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The Harvesters Bane - Devlog

A topic by Dylan created Jun 17, 2023 Views: 383 Replies: 11
Viewing posts 1 to 8
(7 edits)

Hello, I am Piechicken20, a solo dev who never finishes things. This time is different though (I think), I have found an idea I am excited about that seems fun to build and test, and should be pretty doable for my first big game!

This will be an interesting journey, sure to be filled with bugs and excitement, so be sure to come back once in a while and check the progress!

If you want to contact me, do so here or Piechicken20#3144 on Discord.

I would greatly appreciate feedback/ideas for what to include in the devlogs or the game!


My idea for The Harvesters Bane is fairly simple: you are a harvester that lives in a village in the kingdom of _________ (haven't came up with a name yet), that has a little bit of a monster problem. You were nominated to go on a quest to defeat the monsters and make sure they never come back. That will be the main goal, but it will be an open-world type game, so you can do other things too!


Now onto the devlogs!

Devlog 1: 6/16/23, I got an idea, opened up Unity2D, realized I couldn't make good art yet.  Fast forward 10 minutes, I have installed GIMP and am learning my way around it. Once I figured out the basics, I started playing around with characters. Once I got one I liked, I exported it to Unity and started working on rigging + animating it.  6/17/23, the next day, I polished up the looks for the character a bit and gave him a hat. I got rid of the current animation and set up a folder to keep track of all the animations. I then made a new IDLE animation, making him feel more alive.

Wow. So much progress. Speaking of progress, I need to get back to making it, adios!

Update: just redid the character's eyes, then had to re do all the animations :| Game dev can be so tedious sometimes...


Hey! I totally feel you on being a dev that never finishes things. You're pretty early on, so I don't have a whole lot to say, other than that the vibe seems neat! I like the angle of the main character being a harvester, and am curious if/how that will translate into the gameplay (will weapons be farming equipment? will there be some side farming mechanics?). Nice job making this post, game development can definitely be tedious and difficult to hold yourself to, but I think doing things like posting dev logs are a great way to hold yourself accountable/motivate yourself to do more.

Also, for the character animation stuff, did you have to redo all the animations because of the eye change (like, changing every sprite to have the new eyes), or was that unrelated? Don't mean to backseat dev, especially because I don't know how you have your animations set up, but if you aren't already doing this, it could be useful to maybe have the head/face be a separate sprite object from the body? That way if you're changing things about the eyes/expression you could just change out that specific sprite, but keep the rest of the body the same. Could be nice if you want to have character expressions that change during gameplay, but don't want to make a copy of every animation for every expression. Down the line depending on how deep you go you could use that to generally customize your player a bit more (like, having different hats they can unlock, etc.).

Overall, keep up the good work, I'm excited to see where the game goes, and good luck on your game development adventure!

(1 edit) (+1)

Thanks! I was thinking of your character being like some sort of farmer or something. A little fact: when I was experimenting with chatbots, one of them said something like "Farmers Bane", which gave me inspiration for the name :) And now that I think of it, some of the weapons should be farm tools, I'll be sure to give credit! There will also be some farming aspects too, maybe farming gets you extra money?  Or maybe you need to grow and harvest some sort of magic plant to defeat a type of monsters or make a certain potion! And thanks for the tip about the separate sprites for animations ;) I'm really new to Unity (which I think I forgot to mention) so I'm just trying to figure things out. And yes - I redid it all because of the eyes.

(+1)

Gotcha, sounds nice! Learning Unity is a process, but as you get more familiar with it/learn more it's super empowering. Animation in particular can be very tricky to get the hang of in terms of best practices for setting things up. Seems like you're moving in the right direction though! 

And just like that, I brake it... Time to remake everything from scratch, luckily I wasn't too far though.

OMG I just got SO lucky, I tried closing Unity without saving and it worked! Progress is bumped back to yesterday, but that's better than loosing all of it!

(2 edits)

Update: broke the game :| I broke Unity too... Time to restart- :D

Update 2: OMG I just got soooooo lucky. I closed Unity without saving and it worked, no more errors either!

Huge update! I can almost start making the map- just have to implement collision!

Welp. Depth sorting works now. And collisions. But it's very inefficient. Map creation will take a long time.

Update: made it more efficient and re-did movement so you couldn't push trees around :P

BTW, still working! Redoing the movement system to be easier on my future self ;)

(1 edit)

FINALLY reworked depth sorting system! Now there should be less lag in the long run + it will be easier to make the level(s)!

Tip from developer: when making depth sorting, test it with multiple objects, not just one. I learned that the hard way...