First month of the year finished!! Excluding Poppin & Jupa, it's been pretty exhausting, but including Poppin & Jupa, it's been pretty exhausting. I'll load all that at the end of the post though.
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Last month was focused on Chapter 5 development, which is set in a Toy Kingdom. The bulk of it was level design. Something like ~14 rooms?
I think the overall structure of Chapter 5 is closer to Chapter 2, where (following a more linear sequence of PnJ entering the area, meeting the antagonist of the area, and undoing a spell) they're given several areas to tackle in whatever order they want, before opening up the path to the boss. It'll also include it's own miniboss, Dueldelle.
Said areas are based around a timed music box, a giant drawing canvas, a maze within a ballpit, and a small town dedicated to these Ibbix Doll fellas.
Part of this month also revolved setting up the structure of an optional trading sidequest based on these dolls. Each one of them has a single screen home located in the Toy Kingdom; when you enter it, they won't attack PnJ, preoccupied with some other activity. When you talk to them, they might trade an item you have with something else.
I'm being vague so I don't explain everything in it, but I'll leave these item graphics here for you to guess who gets what. There's only 8 items and 10 dolls...
The last area of the Toy Kingdom involves storming a castle, and a gag I had in mind was encountering increasingly larger versions of the "Tin Twerp" toy soldier enemies.
Until eventually, you reach a colossal one attacking from the background.
If Poppin & Jupa get past all that, they'll reach Tinker, the weird ghost twerp who rules over the kingdom. He forces the two to play a board game.
It's a segment I've been excited to do for years, and I think I've come up with a good system for it: Poppin and Jupa act as separate pieces, utilizing a spinner to determine how many spaces they move (which will make it possible to control how many spaces you move, if you bother timing it right).
Based on the type of space they land on it, a different effect will occur, but the primary ones are short minigames where they'll either race to the end, collect enough stars, or fight off one or more enemies.
Their goal is to reach 4 lit candles along the way, during which they'll play another minigame to snuff it out before they can continue.
The big catch is that, following the first candle, Tinker will show up on the board, slowly moving up. If he manages to catch the both of them, it'll trigger a game over. He moves even during minigames, meaning you'll have to complete them as fast as possible.
...Sadly, I can't show that as it's not all implemented yet. I figure fully implementing the sequence could take a month by itself, but I did want to get the outline and base functionality in.
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That was most of the meaningful work in January. Like I said it's been a pretty rough month; at my job, some major work items were due soon which required some over time to finish, and there's been a looming concern about the company's contract expiring in May-July, so I'll likely be job hunting or relocating again.
The other issue involves a few things. My laptop fan is getting old and starting to become noisy. I scheduled a repair appointment but it won't come up until next month, so in the mean time, I decided to back up all my data.
While backing up my data, I decided to follow through updating Game Maker. I've been holding out on a version from 2+ years ago. While it was pretty normal at first ( a few code changes), and had some benefits (listing potential errors/warnings, a much faster method for copy-pasting tiles), eventually it started throwing errors regarding a local variable I was using across breakables, doors, and parallax layers.
To make a long story short, I had been using the same name GameMaker uses for setting the base image of an object. This was fine in the older version, but this latest build got very confused by it, and started throwing errors. Eventually the project would not load unless I went into the project files and manually cleared each instance of this broken reference.
There are a lot of breakables/doors/parallax layers in the game. And on top of it, it would keep remaking this local variable after I removed it. In the end I had to delete and remake every individual instance of these objects where a unique sprite was set, to prevent it from happening. That took up several days I had set aside for development.
Hopefully, it should be sorted out now, and I can continue development as normal. This year I decided to take a new approach by outlining what I'd be working on each day, to keep pace, and I'd say it's worked out well for roughing out all the level design.
This still leaves actually testing and troubleshooting the level though, and enemies/bosses/the trading sidequest/the board game all still need to be finished. However, I think I'm going to set it aside for now, and return to Chapter 3, where I plan to complete it's remaining rooms and cutscenes.
