Tiny Tabby Games

A casual gamer making games and occasionally playing them as well. https://sites.google.com/view/chrissy-tina-t/tiny-tabby-games

[tinytabbygames]

Making Up For Lost Time

I meant to start posting on here more, but life got in the way. Job hunting. Shifting my priorities to other things to try and keep myself afloat. So my games haven't been my main focus these past few months. Recently I've gotten back to work on some of my games. Been getitng the itch to work on them again, so I've gone back to what was my first game. The platformer that was originally just the file I was using to adjust to and learn how GDevelop works.

That's what I've shown in my latest dev log video. It feels nice giving it a facelift and seeing it start to look like a real game. Granted, I realize now that what I've been calling Lvl 1 in teh scenes is technically level 2. But after looking through the other scenes from my messing around in GDevelop I have a good base for an ice level. I also am going to be using a password system for the levels instead of a traditional save system. I'm still trying to figure that out, and it's easier to stick with passwords for now.

But it's weird and kind of fun to look back at the original scene where I was really just messing around and testing things out. It's such a mess, but it's staught me so much. It's also what inspired the idea for what the game is becoming. I'm tempted ot keep it in there as an easter egg.

The game is going by "Need a Lift" for now. That's the temp name. I'm excited and proud of the progress being made on it. I'm happy to say it's starting to look and feel like a game now. I'll be posting all of my games to itchio instead of Steam. Steam is way too expensive to post a game to for me, so I'm sticking with itch.

For now I did add a tip jar to my itchio. It has a printable poster that comes with it as a thank you. I drew it up just for the tip jar. It's not the same art as teh thumbnail, but I'm really happy with how it turned out.

I also started working on a sort of "Rear Window" inspired game. It's very point and click style and a bit of a visual novel, but not a visual novel in the usual setup. It's been a fun one to test out ideas for so far.

[tinytabbygames]

I know it's been a while since I last posted, but I'm back to working on my games again. I've returned to the first game I started putting together. It started as just a test to get myself adjusted to GDevelop, and turned into a game idea. Now about a year later it's starting to actually look like a game!

[tinytabbygames]

While my main games are on pause for the moment, I've gotten a spark of inspiration and giving a different type of game developmetn a shot.

[tinytabbygames]

Wanted to make a quick dev log while I was making progress on the prototype. So far so good. I'm honestly really excited about this. I think there's a lot of potential for this to really test my skills. I've already figured some things out that I was struggling with in previous game tests. I've gotten a couple mechanics I want to test with this one and a ton of story notes. I think it's going to be a fun one to explore.

[tinytabbygames]

Prototyping and Designing

While it's not the game I intended on working on, I've been prototyping an idea and started designing the character. It's going to be a space themed puzzle platformer. Playing around with floaty controls. Testing things out with keyboard and controller as I go. So far I've sketched up a concept design for the player character. Took a bit, especially for it to not look like Astro Boy or Buzz Lightyear. It almost dipped a little Megaman, but I've gotten the design to a point where I think it will stand on its own well enough. It's given me a good starting point to work off style wise, and I'm excited to see where this goes.

[tinytabbygames]

Due to a copyright claim on two of teh background tracks I had in the video, while I know they said it was fine to keep it, I wanted to be as asafe as possible. So I reuploaded the dev log without the background music. So now you get to enjoy every awkward silence when I talk about my games and horribly explain the story behind them.

[tinytabbygames]

Reposting the dev log

Despite the music being under the vlog section of the CapCut music selection, two songs in the background of my dev log got claimed. So to play it safe I decided to remove the video and reupload it without music in the background.

[tinytabbygames]

I still have to work out the audio setup, but guess who figured out how to record the xbox one on their laptop. I'm more than excited about this. I know I'm not the best gamer, but I had fun and that's honestly what's most important, having fun. I don't know if I'm going to keep playing Hollow Knight on the channel, this was mostly a test for recording, but I might just continue it.

[tinytabbygames]

While I wasn't able to take part in the GDevelop game jam, I did come up with a concept for a game inspired by the theme. Think sort of like a Zoltar machine meets 20 Questions. I might actually attempt to make it, but for now, here's the concept I drew up. I started with a very simple mock up in GDevelop with placeholders to get an idea of wheret things would fit in screen, screencapped that, then used that as a base to get placement of things right.

