MonsterGirls

Tool progress

I'm super happy with the progress of the tool re-write... I'm basically trying to port the idea of Adobe Flash Builder (Flex) + the game engine, to HTML... 

The tool, is made in itself (tool-ception). In order to benefit from the speed of development.

It has a ton of work to do... and there is still no way to 'compile' the game yet, but that should come up soon. My target is to...

Progress on scripting system

So, since I got the engine to run in html5, I have been working on fixing the scripting system, which was previously in as3, to html5. Which unfortunately is a humongous project. But I've been using things I've learned while making similar systems at work.

Also trying to partner with some friends at work to see if I can't speed up the progress on the system. Seems like very few people lik...

Html5 Engine LOADS!

So, I've been quite sad with how little progress has been coming, flash is statistically nearly dead (browsers are blocking flash and making it hard for people to activate it). Some of my friends websites/portals are getting 1/10th of what they used to earn because of this, which means they worry they have to stop making games or something. 

I am grateful for the support I get here, ...

Release 41

YEAH! This was a great month, not much content was gone, but I fixed and prepared a ton of stuff.

This month I focused on getting the people to appear in conversations, I didn't go and test the conversations, but instead I fixed how data is stored/retrieved, Also I divided how informative it needs to be, if you know the character, or just the character type, if character art doesn't exist, it'll...

Release 40

HEY! I fixed it! With the help of Mr. J, I got the compiler working again, it broke in a very weird and hard to find way, the fix in the end was scrapping it and rebuilding it... But now I know to avoid what I did, and wrote it into some documentation I have on how to use it. (You know it's bad when your stuff is so complex you have to have documentation to remember how to use it)

So now we have...

August Update

I tried to get a version released, but everything is broken. Took me hours to get the compilers working again, and more is still broken, so instead I'll talk about what I've been doing.

The refactor is coming along nicely, slowly but nicely, some things I'm still unsure how I will do, and other things are much better/stronger than before.

Meanwhile I wanted to get some of the talking in th...

July Update

Before:

After:

So!! It's not quite a content update, but it's quite a big update. I have been refactoring a ton of things, as you can tell, the before and after image look bad... things are not in a worki...

June Update

So, I'm still super busy, so nothing visible in game has changed, what I am working on though is porting some ideas back into the tool. I was able to spend a few months of paid research on the architecture of my event bus (how the game parts communicates with other game parts), and I've learned so much, unfortunately due to the nature of contracts, I can't just copy the code back, and what I have ...

Not forgotten

Hey there, the past few weeks have been super busy for me. I have been spending my weekends consulting for a small video games company and these days I've not been feeling well.

But Monster Girls is always on my mind, I have been looking into the particle system, and found a way to make the game start a bit faster (no more "pre-warming", instead we can cache a snapshot of prewarmed particles) 2018-06-04 08:03:43 +0000 UTC View Post

April Updates

So, If you notice the toolbar on the left, there are two new buttons, draw and erase, the idea of these is to be able to draw rough sketch ideas in the actual tool for making the game, the reason for this is, once we get artists again, I'll be able to quickly sketch things in game, and add interactions to them, and the artists can later replace it with their real art.

It's not quite finished, it...

March Progress Update

Hey, I don't have a game release for this month, but that doesn't mean I haven't been doing things. I am including a screenshot of one of the biggest single components I've done for the game maker, it analyses the data, and creates a flow chart with the relationships that the different areas of the game have with each other, in terms of "on click -> go to this menu". There are of course many ot...

Release 38

Worked a bit on the card system, underling things like how the cards are ordered and rendered, to allow moving them individually etc. But in the end, nothing really changed in that area. Because of the scope of that task, I decided to hit one of the more annoying simple bugs: Bottom left part of the map is now moveable and clickable again. Before if you got down there, you could get stuck and not ...

Behind Schedule - but vacation soon!

Because of the Christmas schedule at work, I wasn't able to work on Monster Girls at all this month. However, I am taking a few vacation days in January in order to compensate for this. I plan on spending some of my vacation days in January working on monster girls.

Release 37

So this was an amazing month, I was able to fix the GPU parts a bit, and the conversation system a bit, now in conversations, you can't click through to another conversation while in one, also before if you clicked fast enough you could cause some weird situations, and see the previous conversation in your new conversation (some of that may still happen)

Also now I can take screenshots of the ga...

Release 36

Mouse clicking is kinda working again, we fixed the clicking so that now you can click items that are rendered in the GPU not just the CPU, the math is a bit clunky, and you can click through CPU items to the GPU items... that needs to be fixed.

