#pointlesssquidly

[thepointlessgame]

HELLO THERE.

It's amazing what a few months will do, am I right? I was doing the sprite for the Landlord character, and I found that my painting style has changed in a sort of durastic way.

Don't get me wrong, I think it looks really cool. But it also looks really weird against the rest of the Pointless characters. I may have to to redo some of them. But redos will have to wait!

Once the game hits late Alpha, I'll start redrawing the rest of the Sprites.

[thepointlessgame]

Developer Time: A little bit out of it...

This week has been a busy week here at HQ. Things have been progressing on both WTSNV and Pointless, and slowly we're getting there. This week has been about bug-fighting - I switched the way our system renders a scene on the back-end, and all hell has broken loose. So, it's been happy fun big-fighting times!

So, What's this change mean?

On the front end? Absolutely nothing. On the back end? Chaos and confusion. The way it was built before, when the rendering engine would come across a tag, it would simply run a function and inject the results back into the output variable. While this worked 95% of the time, there were still a few weird places where it wouldn't for whatever reason. You wouldn't notice these quirks casually, but very rarely these would lead to some strange behavior of the engine, such as alphabetically sorting all the tags(Yes, this was a real bug. Sometimes the engine would get tripped up in processing and just get 'stuck'.).

The new system completely reformat the output, building it from scratch. It leads to a cleaner code, and more easy to read output - however everything needed to be switched to the new format. I wrote a script, and long story short not everything got updated as it should. So, it's been manually updating all the locations and conversations since.

So, next topic... Currency?

The in game currency for pointless is called Zends, and funds all of your in-game purchases. Zends can be earned through mini-games, or in some special cases from events(Like your mom sending you money). Most of your Zend generation will be from part-time mini-games, Like McBurgerQueen.

Each mini-game will have a certain goal, and base points off of your ability to achieve that goal(duh..). A good example, as stated above, is McBurgerQueen.

McBurgerQueen is a McJob inspired mini-game where you serve as a minimum-wage dissatisfied employee who must throw food into your gluttonous customers mouths to earn zends. At the end of the day, your score and the number of zends you get is calculated off of the percent of hits that you got.

Zends are also the primary way you will be able to travel from the Bus Station.

Wait, Bus Station?

Yes, Pointless has a bus station. From this place you can order tickets to travel to any number of self-contained themed locations. I can't exactly say what they're going to be, but each location offers it's own rewards for completion, on top of the story.

Well, that's about it for this week. I'm going to go get some rest - Stay classy, People!

Is there any topics you'd like us to discuss in future posts?

[thepointlessgame]

Character Customization

Zoey here! There was an ask for this, and I thought I'd pop in and blargg my two cents all over the walls  :D  In Pointless, there is a good amount of customization - the character base (the skin) is created as genderless, and any of the clothing can be applied. As an example, you could have a character identify as male, and wear stereotypical feminine clothing.

The base itself is customizable, in various skin tones, as well as some fantastical blue, green, etc. There is also a "tattoo" option, where you can give it zebra stripes, or spots.

You can also change the eyes, mouth, hair/hat, shirt, pants, foreground and background items.

So there is a lot of customization for the characters available  :)  Now, if I'm getting this totally wrong, and you wanted to know about the coding and mechanics behind how to do it, you'd have to ask my partner  ^.^

EDIT: Character customization is a pointless-only feature (for now). There is no avatar system set-up for the Night Vale game.

Questions? Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?

[thepointlessgame]

Developer Time: Let there be sound!

So, what does this mean for the Nightvale Game?

Everything is still going smoothly. I've got all the support in that the engine needs, it's from here on in just implementing the actual story and art, and then bug-testing. It doesn't sound like much, but believe me, there's still a lot to be done.

Any idea on a timeline?

I unfortunately can't say. It should be released on the first of October. We've got to schedule about a week of serious bug-testing and fixes before release, but that's all dependent on how fast everything gets done. What I can say is that we're going to do everything in my power to hit that release date.

So, what about pointless?

Pointless's development is still proceeding as planned in tandem with the Nightvale game, as for the moment the issues that need solving affect them both. I'm going to try and give each project equal time, but as the deadline gets closer for Nightvale that game will honestly take up the bulk of our time. I want to be clear on this: That does not mean that pointless has taken a back burner in any way. There are several things going on in pointless that are not implemented in the Nightvale game, which means that I can simply disable some of these trouble spots from the engine on release.

As well, the scale of the projects is incomparable. While Nightvale will be streamlined set of stories, Pointless is built on the purpose of being a large and open world for you to explore. The base town isn't fully completed yet and we're already sitting at well over 200 scripted locations, not including dialogue, events and stores. That's not even touching some of the other towns and locations that you can go, that are going to be included immediately on release.

So, Sound support?

Yes, we have sound support in game. While this is mostly used for conversations and scenes, We've been playing with different ways that this could be used for either background music or streaming audio. While we're still not that far yet, it's a possibility that we're exploring. All sound can also be disabled from the options menu.

Thanks for reading, and if you have any questions either message us or send a ask!

Have a topic you would like us to discuss?

