Hey I have an instagram now : D Maybe some of you want to follow me!
dungeonsandharvest is the name. Might also make a personal one in the feature so I can also upload unrelated stuff on instagram eventually. But probably not right now.
I decided to use the myers-briggs like personality test from https://www.16personalities.com/personality-types as an additional tool to shape my characters. Probably won’t religiously follow it and it’s possible that I’ll change them, but it helps a lot with inspiration and it’s a lot of fun for me. I’m an INTJ-T by the way if anyone is interested.
I have a lot of story ideas for the characters already and what’s interesting to me, that some of them still have those story ideas but they react a bit differently now because I interpret them differently.
Finally done with this! Everything surrounding typography is not really my thing so I hope it turned out well. I do like it though! It took multiple days it was a tedious process.
This week I didn’t work much on layout, basically I spent my free time trying to figure out how to work with google maps in android studio. It was extremely frustrating at first, but I’m beginning to understand more. Well explained resources are rare, I’m actually tempted to create my own tutorials at some point, but only if my understanding becomes good enough. And not sure where the best place for posting them would be. Starting to experiment with maps stuff that is actually relevant for my game next.
I realised that I might not actually need the roads api but I still think it’s probably easier with it. Basically I want to create items on a google map randomly but near roads to avoid people having to walk into an actual building to reach a certain spot. (Which is absolutely a bad idea!). The Roads API has a snap to roads feature which would be perfect for that. Other than that I need custom markers on the map for the different items or other stuff to interact with and a way of showing a circle around you which shows your current reach (which can be improved by skilling perception).
Concerning art I continued working on the battle screen layout so I made some progress. I’m actually very happy with the progress I made this week.
This took forever (many hours) but I’m really happy how this turned out. Ignore the background it’s just a placeholder. Also I did this mainly in SAI and didn’t feel like working on fonts for now so there are no fonts yet. I also learned a lot while working on this because I have never done anything like this before. I worked super hard on this trying to make it look pretty.
Basically it will work in a way that you can choose items or tools and put them into your 5 slot inventory to access them quickly. You can decide if you want to put a mix of items and tools, or just tools,or just items into these 5 slots. And then you use the item by tapping somewhere.
Some parts of this layout are still sketches, some are already finalised. Hope you like it!
This is another one of the datable/befriendable characters and I had a lot of trouble deciding on his colours. There are multiple ones I like but I kept imagining him with red wings and eventually liked the contrast of the red and green the most. I still think I want to use purple again with him (maybe wedding outfit??)
Rys is a dragon and super introverted. He hates leaving his home and doesn’t really want to interact with people. He’s an inventor and loves mechanical stuff.
Rys is my favourite character of the game which is why I made him my tumblr icon for now. I also like the pencil sketch of him a lot XD
Actually I don’t know that much about her yet, other than that she is a mermaid and has a lively personality. Also she loves to talk. I personally love mermaids so I had to include one.
She is a magic user and therefore has a staff as a weapon.
He’s a cat and his character partly reminds me of the cheshire cat. I have a few different ideas for his character but not sure which ones I want to actually use.
His weapon will probably be archery.
The top one is the current design. He took a long time till I was satisfied. I also tried multiple colours but ended up with the ones I chose. I love the green jacket in the middle but decided it was too fancy for what I want him to look like. I do need fancy clothes of the characters later on (wedding outfits) so it might make a return or be a basis for a more elegant set of clothes.
I thought I’ll tell you about the current status of this project. At the moment it’s still very much at the very beginning. But I have some things already.
I have a pretty clear view how the gameplay is going to be on the whole but there are a lot of details I still have to fix in stone. Farming will be a bit more complex than in average harvest moon games using different kind of soil and crop rotation, but I will try hard to not make it TOO complicated, because I want this to be a relaxing game overall. Skills will have a huge impact on farming stuff so battle and farm skills are closely intertwined.
I have sketches of all the main characters and know basics about their character. For some I already know more story than for others. I still need a lot of other NPCs, parents, town inhabitants etc.
I’m currently sketching tiny screen layouts to plan what is shown on which screen (this is going to take a while. I realised there are way more screens than I thought initially. So many different types of menus).
I’ve also written down a lot of random information in my sketchbook but will put all of this in an actual game concept file eventually.