Also we worked on making character arts for the conversations to appear, but that didn't get fully finished, right now you can add characters in convers...

Release 35

Started this month by looking at getting the game maker onto the tablet, yet again. I managed to get some simple logic done on the ipad, and it was thrilling!! Then I scrapped all that and went to work on the conversation system for monster girls. I made a small re-architecture of how the conversations work, and added two new functionalities. Conditional checking and Trigger running. (In other wor...

Conversation update

Sneak peak at what's coming. Things I'm pointing at are new and I will elaborate on the release date... so excited about this months progress!

Side quested

So this month I happened to get access to iOS credentials for a project, and I had an idea, a bit later I had the game maker running on an iPad... then moments turned into hours, and days... and I got as far as the image above shows. My estimates are around 25% the way to a fully working system... but I don't have time to finish those 75% now, but it's good to know it's possible.

I am sorry to r...

Release 34

Cards, the plan is for each monster to have a deck of cards, as you train them, the cards will shift based on the way you train them. Right now we only really have the basic data, and some of the ui, no interactions yet, or animations. We really like how many card games look these days and are hopeful for something similar, but only later, for now it will be ugly and prototype like.

2017-07-31 16:34:18 +0000 UTC View Post

GPU vs CPU

So converting over the system to a GPU framework is a bit of work, I'm not going to do it everywhere, I just need it for the particles to work... So anything visually 'under' the particles needs it. Still, why not do it where I can, at least until it gets to be a lot of work, then I focus on what I need for monster girls.

Here we have a GPU version on the left, and a CPU version on the right, th...

Map editor

So the map has a ton of things that need tweaking, but that isn't our next release focus, I just got inspired on it because of unrelated needs. However having it's editor be real instead of doing everything directly in the data is always a good thing. Mr. J is working hard on our release focus task.

Traveling Delay

Hey guys, I'm away from home for a few months, that said I am going to be behind schedule a bit, it has been a crazy past few weeks, and will probably continue for a bit.

But once things settle, I hope to be able to get a ton of time for Monster Girls. In fact one of the reasons I traveled was FOR Monster Girls! I have it as part of my plan to sit in coffee shops and work on Monster Girls for se...

Release 28

This month I did a bit on the battle appearance. It throws an event when the enemy attacks, which the new animation system picks up and displays a blood effect and shakes the hero fighter, I'm not an animator, so please forgive me for how horrible it looks.

In the end, I really want an animator to bring life to the battle's. But my animation making tool is also not quite good enough, I end up ju...

Release 27

This month we focused on animations, mainly getting animations to stack in order to pull off something extremly extremly vital for the game, it's part of the core gameplay that battle's be fun... but we also want this to be made of super generic and seperate systems that don't have any knowledge of each other, in programming we call this encapsulation.

My initial hope was additive animations, bu...

Release 26

This month we had a very productive time, 36 file changes in all. Things like: Fixing conversation start discovery, fixing double messages when a character appeared during a conversation, fixing a bit of lag when rendering text, fixing text font useage when animation system tried to kick in... and some extra things that doen't even show up in game, like auto-advancing the texts for conversation (I...

Release 25

Added a character named Annal to the Riumno, she's one of the three that are actually there, but now she actually can appear. Added her to start a quest, (and working on the quest requirements type thing for conversations, questions and conditional checks)

Also added the yurt village of Greidale, it's South West of Riumno and has only a single item spawning there, the idea is for Annal to reques...

Character setup code

Been working on so many little things, I figured I would point at all the new buttons that work, it's kind of unimpressive until you see how much has been done.

Before half of these were designs, now they are "live". I can create new characters and assign them a character template (in most cases a character will have a unique template, but in the case of something procedural this is easy and alr...

Multiple Choice thingy

So I was super torn today between making something easy vs proper, I am still going to try for both, but I'm focusing on making the conversation system easy/intuitive. I would like it so if a node diverges into multiple choice answers, the system automatically knows there is a popup with multiple choice options, as many as are available (conditionals to see or not will come later).

I also want i...

Conversation Editor tweaks

The conversation editor has been re built using a library that has much more support for these kinds of things, It only took a few hours to get so much further than the other library was allowing me to go.

Now adding a character to the conversation happens when there is a proper action for it, not on every single line delivered.

Knowing when to try a different approach

So I learned something new yesterday...

I've spent around 10 days, over the past few months, working on the conversation editor, the goal is to make it super fast, and I knew if I used flex framework it wouldn't be. And I also want it to be super nice feeling, which particle effects etc, to gamify the editing of games (gamification-ception). But after 10 days and still hitting super difficu...