Potato Clock Games Spring Sabbatical

TL;DR: I'm taking a month or 2 off from Black Road Sky to get my shit together.

I don't want this to come off as too dramatic or anything, but I do want to be transparent about the development of Black Road Sky. I'm just kind of sick of it right now, and have been for a while. I think that's a normal thing to feel from time to time with a project like this. I've been working on this thing on & off since 2017 (see the historic first devlog post here) with no real incentive, financial or otherwise, aside from like, hey, wouldn't it be cool if I made this game? So regardless of any surrounding circumstances, I want to be fair to myself with a 'breaks are allowed' approach.

Aside from generally needing a break, I just need the time right now for other things in my life. Spring is a busy time for us beekeepers, and it's important to me that I respect these living things in my care. I also need to catch up on things around the house; I've been renovating my kitchen since 2020 and I'm starting to feel like I'm taking advantage of my wife's patience. I need to start exercising, read some books, touch some grass. I won't go on, but you get it, my overwhelming to-do list has reached critical mass and I just need to make some space in my life to get back to baseline. Cutting back on BRS development is just one of a handful of temporary adjustments I'm making in my life (also going cold turkey on Tetris, wish me luck) and I'm hopeful that I'll come out the other side with a more healthy, focused mindset than I've had for, I don't know, maybe like a year now.

I plan to keep up with the tradition of 9th-of-the-month-devlogs, but the next couple will be a little different; maybe lore dumps or something, I'm not sure. What I am sure of is that this is a temporary, purposeful break, and regular development will continue soon. And honestly, I think it will be better for the game in the long run. o7

PCG 2023 Shareholders Profits Report

Ladies, gentlemen ... (clinks diamond-bedazzled champagne glass full of Miller High Life) ... if I could please have your attention, esteemed yuppie plutocrats. I see you all found your robes at the door, very well, very well.

Another capital year has further consolidated our unholy power, casting the suffocating chill of our magnificent shadow upon enemies and supplicants alike, the filthy masses cowering in fearful reverence of our numbers, our numbers, our numbers that go up.

(The robed congregation chants, "OUR NUMBERS, OUR NUMBERS, OUR NUMBERS THAT GO UP!")

Excellent. As you know, downloads of the latest version of Black Road Sky, released only 2 short weeks ago, have already shattered expectations, the numbers reaching values that can only be described as positive integers. Surfing the bloody wave of this success, YouTube subscriptions have very nearly broken the single-digit barrier, sending a shockwave of doom across an already decimated landscape of smoldering flesh and bone. Next slide, please.

The whiteboard illuminates. We drink of its purity. And we pray.

("OUR NUMBERS, OUR NUMBERS, OUR NUMBERS THAT GO UP!")

This concludes today's meeting. Thank you for your continued conspiratorial racketeering as we look forward to another year in the terrible reign of Potato Clock Games.

Damage, Repair and Moving The Goalpost

Development this past month has focused on finishing up the damage-related systems. I think it turned out great, but it took quite a bit longer than expected for a bunch of boring reasons. Like, I literally finished it yesterday. In fact, everything is taking a lot longer than expected, so I've decided to reduce the scope of v0.4 a bit and tackle the rest in the next version. This is annoying, since v0.4 was just meant to clean up the leftovers from v0.3 but whatever. More on that in a minute, but first let's talk DAMAGE, BABY.

Damage & Repair Game Mechanics

Visually, there's not much to show off beyond the ostentatious new UI elements:

MORE READOUTS LET'S GO

So we now have hull integrity, systems health and engine efficiency to manage. Engine efficiency was already a thing in Black Road Sky, it was just hidden from the player so you couldn't directly see how different engine modes worked at different efficiencies. Now you can! This is really just a measure of how effectively your ship is converting fuel into thrust.

Efficiency is now affected by system health, which is a measure of general wear & tear on the ship's systems. The ship will still perform well with system health in the 80's or 90's but will start burning fuel noticeably faster as you drop towards 50 and below. Wear accumulates naturally, but is pretty minimal outside of high throttle maneuvers.

Hull integrity refers to the structural stability of the ship's outer shielding. Damage occurs naturally during normal operation, but accumulates very slowly ... unless you're running into shit. This is pretty much a standard video game damage bar. A careful pilot will rarely need to worry about hull repairs, but system damage accumulates faster with a weaker hull, so fuel economy can be affected seriously by any major hull damage that goes unrepaired. Let things go too far, of course, and fuel economy will be the least of your problems.