Artwise I’m also drawing the main farm screen at the moment which I worked on in my last twitch streams. I’m also planning to work on this later today too and maybe also stream again.
Programming wise I don’t have anything done for the game yet but this is what I’m currently doing. Basically I am starting from almost zero. My previous programming knowledge is action script 2.0, tiny bit of javascript, construct 2 (which doesn’t have a typed programming language and is working with events, I love working with that one because you have stuff done incredibly fast and it’s super fun). I also learned a bit about php and mysql but without rereading a lot of stuff I wouldn’t be able to use them right of the bat. I also got a glimpse at c# at one point and 3d development with I think it was microsoft game studio but honestly I don’t think I remember anything of that.
So what I’m doing is learning java and android programming. I’ve read the java documentation tutorials up to generics or something. I’m also working trough a 3 part java course on video2brain using eclipse.
I’m also working through 2 books about google’s android studio named“Hello Android” and “Head first Android”. Hello Android is definitely not meant for people who don’t have a good grasp on java already. Even though it says skill level beginner, the beginner only applies to android. This is also the very first book I started with so it overwhelmed me a bit (especially since I got confronted with so much java that was brand new to me). This book is very good though because it builds a whole ultimate tic tac toe game (9x9 field) which uses lots of concepts I need for my game as well. It doesn’t really encourage to type your own code it basically just explains code blocks and I copied them and tried to get it to work (which was sometimes fiddly with android studio but this way I already get a glimpse what it’s like to actually code in there. ) I do have a working tic tac toe game with a moving background and sound already. Animations are the next step here. And at the end the book goes into stuff like how to make your game look good in different screen resolutions etc. Also very important topic.
“Head First Android” I have just begun but I also worked through part of “Head First Java” and let me tell you these books are super fun. They work with an unusual visual style that applies to multiple of your senses which makes you remember some things easier. It also starts off much simpler. I’m pretty much at the beginning, and want to work on this book again soon. It has a lot of pages so I think I will learn a lot with it. It does say you need java knowledge but I think you only need to know basic stuff and they’ll explain more complicated things. How basic I can’t say yet because I’m not very far into the book. But my guesses are stuff like variables, arrays, classes, if, while etc should probably be known to you. Because it uses smaller examples I’m way more encouraged to actually experiment so I’m very excited to learn with this!
About google maps stuff. I know I absolutely need the google maps api and I’m pretty sure I also need the google roads api. Luckily the roads functionality I need is already in the version that i free to use. I don’t know much yet how to work with this but I do have 2 example files which I can look at again once my understanding about android is a bit better. It’s especially hard to find helpful info about roads for beginners like me. The roads example does have exactly the type of functionality I want but it’s embedded into SO many other example stuff that I’m not sure what is essential at the moment.
I do know how to get a google api key and use it. Android studio easily lets you setup an app using the google maps api so this will be a nice way for me to start my first experiments.
Basically it boils down to:
I’m excited! There is a lot of fun to be had (and probably lots of frustration but that’s normal)
This is one of the characters you can befriend / marry.
She is a wolf and famous for her archery. Her personality is kind of arrogant but there are story related reasons to that.
Since her character design jumped around a bit I wanted to show you the progress to her final design (the one on top with the most clothing is the final one). Initially she was based on an old OC of mine which I don’t fully remember what she looked like but that’s the pencil sketch with the long wavy hair. The pencil sketch on the right looks like Winry Rockbell from Fullmetal Alchemist so I ditched that too. I thought about how she lives in the woods and also likes to climb on trees so she needed a hairstyle that didn’t easily tangle with branches. Of course long hair is still more impractical than short, but braided is better than hair down or a ponytail. The coloured sketch was drawn when I only knew she lived in the woods. Then I decided to give her a bow as a weapon and build a story around that. So I wanted her to look a bit more like an archer. Still she needed clothing which is comfortable and non obstructing so the final design happened.
Non playable characters have fixed skills. You can level the character by partnering up with them but you can’t influence how their skill points are distributed. I’ll write more on the skill system I imagine in an individual post. It also might not be the final version of the skills so they can still change.
By the way designing clothes is really one of my weaknesses so these all took many many hours, but I’m happy with all of my characters. Love them.
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