[Thoughts] Directions

Today I was talking with a friend I had not spoken with in years. Turns out he had been a game designer in the past! I linked him to this dev blog and he requested a demo build for the game. He explained to me about finding a core loop for the game; something that the player goes back-and-forth between.

• Equipment can improve your stats and modify ways to interact with the boulder
  Town Improvement
  • competing with another town?
  • unlocking new stores that sell things to help you progress further into the dungeon
  • to defend against attacks from the outside?
• Go through the dungeon to find resources to upgrade yourself and your town.

I know that this is a bunch of repeated stuff, but at least writing it down here gives me a fresh view of what I should be working towards for my game's goals. Note that these aren't set in stone, but they are ideas for my core loop.

[To Do] Differentiating Feature Creep vs Core

Despite my previous post mentioning my approaching to "completion". I still have a hard time distinguishing between when adding another feature/function is necessary or if it falls under some form of bloat. My guess would be pruning out various things after they are implemented if they do not add anything to the game in terms of function or fun.

It's been a while since my last To Do post, and thought it was necessary to make my list to remind myself where I really stand in terms of progress with Sokoban Crawler:

• Work on Title Screen and Menus
• Inventory redesign and implementation
• Add a delay before pushing the boulder, and maintain a delay per cell.
  • Adding equipment
  • Player Stats
  • Perks?
• Optimizing hazard tiles + adding more trap varieties
• Further development on stamina mechanics
  • Adding monsters
  • Development of combat mechanics?

This is all that came out of the top of my head. Whether they are actually necessary or not, time will tell.

[Progress] NPC Dialogue(s) and Message Windows

It's not much, but it's a start. I need to figure out how to "unscale" the font sizes from my draw events. I suspect tinkering around with draw_text_transformed(); until I achieve the results is the best way.

This month-long project has taught me many things I did not expect from learning about game design and programming. I believe that I am approaching "completion" of the framework. I did not end up using surfaces as much as I liked, primarily due to my lack of complete understanding of it. However, I feel that it was not necessary to use them as much in this case, as I primarily removed objects and instances using while loops instead which netted a higher performance gain.