Blackmail and a Broken Clavicle

You can now fake an injury, and demand blackmail to keep quiet about it and not make a fuss. In the true spirit of Reigen Arataka, you can pretend your clavicle is broken too. All of you should watch mob psycho. The recording attached better be the right one.
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I’m still doing the backslashes. I’ve given up. I might try new formatting another day, but I’m tired.
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Alright, so the minigame for faking an injury is pretty simple, its an fnf like rhythm game that is so unbalanced it’s insane. You are deducted points for pushing any button, and are given points for if you hit a note. You will be able to tell if you hit a note because it will expand like a balloon and fade away like my employment opportunities. You are given more points if the note is closer to the filling the center cavity of the button.
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The point of this is to reward actually hitting them on time, and not just spamming. Missing notes deducts points. Severity of injury being faked determines game difficulty. Minigame performance has certain weight on how successful you are in getting money. If you perform in a negative fashion, it’s over. After blackmailing a stranger (successful or not), they will never talk to you again (kinda). They are removed from your current roster of strangers, but they might come back when reroll happens since we only have so much stranger types so far.
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This thing is so heinously unbalanced, it’s insane. All the values need to be tweaked, and I haven’t done enough playtesting to know if it is fair or not. I’m hoping tweaking the values will be easy, but it might be hard to polish. That’s for another day.
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Update on friendship

My friend is working on actually interesting randomized dialogue, so that should be something to look forward to. Check out Ratseer’s stuff.

Nothing is working

I’m trying out on making the fake injury option, and it is not working as intended. It’s supposed to have a rhythm based minigame, sort of like friday night funkin even though i’ve never played that before, but it clearly isn’t working.

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All the icons are sideways, there are too much notes, and for the longest time none of them would scale correctly because I forgot to assign the new scale to the scale property.

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Markdown, again

Okay I think I got it this time. If I just leave the backslashes alone…

Beg

The beg minigame has been completed, meaning you can now get on your knees and start praying for money. I also did some polishing work, but I have absolutely no recollection of that. Frontotemporal dementia is simply a wonder, isn’t it?

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I’m also trying some new mark down. Let’s see if my paragraphs space properly.

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When you beg to someone, you get “dialogue options”. The options are based off the three methods of persuasion, Ethos, Logos, and Pathos. Pathos is appealing to human emotions like empathy, logos is using logic, and ethos is using authority to prove an argument. Each stranger will have a different reception to the persuasion types, based off data values stored in the code.

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You have 8 chances to beg. I think. I might have changed the value. Again, frontotemporal dementia.

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Everything is ledger compatible. If you get less than 25 progress somehow, which I might change to make it more difficult, you are rejected and cannot approach the stranger again (until strangers refresh). The more you use one strategy of persuasion, the less effective it gets. I plan to make this effect more pronounced when balancing.

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That’s it. Please let this markdown formatting succeed.

Polishing 0

Couple of polishing points that I put into the game to freshen things up and solve all the bugs that haggling made. Items are removed from inventory after selling, strangers walk away after you fail a sell attempt with them, and I fixed an integer division error that led to fearmongering being physically impossible to complete when you select it as a minigame. While I was working on the sell items minigame, my friend Ratseer has been working on the ledger which tracks all the finances. I’m too lazy to link him, but you should check it out over at his profile, if he devlogged it. I’ll put a video of it working here, but that’s just because I don’t think I can post this without a media element.

Sell me this pen

I finished the minigame for selling/haggling your items away. My markdown formatting is going to downgrade because I’m honestly not that motivated this feature took way too long to program, and i’m not very energetic right now.

A couple things. After you talk to the person, you select which item you want to sell, and then sell it. There are dialogue options, and the safer ones like recommend make the minigame easier but you make less progress towards convincing them each time you succeed in clicking the button, but the riskier options like fearmonger are high reward types. After that, you can give a highball or lowball offer on a scale. The game calculates your chances of succeeded by combining pure randomness, your progress towards convincing them, and how much you priced your item in comparison to it’s actual value.

Ignore the system text that says “five tries remaining”, that is vestigial and I forgot to remove it after redoing the whole minigame design. I can’t believe I spent 8 hours on this, and it isn’t even polished.

Cool New Art

Yes, as you can see, my friend is an absolute lifesaver when it comes to me trying to not lose my soul to krita. Lots of great sprite art here that makes the game look much better. I’ll have to clarify some text elements to make them more legible but it should be fine for now.

Circle of ignorance

If knowledge was a circle of light in a dark 2D plane, ignorance would be the darkness. We only reveal how much of it we find ourselves in by seeing the circumference of our small circle of knowledge. The more knowledge we obtain, the more unknown we must face.

I’ve become bluntly aware of my own little ignorance circle. I’ve only done one of the five actions, and it’s unpolished, and it took me 8 hours, and the money isn’t even tracked because the ledger hasn’t been programmed yet, and I can only feel the great abyss devouring my spirit slightly more by the day. Watch the attached video to see how it works. I know, it isn’t that visually appealing, and I’ll probably spam lerp functions again to make it look smoother, but IT IS WHAT IT IS.

Action Screen and the Power of Friendship

For actual game development, the main progress made was continuing to develop the action screen. After you approach a stranger, you can now see their sprite art in a zoomed in fashion, and click on some actions. As you can see in the video, after the first part where I flex my new sprite art, clicking on an action gives a description of what it will do, and clicking the take action button to confirm that has the terminal display some fun text before the mini-game starts.

I don’t believe I ran into too much bugs while developing this, and I haven’t gotten to the actually much harder part, which are the actual mini-games.