Game Over!

Repairs can be ordered from any garage terminal. This works basically the same way as refueling, just pony up and it's done. As with refueling, there's a flat fee in addition to the cost of repairs. This is meant to discourage players from refueling and repairing every single time they land, just because I think that would be a tedious activity to reward.

Get fucked, get fixed.

On paper, this doesn't change the gameplay that much; don't throttle up higher than you need to and it's just an extra fee to pay every once in a while. In practice, though, actually having a reason to care about your ship's health adds a fun element of immersion to the game. It's a placeholder system but I think it's a nice taste of the direction things are moving in.

Reducing The Scope of v0.4

It should come as no surprise to Potato Clock Games stans that this update it taking for god damn ever. And there's still a lot to go. So I've decided to polish up what I've got once I'm done with the visual improvements that I have in mind and release it.

The game is already in a stable, playable state so this shouldn't have much of an effect on the overall development schedule, and it will be a good way to get some player feedback before moving on. I'm obviously not qualified to hazard a guess at a release date so I won't even try. It isn't exactly imminent but I'll say that it's on the horizon, whatever that means.

As for the elements that are being cut from this version, fear not, they'll make up the bulk of the next release. This means pushing systems implementations back YET AGAIN, but it's cool. We'll get there.

Coming Up Next

With the damage and repair systems finally complete, I'm moving on to experimenting with post processing, shaders and lighting. This is stuff that I know pretty much nothing about, so it's more research than active development at the moment, but it's something I've kind of got to deal with eventually. I'd also like to start redesigning the planets and moons. That might just amount to research, or redoing one planet, or maybe replacing all of them. Dunno yet. And I want to take another stab at some of the placeholder ship interior models. But then we'll just be a round of buxfixing, optimizations & loose end tying away from a release.

Tune in next time to find out if I just spent a few weeks ruining the game with a bunch of lens flares or something. Until then, fly safe, and I'll catch you next month!

PCG 2022 Shareholders Profits Report

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen of the board. Time is money so let's get started.

2022 has been a banner year for Potato Clock Games. The highly anticipated Version 0.3 of Black Road Sky has finally been released to an adoring public and downloads have soared into the double digits. Subscribers to the Potato Clock Games YouTube channel have increased by infinity percent from 0 to 3 thanks to the resounding success of an obnoxiously long series of drunken tutorial videos. We have prayed daily unto The Whiteboard, and lo it has been updated, may it show us The Path.

We stand poised for global market domination, laughing maniacally atop a mountain of skulls while red neon lightning cracks the night sky wide, revealing the incomprehensible fractal structure of reality folding in upon itself in an ever changing self referential loop beyond time, beyond space, beyond love.

Boys, we're gonna make a fortune.

Post-v0.3 Plans for Black Road Sky

A couple of months ago I outlined the possible paths I saw in moving forward with Black Road Sky: give up, start over, or just keep going. I have chosen a path.

I'm actually having fun again, so giving up has lost its appeal. And now that I've reacquainted myself with the code base, which was more of a trial than it seems like it should have been, starting over feels unnecessary. SO ONWARD WE GO! I have reduced the scope of the game somewhat, but I've never said much about what the full scope was going to be, so who will ever know the difference? No one, but I'm gonna tell you about it anyway.

I've pared all of the ship systems down and even eliminated a few. This will help give me a chance of finishing the game in my lifetime, and now that I've made that decision I think I was probably over complicating the systems stuff anyway. I'm getting rid of a planned Tank Management System which was going to handle pressurizing & depressurizing consumable tanks as well as routing them to the appropriate systems. The system also involved a complicated network of valves for refueling, purging lines, and so on. All of that stuff is just going to happen automatically now. I've also decided to completely hand wave away the Life Support System, which was going to handle cabin pressure & temperature and would have had its own tank of life support gasses. And nearly every remaining system has been simplified to some degree, most notably the electrical & communications systems. Don't worry, the cockpit will still be an overwhelming mess of buttons and meters, but I'm trying to make sure that every button and every readout is really significant in terms of gameplay. I'm also shelving some non-trucking and endgame ideas, but those are things that I could add back in someday if it seems like the game needs it.