[thepointlessgame]

Developer Time: Bite Sized Inspiration

It's simply this: If you want to be something, go be it. You want to do something, go do it.

What?

Yeah, I know, cliche right? I'm serious though, if there's something you really want to do or be, the only way you're ever going to get there is to go out and start doing it. Now, that dosen't mean to charge off blindly and start ripping people's skulls open thinking your a brain surgeon. If it's something you want to do, you need to have the drive and determination to learn about it on your own.

I knew at a young age I wanted to be a game developer. When I was twelve, I inherited a selection of manuals and a C compiler from my uncle, and I took off. Within three weeks, I had developed my first game. It was a linear adventure, in the style of the choose your own adventure books. It was also riddled with bugs, and very much a "guess the verb" game. In the end though, it was playable.

I have dedicated countless evenings, weekends, months and years learning how to do what I do. I haven't had any formal training, so I do make mistakes from time to time. I tend to leave things like the <DOCTYPE> tag out until I'm done getting the page working. I use the style tag instead of CSS unless I have to use CSS. There are <div> tags EVERYWHERE. It's the little quirks you learn when you teach yourself. In the end though, the product still looks good, so I don't worry about refinement until after the project is done.

Another great example is zoey. From a young age, she loved television and writing. As a young girl she would write episodes for some of her favorite shows, including in one instance making a entire new season for one. She has a passion for writing I have seen in few other people, and her scripts are top notch. It seems that some of that may be paying off finally, and we're waiting to hear back if she's gotten accepted for her most recent fellowship application.

The point is, that if you really want to do something, and I mean really want to do something, you're the only one holding yourself back.

Anyways, it's late and sleep deprivation is starting to get to me. Hugs and Kisses,

~Nymall

[thepointlessgame]

Developer Time: Classy OOP

Nymall here with another post from the development trenches. It's saturday, so it's time to pull a random subject out of our hat-o-topics to discuss. Remember, if you have any questions or specific topics you'd be interested in us talking about, send us a message and we'll see about spotlighting it.

This week we'll be talking about some of the additional features of the game engine and some different future plans. Read on!

Engine Madness

One of the many exciting things about the game engine we've developed is that it can be used as a base for serving several different structures of game. At the current stage of development, it's being used for developing two different games, Pointless and another that shall remain nameless at this time. So, what's the upshot benefit of this?

Log-in information will persist between games - what this means is that the system will basically use one log-in to rule them all. This can be controlled from the in-game options menu, but if enabled(it is by default) to register with another one of our games all you have to do is log in with your username and password. It's that simple!

If disabled, however, registration will work as normal. In the end it's a optional, but highly encouraged feature.

Another interesting feature that this universal engine will enable is "synargies" between games. One of the first planned synergies is a cross mini-game between this and a in-dev game of mine called zombie towns. The mini-game will be completely accessible from in game and, if enabled in zombie towns, will generate additional resources as well as the bonuses gained in pointless for playing the daily mini-game.

Minigame - McBurgerQueen

How could a McJob ever be interesting fodder for a minigame, you ask? Well, it becomes interesting when instead of being a time-trial or timing game, we instead make it a physics game.

Wait, what? That's right, physics.

The entire goal of the McBurgerQueen minigame/job is to throw the food into the customers mouths. The general theory being that either the customer is too lazy to get the food themselves and have outrageously large mouths or you've just become so disgruntled you don't really care anymore.

So, how does the game work?

You'll start each day at the job with 100 coins(this is tennative, as the game is still being balanced), and you'll be able to choose between different types of ammunition that cost more points, but at the same time offer more of a reward if scored. Once the ammunition is picked, then it's just a matter of hitting the targets mouth with the food.

Insane? Yeah, a little bit. It's fun though.

Dev News

Other then the aforementioned updates, nothing particularly of note has happened this week in development. Zoey got a new computer, and I've been restructuring the rendering part of the engine to run a bit faster and use less resources. Hopefully by the end of next week we can get all this business sorted out and get back to finishing the last few things with the forums. The laundry list is surely getting shorter...

As always, if there's anything you want us to discuss, either message us or leave a reply. What topics would you like to be discussed in future posts?

[thepointlessgame]

Zoey here!

I absconded the Programmer's computer to get some work done. It really sucks that we have to switch out, it's really slowing down progress, but hopefully that will be dealt with soon. Soooon.

In the meantime, I've updated the GUI, adding in things as they were needed (such as a logout button, whoops). It looks much cleaner now, yes?  :D  I've also created GUI for new features (such as the Petology Codex, shh) and some other things that I cannot disclose to you at this time.

If you want to follow us, go for it, or if you just want to stalk a tag, I'll make sure we use the tag pointlesssquidly for all of our future posts!

[thepointlessgame]

As you can see, the sprites for the characters look sort of really epic now.

The programmer is asleep, and my own computer is six ways dead (stupid stupid computer, making development drag!) so I've obsconded his computer to work on the cast of teachers. Yeh, that's right, this image is a teacher, Ms. Tsuki Chou, in her casual clothing. She teaches the Zoology class, that is, the care + feeding + raising of your pets.

I just really loved the way she turned out, and that I haven't shown off many female characters yet - so there you go.