Harvest Booze Update #9: Shitventory

I've been a lazy piece of shit for the past couple of weeks, but 0.0.2 is officially complete. You can now actually collect stone, logs and plant fiber from the rocks, trees and grass. The game keeps track of what you have in a simple inventory system, which you can't interact with yet except by gazing upon its glory:

Also note the dude-sized logs. Just toss those in the backpack, no prob.

So, moving on. The big ticket items for 0.0.3 are:

• Inventory system that you can actually interact with
• Crafting system & the first few crafting recipes (basic tools)
• Getting all those tools working in the game
• Maybe a save system

And, you know, whatever little things I stumble on along the way. The save system might end up becoming a version update all on it's own, I'm not really sure how big of a job that's going to be, but it seems like it's probably going to be a huge pain in the ass. Kind of needs to happen sooner than later, though.

But all of that sounds hard so I'm probably just going to play Rogue System for a couple of weeks, see ya.

Introducing Dog Catcher Jones of the Sequel

I teased it a while back, but I cannot in good conscience keep you in suspense any longer, dear fans. Yes, Dog Catcher Jones of the Sequel is in development.

Fear not, I'm still serious about working on Harvest Booze, but in the midst of final exams last semester I just needed something really, really stupid to work on. So this is it.

If you haven't played the first game, Dog Catcher Jones of the Future, do yourself a solid & check it out at potatoclockgames.com. It was the first video game I ever made, so yeah, it's pretty good.

This new installment in the series plays like an idle clicker game, with a couple of grueling twists; if you idle, you lose, and you have to play for 24 hours straight in order to win. No pausing, no saving. Just you, the terminal, and the fate of the universe resting on your shoulders for a miserable 24 hours.

Good luck, Jones.

I really don't have a schedule in mind for release, just depends on how much I feel like working on this over Harvest Booze. A month, maybe? A decade? You'll be the first to know.

Harvest Booze Update #8: Bustin' Makes Me Feel Good

With the semester having wound down last week, I've finally been able to put some quality time into developing the first real gameplay elements of this thing. We have:

Rock kickin'!

Grass yankin'!

And my personal favorite,

Tree punchin'!

The trunk is drawn separately from the branches & even the bark patterns, and I was having a hell of a time one night figuring out how to make everything move together. I went to bed & had weird dreams about triangles & woke up like, oh yeah, trigonometry is a thing. Brains are fucking nuts.

Anyway, as is probably evident, this was a really fun update. Most of the blowy uppy effects are thanks to GameMaker's built in particle system, which I probably went too far with, but whatever, if it makes me giggle then it stays, consarn it. I want the early game resource gathering to be sort of tedious to really encourage players to put some time into building automated systems in the mid & late game, but with some decent sound effects along with these visuals, I hope breaking shit is satisfying enough to temper the tedium. You'll be able to craft basic tools within the first few minutes of gameplay, so you won't be stuck kicking rocks for too long, but tools will be able to break so you'll always have the option of man vs. wild hand-to-nature combat.

I'm working on a very basic inventory system right now, that's the last official task for v0.0.2, then onto crafting & more in 0.0.3; I think the first crafting recipes will be for the tools which already have a use in the current game: ax for bustin' trees, pick for bustin' rocks, and scythe for bustin' grass.

More Tree Fails

I've got the falling trees working now (baaaaaasically...), but showing off things actually working just seems so boring after this:

A little bit of cleaning up to do, real update coming in hot tomorrow, probably.

Invincible Leaf Fountain

Here's a quick preview of what's to come, but I mostly just wanted to show off this invincible leaf fountain that I made by mistake:

I spent like an hour trying to justify not fixing this.

A few things to work out, still, I guess.

Welcome Back, Jones

Welcome back, Jones. Things sure have changed. We can now catch dogs with ease from the terminal. The government pays us when we catch the dogs.

And now for the bad news: dogs are increasing at an exponential rate.

There is a problem with spacetime caused by Butterbean, who went rogue after your last mission. There are microscopic dogs and one dog that is the size of the whole universe so you'd better get moving, Jones.

And Jones, one more thing ... let's catch these bastards.

[Cue music: Back in Black by AC/DC]

Harvest Booze Update #7: Version 0.0.1 is Complete

It's been a rough week between my laptop shitting the bed for a minute & finals week looming but I've managed to push through the last bit of the historic version 0.0.1.

Organizing my "shit to do" list into version numbers really helps to keep me on track, and it lets me feel every once in a while like I've actually finished something. The last task of 0.0.1 was a basic collision system, which is now up & running; you can't walk though trees & rocks, you don't get stuck in shit, and everything is drawing at visually sensible depths.

0.0.1 was all about getting a basic procedurally generated forest working; 0.0.2 is all about destroying that forest. Rock kicking, tree punching & basic resource gathering are all on the agenda here. This should be a fun one.

Harvest Booze Update #6: ROCKTIMIZATION

Got some rocks up in here. These little guys are your standard crafting game rocks; they're fairly easy to break up, you get some stone resource, and then they're gone.

Only rocks have shadows, duh.

Some light procedural generation here, just to avoid looking copy pastey. I've also added a bedrock ground type. Extracting resources from the bedrock will be more difficult, but it will never completely deplete. The idea here is that you gather the easy rocks in the early game & save the hard stuff for the late game when you can build drills to do the work for you. These bedrock patches generate in the same way as the grass, so most of the work was already done.

I also pushed through another round of optimizations & got the FPS up around 300 which is sort of a relief. Little bit of breathing room. I'm basically totally deactivating any object outside of the player's view, updating that about 3 times per second. Updating more often than that causes the overhead of the activation/deactivation process to eat more CPU than it saves. There's still some tweeking to do there, and I'll have to redo the time system, but we're running smoothly for the moment, anyway.

Of course, there's still no game here. You can't interact with anything yet. First order of business on that front is getting basic collisions working, so you can't, like, walk through trees. That's the last planned task for version 0.0.1, then on to tree punching!