Continuing my game dev efforts [DEVember challange]

I, Psycho_666, will participate to the next Devember. My Devember will be speed development of my game. I promise I will program for my Devember for at least an hour, every day of the next December. I will also write a daily public devlog and will make the produced code publicly available on the internet. No matter what, I will keep my promise.

So for those, that don’t know, here is the thread, about my game.


I have abandoned it for a while. Now this challenge will make me go back to it, and probably do a lot of work on it. 1 hour a day will do a lot. Even if I just do research most of that hour, I would still be able to build at least the world generation system in that time…

So here are a couple of small goals to complete:

  1. Implement the already existing dungeon building algorithm.
  2. Implement similar system for procedural generation of the overworld.
  3. Try to make kinda playable demo for the world…

I am starting today, at the time of writing, it is 1:37AM at December 2-nd, so the first day is gone.
So see you all tomorrow.

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Awesome! Can’t wait to see the fruits of your labor.

Devember train keeps on a rollin’.

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Today was completely fruitless day…
I have experimented with file systems. I have my “procedural generation algorithm” and I wanted to save all the data in a file.
My initial idea was to generate everything in a separate program and save the data in files, so the main program may just use the generated data. But I need to decide if it may be better to just do the generation in the main program.
Still, I have made some progress, so it wasn’t completely fruitless day, just mostly fruitless.

  1. I have decided I will use an .ini files instead of any other type, because they are structured, and that’s crazy convenient to me. I can save everything in it. It’s perfect.
  2. I will video record most things I do on this project, so I will occasionally update the main game thread as well (NECRO all old threads of mine).

I experimented with INI files and I will play with them a bit more, so tomorrow I can start “serious coding”…

Game development seems to be way harder than I and many other people think. I don’t really know if that counts, cause there will be a lot of experimenting and doing stuff, that have nothing to do with coding.

Still, my immediate goals are:

  1. save generated data in .ini files
  2. read the .ini files from the main game

Damn, I am making data transfer… Yey meee…

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Goals are goals, and I wouldn’t consider today fruitless. :slight_smile:

You spent it learning about how you will structure your data. That’s an important planning step.

Progress is progress, no matter how small.

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So here we go.
I wrote all ini code I needed in order to create the file. Then I couldn’t find the file. So i basically hit a wall at day 2. I created a file I can’t find.
I will have to do extra research, that will definitely take more than an hour…

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Update…
Day3: More research. Last time I hit a wall, I broke that wall, I found my files I was looking for. All fine and dandy. Now me and another dude or dudette, that is clearly more experienced than me, are trying to figure out how exactly to break the next wall.
The next wall, in short description is an engine limitation.
Game maker opens and saves file in separate folders for each game running. I want to make a communication algorithm between different game instances. We are trying to figure out if that is even possible, cause GM:Studio is… well, limited.
I don’t mind throwing all the code in the main program.
But it would be soo fucking cool to have like 10 different game instances running at the same time and effectively multithreading the game and all communicating between each other. This may not be possible, though, but we will see…

Research… Not really coding, but damn…

Day4…
I have made the hourly quota for the week in reading and researching the limitations of the game engine I am using. However I will have to drastically change the plans I had.
Instead of running different programs to generate and calculate stuff, allowing Windows to throw each of them to a different core, I will have to resort to creating new objects, that will generate and calculate stuff. That way everything will be done in the main game and all files will be saved in the same default folder. There will be no multithreading, however… But the game runs at some 3000fps anyways, so there is a long long way to go until I reach optimization wall.
Tomorrow, meaning Day5, there will be quite the update. I will have to make 2 things:

  1. Create a basic main menu, so I can generate stuff and later on load stuff
  2. Actually the easier thing - implement the generation algorithms into the main game.

I lag basically 4 days behind, because all of this was researching stuff. So now I will have to be quick with the coding.

Its okay. We’ve all been there. :smiley:
Research is important though, that and proper planning will save you time and ache in the long-run.