It's looking like another 2 months before v0.3 is ready, so that probably means like 4 months, but work is progressing steadily. If I can get it done by July, it'll only be 2 years later than my initial goal. Pretty good.

BRS Version 0.3 Progress and Existential Dread

 I finally got back to work in earnest on Black Road Sky. It sucks.

The code base has been a nightmare to get reacquainted with, even after just a few months away. But I've been forcing myself to work on it for a couple of hours each day and I'm making progress. Some major bugs have been squashed, and I'm confident that I can get the game back into a stable state. Might take a month or two. I don't know what the future holds for Black Road Sky, but I feel pretty committed to getting v0.3 off the ground, at least.

Then what? I'm not committing to anything here, but these are the options currently floating around my head:

1. Fuck it. Give up. I don't think there's any way this game will end up meeting my expectations for it, but who cares, I'll end up with a cool tech demo and maybe I can move on with my life and make a different game that doesn't require a mastery of math that I barely understand.

2. Fuck it. Start over. I've been trying to make this game for like 10 years now, and I've started over 4 or 5 times, and maybe I'll just do that again. This is actually pretty appealing. I've already figured out a lot of the architecture and math and stuff, so I know that I could build a stronger code base if I started over.

3. Fuck it. Just keep going. Keep building on this monster until we have something resembling our vision. Maybe reduce the scope. Make like $150 on Steam. Get it right in Black Road Sky 2.

Maybe there are other options, but I can't see them right now. I'm not really leaning toward or away from any of the above 3 options. I suspect that I'll have some clarity in a month or two after I get v0.3 ready to ship.

DON'T WORRY, Pandemic Flashback The Last is coming up next. Cool yr jets.

PCG 2020 Shareholders Profits Report

 Welcome, welcome. Your time is valuable so we'll cut to the chase. As you can see, we are on track to complete BRS version 0.3 last summer? Wait ....

BRS Progress Report

Huh. Well, shit.

848 Days Later, Somewhere in Egypt

My eyes snap open to darkness, body of hair and bone surrounded by cold stone and the stench of my own death. I push against the smooth walls of my tiny prison and feel them give. The sarcophagus lid slides away, falls to the ground, shatters. An unearthly howl escapes from the depths of my body, the wail of a thousand unspeakable deaths rattling across black teeth, withered tongue and lips.

The booming echo of the shattered sarcophagus fades, chasing itself through the labyrinthine corridors of this ancient hell, pyramid of death, and home, home at last.

My wretched face contorts in the sick imitation of a grin. "Showtime."

Potato Clock Games Fall Sabbatical

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ SEE YA.

xoxo
Potato Clock Games

Family First: Quantum Leap and Samsara

After the wildly successful release of Harvest Booze, I found myself drowning in a heady cocktail of fame, drugs, and obscene wealth. I was a crack-addled Scrooge McDuck and the fans just couldn't get enough ... yet a man has only so much to give. Less than a year after release, I could feel myself breaking down, my spirit caged and my body in shambles; I had lost my way. I had lost the way. I gazed down to my hands; whose hands were these?

I began a rigorous program of self-rehabilitation, which involved getting drunk and watching Quantum Leap starring Scott Bakula, until finally I found myself deposited into a parallel universe in which I had abandoned development of Harvest Booze long before it could inflict its wretched torment upon me. I booted my old development computer, sweat cold on my brow, and raced through the labyrinthine file hierarchy to find it, that incubating darkness, harbinger of the fall. I hovered my cursor over the folder, my finger over the delete key. I looked into its eyes; my monster, my folly ... my child.

I knew I must, yet I could not. And I wept. For I was home.

Potato Clock Games Fall Lineup Q&A

Q: Where you been, bro?
A: Stardew Valley.


Q: What up?
A: So, Ok, don't get weird about it, but GameMaker & I got back together. Sure, we had some bad times, but man, oh man, when it was is good is was good. Like that time there was a Humble Bundle where instead of paying like a grand for the pro edition & all the output modules I got them for 15 bucks. Good times like those.

I made Flood in GameMaker as sort of a warmup (always fucking warming up) and as a, like, 85% successful test of exporting to HTML5. The online version pretty much works, but you can't save your progress & all of the numerical values hilariously show up as NaN ("not a number", for the less nerdy out there) for some reason. Math? Probably math.

I'm going to start working, today hopefully, on another little puzzle game that I've been wanting to make for a couple of years now, called Haunted Monster Cocktail Party of Doom. FYI, I'm way better at coming up with titles and nebulous sequel/remake ideas than I am at the whole actually making games bit. Anyway, more on that one soon probably.

I'm also working on a long-winded, handwritten design document for the game that will make me famous. So stay tuned for that crushing disappointment.


Q: Wait, what?
A: SEE YA.

We're back, baby.

The Potato Clock Games team has put aside their fundamental religious, political & sexual differences, their seething animosities and their dark lust for the arcane wisdom of the ancient underworld to come together for a grand project, a king scheme, the realization of a plan hatched in a madman's fever dream:

Woe to the beast. Woe to its hunter.

"Failure is not an option."
-popularly attributed to NASA mission control Flight Director Gene Kranz but actually made up by some Hollywood guy.

Giraffe Adventures Update #4

I've committed myself to never letting my "playtime over the past 2 weeks" stat on Steam go over 20 hours. This has had an embarrassingly positive effect on my productivity. I'm suddenly a week ahead on my homework, I've finished Giraffe Adventures, & I'm about halfway finished with a little Twine RPG which I'll talk more about later.

Giraffe Adventures Final Node Map

Right, so Giraffe Adventures is finally finished. It has its highs & lows but overall I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. There are a few laugh-out-louds in there, I think, swimming among the groans & the huh?s. I'm holding onto it for a bit of proofreading, but let's be real, this was not an entirely sober endeavor. It is going to be full of humiliating grammar & spelling errors, not to mention the irreconcilable plot holes & narrative jump cuts. What I'm saying is, I'm not planning on wasting a hell of a lot of time proofreading this. It is what it is & it should be out in the wild next week.

Potato Clock Games Summer Sabbatical

Giraffe Adventures is so close to being finished & it's the last thing I really wanted complete before school starts back up (which happens in two days), but you know what? I don't feel like working on it.

So there.

So that's it for a while, I probably won't get back to game development for a few months. TRY TO SURVIVE WITHOUT ME.

Summer Schemes

I have a final exam to get through tomorrow, then it's back to work on games. Here's what's left to do:

1. Finish Giraffe Adventures
2. Finish CockBlockaz
3. Throw together Outer Space Future Battle Massacre 1997

I don't think I've mentioned Outer Space Future Battle Massacre 1997 yet. More on that later. These 3 projects all have very different sorts of to-do lists as they are very different sorts of projects so I'm thinking about working on all of them concurrently rather than lasering in one by one, just to keep it fresh. According to no study ever, multitasking is an efficient way for human beings to accomplish tasks.

Other things I'd like to do this summer if I have time:

1. Dig into Twine a little more
2. Play with PuzzleScript
3. Learn ENIGMA & maybe use it to start over with Lucha Cerveza

I also want to learn Haxe/OpenFL & Unity & I've been wanting to learn NES assembly just for kicks but, yeah. Chill out, dude. Now I'm just stressing myself out. Anyway.

Shout out to the fans in Germany!

Changing up the Gameplan

Here's what's on the docket:

Sunrise Sunset
Giraffe Adventures
SquareWave
Lucha Cerveza
CockBlockaz

Well, I just played what I've finished of SquareWave, which is very little, & it's just not much fun. So fuck it. I've also decided that, unless inspiration really hits when I get back to work on CockBlockaz, I'm going to reduce the game's scope fairly dramatically: 25 levels instead of 49, no music, boom, call it a day. Lucha Cerveza could be fun but I'm so sick of patching & working around my old shitty code that I'd rather just start over from scratch. So I think I'll make that my first project with whatever new development tool I decide to learn. Actually, I want to learn a bunch of new tools this summer. Anyway, that makes the revised to do list look like this:

Sunrise Sunset (almost done)
Giraffe Adventures (almost done)
CockBlockaz (almost done if I decide to reduce the scope)

My chances of ditching Game Maker by the end of the summer just got a lot better. I'm feeling pretty good about it.

