Posted March 09, 2021 by Seilburg
Yesterday in my foolishness, I promised quite a lot. But I aim to deliver. So first, as promised, the Day 0 devlog!
Day 0 - Beginnings
Voxelate and I decided well in advance that we wanted to enter the contest again, which gave us an excruciating amount of time for preproduction for the game, something we clearly needed as evidenced by our project last year, Slumber. This is of course a double-edged sword, in that the longer you have to dream about your project, the more opportunity there is to get attached to concepts and ideas that can become out of scope. But not this time. I think we did a pretty good job of keeping the design and ideas focused. With Slumber, there were too many complex and unrelated mechanics that were planned to live side-by-side each other, but in Portlligat we've focused on forging a gameplay system that is self-synergetic and coherent; the gameplay supports the gameplay.
We have the preparation (or at least some of it. Even with a 10,000 word design document, there is much that is missing or incomplete!), we have the tooling. Since we developed Slumber, I've moved out of the Apple ecosystem completely, so now I've migrated all of my tooling to Windows. Some of it, such as our main and most important tool, emacs, runs on both equally well. Of secondary importance, our game engine, Godot, supports both fully. The only software I haven't been able to migrate is some of the audio and audio production software I've used previously, so that's a new workflow for me.
Our plans are ambitious, of course. I believe we can do it. These seven days will tell.
Day 2 - Dream it, and it will be
I've been gloriously productive during day 2, but I don't necessarily have a huge amount to show for it. It is very much a quality and not quantity day. No panicking, just a constant and steady pace.
My tasks for the day:
• Today was a gloriously free day for me - I essentially had one goal to complete, and I did it! The crafting system (pretty much!) works!
What I did:
• I made a crafting system! Now, using parts that the player can salvage and pick up, the weapon of your dreams is within grasp. How often have you wanted to wield nunchucks and found that the lazy developer hasn't implemented them? All the time, right? I too am a lazy developer, and I will not implement them. But check this out:
You can make it yourself! Want a polearm? Make it. Want a giant club? Make it. Want a super giant blade with no handle that disfigures you as much as it will your cowering foes? You can make it.
This was a huge project. The Godot GUI interface is wonderful and powerful, but the devil is in the details, and these details took a monstrous amount of time and energy to deal with. At the time of writing, I've about 50% of the graphics needed to complete the crafting system, and none of the crunch done for it, so I'm going to continue working on that over the next couples of hours.
What will I do tomorrow:
• It looks like I'm going to be working on combat!
• I'm going to be drawing graphics!
• I'm going to be working on a corpus for description generation!
And as promised, following on from the little brother elephant of yesterday, today we have his big bro: