General

This week was a little harder for me to keep momentum going. I don’t know if it is simply because the game is becoming more complex or if my return to the gym has sapped the extra energy out of me. I am hoping this just remains a blip on the radar and I can keep pushing through.

I have found creating these blog posts has kept me accountable and forces me to put my money where my mouth. From here, I need to create a roadmap with targets outlining what goal posts I should be hitting. Generally, I want the mechanics settled and completed by the end of the year. The only thing left should be boss fights, level design and art music and sound

My goal is to have a playable internal demo, possibly with multiplayer ready by the end of the month. If everything goes well, continue production. If not, I will have to look into making a smaller project with the same mechanics.

This Week’s Goals

Cintrianna’s Forge

Goal 1: Push Update to Production.

While I did have to relearn the process of exporting in Xcode. The Apple build did not cause me much trouble at all. It is now currently in review and awaiting Apple to accept.

The Android Build however… Oh boy… To push a build to Google Play you need to push it with a certificate you have and due to a… Blunder on my part. I found a way to factory reset my laptop. Without getting into details I am very glad I recently shifted my main development to the Mac.

To continue uploading to Google Play I had to get a new certificate, I uploaded that to the google support team and they are ready to accept new builds tomorrow with the new signatures. I’ll push it once I have the confirmation.

While a great learning experience, a lot of good data was lost on the laptop.

Knott and the Waking Wilds

Goal 2: Item Drops and Staggering

This was actually way easier than I thought. I got this done in about 20 minutes, this of course not including the 15 minutes testing to find out why it failed. Items drop when enemies die or when their stun tolerance is breached. Stun tolerance is decided via their armour stat. Pots apply a stun of 99, So unless the target has Super Armour, it will not effect them.

Goal 3: Item Durability

This was a little bit more complex but still relatively easy to pull off. I got the UI to show the state of weapons as well as a quick flash when the durability takes a hit. I am quite happy with the results. See above for the result!

Extra: Rigid Body Weapons

All the weapons where using Character Body nodes. I did not like the artificial feeling they had when throwing so the weapon class needed a revamp they still operate the same way when held by Entities however when thrown there is a window of airtime where it has the normal velocity then it hits the ground and slides, The heavier the weapon the lower the airtime.

Next Week’s Goals

General

Goal 1: More Robust and Automatic Backup Strategy

After that certificate issue, as well as potentially losing… Well everything. I need to create a more robust backup strategy. Something automatic that hopefully only costs the price of a spare hard drive. I do have version control set up for my games but I can’t push everything to the version control. Graphics and Sounds need their own space to live. Besides, an additional physical backup never hurts.

Goal 2: Create Roadmap

In addition as mentioned in the beginning above, I don’t want the game to drag on forever. So creating a roadmap that I can edit and update seems like a pretty smart idea. Either create it inside my current Notion or make it a physical board I can’t avoid in my study seems like a pretty good idea. Ideally, The game gets done in a year. My goal is to create that roadmap with all the features planned to be added to the game. I’ll come back with more details next week.

Knott and the Waking Wilds.

Goal 3: Unchain Player Movement from States

The game is starting to feel a lot better but the movement between actions still feels a little off. I would like there to be a little bit more momentum and feeling between attacks and movement.

With this I would also like to get my equivalent to the Pegasus boots working, With moving consistently for 3 seconds triggering the effect of a sprint. A bit like the way the characters in Mario 3D world burst into a puff of smoke and start charging.

Recommendations

Mashy - Twitch / Youtube

It’s no secret that my game draws a lot of inspiration from the Gameboy Zelda’s. Usually in the background, I have filled a lot of the empty space with 2-hour long extended Persona music. Recently however, I have been enjoying a little picture-in-picture window keeping me company when error messages are inevitably appearing.

Mashy mainly runs randomizer Speedruns of the Zelda games, and if any of Knott and the Waking Wild is interesting at all to you, I think you will find yourself cozy with some of his videos.

mashy - Twitch

I mostly play 2D Zeldas and other Nintendo games ~ Speedruns ~ Randomizers ~ Races

Twitch