Sunrise Sunset Update #5

I knocked out about 2/3 of my Sunrise Sunset left-to-do list this morning. So there goes all the low-hanging fruit. Still, not much left to do. Mostly optimization work & a few bug fixes.

Development progress has been slow, & will probably continue to be for the next month & a half or so, mostly because of school. Finals are next week, then I have a week off (of school, anyway) before summer semester, which will only be about a month long.

So I'm hoping to have Sunrise Sunset finished by the time summer semester kicks off, & I think I can probably have Giraffe Adventures finished by the time it ends. Giraffe Adventures isn't even a game, it's a half-finished browser-based choose your own adventure story. Anyway, it shouldn't take long to finish.

I'm starting to reevaluate what I want to spend my time on once I'm done with school for the summer. I want to learn some new development tools & I really want to start working on some new games. That being said, I also want to finish what I've already started. & that being said, I am so sick of patching up my old bullshit code. So much work, so little reward.

LIFE.

I Love You, Game Maker- I'm Leaving You

Game Maker has been my go-to development tool for as long as I've been making games. It's what taught me to love programming so much that I've gone back to school to study computer science. It allows stupid fast prototyping of games. It's easy to use. But I'm leaving. After I wrap up all the projects that I'm currently building with Game Maker, I've decided it's time to move on.

When I first bought Game Maker for $20 it was one dude's (Mark Overmars) labor of love & came with the promise of free updates for life. Then it was bought out & the free updates stopped. It was just recently bought out again, by some gambling company. I don't like the taste of it. It's still a great tool & I almost gave in & bought the most recent version anyway. It's only $50, but you want to develop for MacOS in addition to Windows? Extra $100. Linux? Another $100. HTML5? That's $200 more. Then there are the myriad known optimization & audio engine problems. None of these things on their own are enough of a reason for me to leave. But all together- the buyouts, the cost, all its quirky little issues, the fact that I've long outgrown the drag & drop interface that first got me hooked- it all adds up to time to say goodbye.

So I'm doing some research & finding lots of interesting sounding alternatives. OpenFL has my attention at the moment; free, open-source, & multi-platform. Some great games have already been developed with OpenFL (Papers, Please being one of my personal faves). There's also the free, open source ENIGMA,which is Game maker compatible, making it another tempting option. The point is, there are great, free alternatives. I'm not Big Mr. Open Source or anything, but given the choice I'll take GiMP over Photoshop any day.

I've got a lot of unfinished Game Maker business to wrap up so I'm not making any big decisions here, really, except that I'm committing myself to learning a new development tool once I flush all my current projects out of the pipeline.

It's been fun, Game Maker, & you'll always be my first. I hope we can still be friends.

Potato Clock Games: Officially In The Red!

Throughout the legendary history of Potato Clock Games, we have managed to remain not unprofitable by following a simple business plan: no money in, no money out. It was fun while it lasted, but it's time to get real. As of a few days ago, we are officially hemorrhaging exactly $12/year for the rights to our brand new, take-no-prisoners, URL: potatoclockgames.com! As the Buddha teaches, "you gotta spend money to make money."

 If you're like me you're going to miss having to type www.msu.edu/~will1907/potatoclockgames/main.html like nine times before getting it right every time you want to visit this shitty website. No worries, I've got you covered. potatoclockgames.com just forwards to the existing website so you can still use the old address.

Of greater concern at the moment, I don't know where the fuck I'm going to get the $1/month that I'll need to stay in business. But these are tough times. We're all making sacrifices.

POTATO CLOCK GAMES

BY THE PEOPLE. FOR THE PEOPLE.

CockBlockaz Level Select System Complete

I was pretty lazy about it, but the level select/unlock system is finally working & in place. I still have some UI work to do but the code's all there & I finished the save/load system as well since they kind of go hand-in-hand. Here's what it looks like; white squares are unlocked puzzles, blue ones are completed. Completing a puzzle unlocks the adjacent puzzles:

So, anyway, that's a wrap for all the major systems in the game.

I still have like 25 puzzles to make, all of the music to write, & a heavy buttload of tedious bullshit details to take care of. There's almost no way this is going to be done by my arbitrary & masochistic tentative release date of April 15th. I haven't decided if I'll just keep pushing through this one at the expense of all my future planned release dates, or just move on & come back to this one at the end of the summer. Probably the latter. The final stretch of game development is seriously such a drag.