[tinytabbygames]

This might be the end of my Stardew Valley series

I know I recently started up a Stardew Valley laet's play. It's only a few episodes in, but recently my game has started glitching and crashing. Each of the side saves I tried crashed the game and vanished upon reopening the game. The game is up to date. There are no mods. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling it(don't worry, the save for my series is still there). I tried starting a new save just to test it and after two in game days it froze loading the next day and crashed. And when I went to open it, that save was gone.

So this might be it for the series. I'll see if I can fix it. I know another program of mine has been bugging and ClipStudio hasn't been letting me save files as ClipStudio files(although I can save them as Photoshop documents, so at least it's not a complete loss). Hopefully I can fix this, but for now the let's play is on hold.

EDIT: I decided to try unistalling Aura, since this all seemed to start after installing it. When KAspersky said they wouldn't be renewing my subscription, I started looking into other options. I decided to give Aura a shot and it seemed fine at first. BUT it was only after installing it that everything started going downhill. My laptop started freezing. ClipStudio stoppe letting me save things as CS files, and Stardew Valley had been acting up.

So I decided to uninstall it and use a different antivirus. Sure enough enough, after I removed Aura everything seems to be back to normal. I tested ClipStudio and things are saving fine. So far Stardew seems fine, I started up a new save and it made it a few days in game with no issue. So I don't know what it was about Aura, but I think it's safe to say it was the source of the problems.

[tinytabbygames]

Game Dev Update

Things are momentarily on pause. While I've been working on a couple other things, I've also been realizing I've given myself too much to work on at once. I'm usually someone that can bounce between projects at once, but sometimes more projects get added to the list and it becomes too much. So for now the games are on hold. I'm not abandoning them, just taking a little break while I finish some other things that are a higher priority at the moment.

[tinytabbygames]

Finally getting back to playing Stardew Valley. This time I don't eat a flower in front of the townsfolk, although I still suck at making friends with them. But, this time I have an overlay for the channel and I'm not using my dnd one.

[tinytabbygames]

Happy Accidents

One of the best parts of learning game dev: Unintentionally figuring out a completely different mechanic while working on the one you wanted.

That and figuring out a new mechanic by forgetting the order for a mechanic you know how to do.

[tinytabbygames]

Just noticed something

I should probably say now, I have a bad habit of flip flopping between British and American English spellings. I don't know why, it's something I've done since I was a kid. Sometimes my brain is just like "this spelling is right" unless a spellcheck or word processor yells at me. I just realized it with my last post and spelling behaviour insteasd of behavior.

In GDevelop it's behavior not behaviour. For some reason behaviour felt correct spelling wise to me.

If you ever see me go back and forth between color/colour, favourite/favorite, and grey/gray, this is why. Even as a kid I did this when learning to spell, it wasn't untill much later that I learned why my teachers told me it was the wrong spelling. They just told me it's not spelled like that when I spelled favorite as favourite and color as colour. Wouldn't explain why, just "that's not how it's spelled".

[tinytabbygames]

Odd GDevelop Issue

I've ffigured out how to fix it, kind of, but it's still weird.

So I'm making a platformer. I've used the remap behaviour to remap the controls to WASD. For some reason though, unless you turn the default platormer controls off, it also counts shift as a jummp button. But then if you turn it off, whether you type "space" into the box for the jump button, the space key doesn't work for jump.

My work around has been to use the events and have it set to if the space key is pressed it simulates the jump key. It's weird though, because you'd think that would do that anyway if you type space into the box for the jump button remap. It's not like I typed it a different way between the events and the remap behaviour.

I'm just very confused about it. Again, the workaround wotked and space works as the jump key, but I'm lost on why the other keys work in the remap, but the space key doesn't in the remap.

[tinytabbygames]

Making Progress

Been getting a lot done with my platformer. I've been sketching up a lot of concept art and level layouts. I also worked out a way to get around me not completely having combat figured out(I'm new to making games, so even though I'm using GDevelop, there's still a lot I need to learn).

I've also been using a different test game to try things like portals, getting a dash to work(because I haven't completely worked out how to get the behavior to work even though I've added it to the player character), and making disappearing walls.

For my first week or so really using GDevelop, I'm proud of how far I've come. I've gone from having no clue at all how to do any of that, to having functional game mechanics, even if they are in more of a playground than an actual game level.

[tinytabbygames]

Just posted a new dev log to the channel. Considering how much I got done in a few days, I'm proud of myself.