Day9…
Damn…
OK, I finally made some actual progress.
I gave up on the idea I had for different programs calculating different stuff. Basically each program cerates it’s folder where it saves data, and can’t read or write to any other folder in the computer without asking the user for permission every single time or doing some roundabout stuff or writing extensions… No… I put it all in the main game. So now the main game does all the generations and calculations for me.
I forced myself to try and build stuff without making a menu, but then decided to just make a menu. So I made a main menu for the game, added the generation algorithm to the start button, saved the generated data in an .INI file and next time, meaning tomorrow I will open the .INI file from the main game and use the generated data. So I have like 20min work tomorrow to do that.
After that I would need to polish some bugs I have noticed exist and are bugging me, so I will have to fix them and then I will have to do some kind of world generation.
In order to make the world generation work at all, I will also have to spend some time making some basic art assets.
The visualization of the overworld is one of the ideas, I am most interested in screwing up, cause it’s so simple even I should be able to do it first try…

Day 12…
I’m really lagging behind.
I am definitely not coding an hour a day. Still I do code a little bit. I am failing massively the challenge.
Anyway, so let’s talk about my progress:

  1. I have worked out the writing and reading from .ini files. I had some issues with opening the file and reading the data from it. I fixed it, so now it’s all perfectly fine.
  2. I have made some visualization stuff, that show me stuff on the screen to help me see if everything is working properly. So far it is.
  3. I have started going for world map generation. I have done some calculation and started taking them into account with the test project I am doing…

This is the first time I am looking at the project and feel conflicted.
I am both excited and worried. I’m excited, cause I am starting to see all the stuff slowly coming together and the connections actually working and I’m fairly proud of myself for doing that kind of complex thing. I am worried, cause I just started realize how much more work I need to make anything, that even barely resembles a playable demo. I am not even close to finish the procedural stuff, and I haven’t even started work on the characters and quests and world and anything…

OK, you may expect videos of my progress by the end of the week.

For the next time my goal will be to progress some stuff with the procedural generation.
I will increase the seed to 8 characters and start generating some more stuff, like dungeon locations on the map, some differentiation between the different dungeons, may even do some bug fixing, that I didn’t do this time.

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Day 14…

I did. I organized the project A LOT. I added some different code for the different dungeons, made some world generation.
Progress is slowly being made.
The large issue with that is, that deeper I go in the project, the better ways to do it I am discovering. So bit my bit I am completely reorganizing the entire thing.

Damn, I forgot to do that.

I didn’t do that either. That will be next time, since I have done all other important stuff and this is the next on the list. Right now I am using static locations with the idea of generating them with the world so it matches caves and mountains and rivers, forests, jungles, etc etc…

Not really. I will skip tomorrow, cause I have a long shift to take. Sunday I will try and gain the time I lost. So here are the immediate goals:

  1. Seed - 8 characters
  2. Relocate the dungeons on the “map”
  3. Will try and finally make a video (or 5) on the topic…
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Are you still using Game Maker Studio?

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Studio 1,4 yes.
Thanks to @anarekist. I will not forget that.

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Nice! How are you liking it?

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I have been using it since 8,0 way before it was studio.
I love the simplicity. The coding is extremely easy. I love that. The syntax is simple, I love that as well.
It reminds me heavily of Pascal, the first programing language I learned. And that is a positive for me.
It’s a simple 2D engine. If you thought Unity is easy to use, Game Maker Studio is about a trillion times easier, mainly because it’s 2D and because the coding is way simpler than the C# or whatever unity uses.

Day… Something…
I failed massively. I haven’t been working on the project for the last… Week or so. I can use excuses like I am tired, it’s heavy work now that the holidays are close, I had issues with real life stuff, etc. The fact of the matter is, I haven’t been working properly on the project for the last week or so.
I will still try and make progress every now and then. In the next few days I will be busy with my new build, so I may not have time for it.
With the new system I may actually make progress on the game, since I will play with the cpu a lot.
But still, the fact is, I have failed.

It’s fine to take a break from something when there are other more important or interesting things going on in your life or even when the motivation just isn’t not there it’s good to put a project aside for a bit and take a break.

I think the main idea behind #devember is to encourage people start something fun and creative, perhaps something they wouldn’t normally tackle. It’s a bit of an experiment so I wouldn’t be too worried about trying to finish something by the end of December.

If you’ve made a start and any progress on your project then you haven’t failed. You can always pick it up again later on and do a little work here and there.

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I wasn’t really going for a specific goal. I failed, because I haven’t developed the project for a long time. The one hour a day thing is long gone. I still made progress a few hours a week, but not every day. Now it’s just gone. I won’t be able to do anything today, then there is Christmas, then there is my birthday… So 28-th I can work on it again…

Ah, but there have probably been a few days when you did more than an hour … so it all balances out in the end :grinning:

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It’s okay bro, as long as you haven’t given up. You only fail when you give up.

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