#proximity alert devlog

[rhinequeenmakesgames]

Proximity Alert is Here!

Proximity Alert by RhineQueen

An alien trucker makes an emergancy pitstop.

Proximity Aert is a short, comedic, point and click adventure that I made to get familiar with this kind of game and Adventure Game Studio. You take the reigns of Gorp, an interstellar trucker when he encounters a dangerous swarm of meteors and must help him ret his ship in working order. I hope that you enjoy this as much as I liked making it! Next year I'll be getting stuck into what I hope will be my first commercial release, so keep your eyes peeled for more updates in the near future!

[rhinequeenmakesgames]

Proximity Alert Soon and the Road Ahead

Work on Proximity Alert has been trucking along quite smoothly recently. The AGS rebuild has proven to be a real boon, even moreso than I had initially expected. Despite it's quirks, the engine has proven to be robust and has let me really focus on the art and writing. That has helped speed along progress and I've now got a game that looks and feels much more complete.

I've got a basic set of animations implemented, the core gameplay progression is there, and I'm fairly confident that I've accounted for any obvious bugs. Next on the docket is putting in a basic title and end screen so the game doesn't just abruptly quit when you finish.

At that point, I intend to open up the Itch page for playtesting and while I'm gathering feedback and bugs, I'll be going through my polish backlog and see what I have time to spit shine. My plan is that one way or another, I'm going to finish and release this fully by the end of October. At that point I'm gonna stop developing any new features and any updates will purely be bug fixes. I've decided this since I want to wrap this project up soon so that I have a month or two before the end of the year to mess around with some hobby projects and plan for 2026.

What am I planning for? My first commercial release! I wanted to prepare for this properly by doing games like Proximity Alert, AGBAS, and Project Marl to sample a handful of engines and try to find one that had a good balance of ease of use, speed of production, and good documentation. As promising as Godot has been, the steeper investment in programming backend has been the part I keep bouncing off. I may still practise with it in the background, but if I'm being honest I'm more interested in storytelling and making art than figuring out how to implement a robust and optimized save/load system or figuring out how to optimize culling.

So after some deliberation, I am likely going to commit to at least a demo to guage interest and scope in a point and click mystery game. I think it's a good balance between something I'm interested in, a genre that isn't too over saturated these days, and ability to tell an engaging interactive story. If I'm gonna be honest, the biggest hurdle in my mind is gonna be promotion. Ideally I want this to eventually be something that earns me some proper income and unfortunately that means promotion, advertising and marketing. And if programming is out of my wheelhouse, marketing is something that is even less familiar and comfortable for me.

Especially recently, I've been trying to avoid most social medias. TikTok was like turbocrack for my ADD, I only use Facebook for logins these days, and never really had much interest in twitter or insta or other social media. Self promotion doesn't really come naturally to me so it's probably something that I should look into and work on during the next few months. Aside from my youtube channel I haven't really tried to maintain much of a public presence since I was in college. Even then I wasn't particularly good at maintaining that presence on youtube. My hope is that being medicated will make that easier to focus on, but who knows.

Regardless, I'm really hoping that the future is bright and if I'm gonna be making games (hopefully) professionally, I get to give myself a studio name as if I have a studio. Like all good indie devs do. So look forward to the future of Cowgod Games. It will be bright and spooky!

[rhinequeenmakesgames]

Give Me Documentation or Give Me Death

So this is a little less development focused and a bit for of a vent, but the update part regarding Proximity Alert is that I have made a decision to switch from Popochiu, the Godot plugin that I was using, to Adventure Game Studio. In a lot of ways that is a downgrade I'll admit. The software is older, clunkier, slower, and more limited. However, I'm pretty used to that kind of thing having made AGBAS in RPGMaker XP. Old software isn't that hard to use, especially when it has strong documentation.

Despite how promising and straightforward Popochiu is, the documentation is really lacking. There is a basic tutorial in the docs, but it doesn't go over a lot of relatively basic fuctions, and the coding documentation is incomplete and the search doesn't seem to work. The docs don't even include reference on how to change rooms anywhere that I could easily find. The fallback is something that I see more frequently recently, especially with indie projects and it's quickly becoming a bugbear of mine.

A Discord server =/= Documentation.

It's not even close. It's rather frustrating to have to try and search through months of old discord posts to maybe find something like what you're trying to achieve. Or failing that, posting in the troubleshooting channel(if they even have one) and hoping that someone replies sometime. Meanwhile, the Discord is the only place that update logs are posted. If you're lucky, that server will have a dedicated channel for updates and announcements, but more often it's just posted in the General channel with an @ everyone and then left buried under other messages.

Anyways, all that is to say that I'm more than willing to put up with clunky old software and proprietary code that's a bastard of C++ and Python or something, if that bastard codebase has thorough documentation. Being able to solve my own problems with a well organized set of detailed instructions and references is far too crucial for how I work for me to find the chaos of a chatroom anything close to a substitute. So for now, I'm moving forward with AGS since it lets me work more effectively on my own without having to search through a dozenish discord pages and scour an unrealted video in a language that I don't speak(common monolingual L) to find code that isn't even the point of the video so that I know how to change rooms.

In AGS I've been able to rebuild what I had built in Popo in less time and with less frustration, confusion and searching. Everything I need is pretty much right there and the bonus is that I don't even have to learn how to fill gaps that Popo doesn't cover, like title screens, much more easily. This has put me back a bit on this hobby project, so I'm not really gonna dedicate as much time as I initially thought on beautifying or small environmental animations. So in light of that I'm probably gonna steam ahead with some more simple animations and fewer of them so that this doesn't take more than another month hopefully.