on what I want the patterns to be on the 2 remaining species.

I'll have to also start trying to pick out color combinations. Like the patterns, the colors I choose might get touched up later, but I do want them to be pretty close to the final version. I also need to come up with names for those color combinations. And, with 36 combinations per species, I have my work cut out for me.

Adding drop shadows and shortening the buttons like I mentioned above is also going to be something I want to get done before release; these are just easier things to knock out quickly. While I'm in there, I might add an "x" or a "+" between the morphs on the breeding interface, to make it clear that those are the morphs being combined.

The UI also needs some other work in general, but particularly on the left side. I want the top of the screen where the money is shown to have its own "box" to hold all the player information inside.

So, lots of visual clean-up stuff happening.

Speaking of visual clean-up, it's not lost on me that most amounts have a trailing 3 decimal places. I'm looking into the library I'm using to get access to larger numbers to see if I can either cut the decimals off, or reduce the number of decimal place values it's using. Ideally, both. Leave them as whole numbers if it's less than 999,999, then start doing abbreviations in millions or higher with a couple place values (for example, 1.26 M instead of 1,266,989).

One of the final touches is going to be some number tweaking. I want to make sure I'm getting close to the right base value for everything, and make sure that the scaling is tuned appropriately. I'm trying to make a game where people feel like they can progress, but are encouraged to seek out upgrades and ways to get ahead because their scaling will fall off. That's kind of the main draw of idle games - making sure the drop-off doesn't feel too punishing, but doesn't make the game so easy that it all feels pointless.

I'll also need to make a "thanks for playing" screen for getting to whatever amount will get you to new game + in the final version. But, that should also be easy. Just a screen telling the player that they've reached the end of the alpha build, and maybe it'll suggest they leave some feedback.

But that's the only "planned" code change I have. Anything else will probably be a bug fix.

After the main objectives are done, I'll start touching up the UI. There's a bunch of buttons that are either the engine default, or don't have the right look to them yet, and I want to fix those. They've got to be fixed before the full release, anyways, and I'm already working on the others.

Another "stretch goal" for this month is to create a custom font for the game's larger text, and come up with a title screen. But, those aren't really a necessity for getting the demo ready.

At any rate, I hope April will be as productive as March was. If that's the case, I'll have this alpha deployed on April 30th, no problem.

Wish me luck!