I solved that previously devlogged bug with like five lines of code it was so infuriatingly easy.

New Sprites

You may be asking, “idi0cy, I saw your water bottle sprites, and I find myself confounded as to how you have managed to improve so much in your art.”

Your suspicions are correct. I’m not making that art, my friend Ratseer is, because I got them on the project. They probably won’t code a lot for now since they still need to decipher the horrendous logic I used in the making of this game.

It is very strange knowing that there is likely nobody actually reading this except for said friend, and now the acknowledgement of said fact might have just made it more awkward.

Crushed buble emoji. Knowledgeable thoughts cannot describe my disappointment.

Social Interaction

Studies show I am not fond of it, but I’m still programming all of that into my game. This is the beginning of the sell function, where you are able to sell off your goods to strangers on the street.

Having it be named “Sell” is a bit misleading, since the general game mechanic is a bit more broad than that. When you approach a stranger, you will be able to initiate a sales pitch, beg, steal, fake an injury, and tons of more fun options for making money. I’m still thinking of what I want as minigames for all of those, as I’m not sure if there will be separate minigames for each one. Each action you perform will have differing chances of success depending on game performance and the person you approach.

• For example, shouting into a crowd that a kid just injured you and demanding payment from said kid will have a zero percent chance of success.

As of now, it still needs polishing, and while I’ve gotten the big obvious bugs out of the way (nothing rendering, nothing rendering after I click another button and go back, nothing rendering once more), I’m sure more await me. Next devlog will likely be on polishing the UI for the sell window.

Finally using that clock

Depending on what time of day it is, you are likely to find more/less strangers. If it’s rush hour, more people will be on the street in comparison to at 1 AM.

Sprite art strikes back

Everything was fine when I was drawing water bottles or whatever, but people are too much. In the meantime, I’ve substituted the human appearance with a sprite that in no way alludes to my mental state at the time of drawing.

As soon as my friend who can actually draw is freed from the shackles of crunching at the end of school, I am selling their soul to the sprite art directory. Don’t tell them I said that.

Timer

Created a time variable to count in game time of day, and a time button/counter for the player to tell what time it is. I plan to have different minigames operate with separate loot-tables or success chances depending on what time of day it is. Pretty short devlog, but I’ll have to integrate this time variable into a LOT of different features that I don’t completely look forward to.

New and improved markdown superpowers

I think I’ve figured it out. Hopefully I no longer fumble all my markdown. But then again I still have no way of telling.

Inventory

Inventory system that displays all the items you currently possess. Upon clicking on one of the items in your possession, information on the item such as quality, value, and item name will be displayed. More information is planned to be available to the player, however that has not been developed yet.

Unfortunately, the item icons for the inventory do not have the same smooth lerp scaling that I was able to use for the buttons, as texture buttons do not have a proper scale function. I could theoretically group a texture button with a sprite2D node, however the gridbox I’m using to organize all the items is unlikely to cooperate.

All the item’s values are spaced out automatically so they have room and aren’t too close together. Each item has different information, and it’s only bestowed to them each time the inventory opens, since that is when the icons are generated. This forced me to do some weird signal connection logic in the scripts, but it worked out.

##Sprite Art

Sprite art is overrated, and I want to stop doing it. All my hours are being spent drawing water bottles and pencils in krita, just to never be logged. I offloaded one of the sprite arts to my friend because they were bored, and he produced the hamburger sprite. Note that the hamburger sprite icon does NOT have the same colour as all of the other icons, because said friend is unable to use the colour picker tool for whatever reason.

##New Markdown Superpowers

I learned how you format these, and I’m hoping it ends up looking good upon posting. I don’t really have a way of telling as of writing, however.

##Way too ambitions

Me and associates started actually being interested in developing the game. In the near future, I plan to involve my associates as collaborators for the project, since we have a lot more planned than I originally thought. “Union Buster Tower Defense” might be a game feature that we actually consider making.

How in the world do people format these to look nice? Is it markdown? something. Can’t tell if that worked. Doesn’t show me in the writing box.

Progress for the day includes creating the first “stage” or area of the game. It’s themed after a sidewalk, as you are currently broke and probably living on one. Central cavity will be able to display UI for certain mini-games/elements related to tasks such as buying or selling items.

All the buttons have been reformatted, since they didn’t look that good the first time I made them. Clicking the buttons has more response now since it gets smaller upon button press. I wasted so much time re-doing pixel art.

Hopefully, the video that I attached will display properly, though I have no indication of whether it will as of writing.

Progress today includes finishing the title screen for the player to start the game. There are currently three buttons with un-programmed functionalities, including a “Start Game”, “Credits”, and “Settings” button. There is also a large title for the game, which took me a bit too much unlogged hours to create for what it’s worth.

Each element “flies” onto the screen, title from the right, and buttons from the left. Movement is generated using lerp() for fluidity.

Making a 2D based semi idle game. Like any generic game in the genre, it starts with a button, so I just made that so far. Each button has an icon that can display pixel art, and a textbox for text.

The original plan was to have a border that could grow/shrink independently of the main body of the button, however it was hard to create a general button function I could use for various purposes, as it didn’t scale properly to ensure a constant padding throughout.

Settled on this type of button, that expands slightly when hovering over it so you can more visibly see the purple background. Might have to make other types in the future, but it should be fine for now.

• Button uses lerp function to smoothly expand the background sprite through time.

Images show the button normally, and the button when hovering over it with the cursor. Also made some title screen art that will definitely be changed.