2023-06-21
- Firm up goals for recurse center
- Do some chores
- Do things I’ve been putting off so that they’re done pre-RC
- Groceries
- Dropped off shoes for repair
- Built RC goal list in this gist
2023-06-20
- I was so excited about RC that I did almost nothing other than read about RC
- I guess that’s a good thing :)
2023-06-19
- Short days until recurse center next week
- Drew art for maslow
- Prototyped interaction between two characters in maslow
- Laughed out loud at how goofy it looked
2023-06-18
- Day off!
- I’m going to recurse center :)
2023-06-17
- Day mostly off
- Recurse center prep
- Prototyped a bit of climbing in the game
2023-06-17
- Day off, visiting with friends
2023-06-15
- Prototype some parts of PigS game
- Life admin
- Did a tiny bit of art and prototyping but very little else
- Unproductive day. Tomorrow will be better
2023-06-14
- Actually commit to PiGS gamejam theme
- One more easy day, maybe a little code / art / game design
- Life admin
- Did some coworking and generated a theme
- “We must climb Maslow’s Pyramid” / “Self Actualize”
- Idle game about evolving and climbing the pyramid
- Probably about climbing a literal pyramid
- Management elements, maybe launcher elements? Maybe the launcher is just a simulation
2023-06-13
- Post the blog
- Sketch out an idea for PiGS gamejam
- Two week gamejam where you make an idle game with the theme “mutation”
- Mutation sure comes up a lot in gamejams huh
- Take it easy
- Blog posted
- Picked Crosscode back up!
- Really lovely. One thing I forgot is how nice their “trade” system is for weapons (have to get specific items for them)
- Whole lot of games see a problem with just trading for gold
- Came up with some gamejam ideas but didn’t commit
- Fine to relax, I worked through the whole weekend
2023-06-12
- Wahoo the game is done
- Write most or all of the game blog
- Come up with a plan for the PiGs idle gamejam (theme “mutation”)
- Take it easy for today
- Did RC conversational interview
- Passed RC conversational interview!
- Submitted RC code sample for pairing interview
- Finished a draft of the ReShape blog!!
- Did not succeed at taking it easy for today but this was a high productivity day.
2023-06-11
WHAT IS LEFT
- Damage test at the end
- Show hotkeys at pause screen
- Get up to at least 40 waves, maybe 45 or 50
- Final balance pass
- I DID everything it’s done i am so tired omg
2023-06-10
- Wrap up the game!!
- Creep changes:
- Add “Many” creeps that reward AOE
- Pump creep health SCALING because we have so much AOE
- Pump Thick health 2x at least
- Minimum speed
- Prevent permastun
- Get to 50 waves
- Reduce gold gain a little bit
- Damaage test at the end
- UI Changes:
- Remove reshape button at bottom, add back hotkey
- Right click to clear building state
- Pause menu should show hotkeys
- Maybe the upgrade buttons can pulse to call attention to them
- Tower Changes:
- Slightly increase level 4 and 5 cost?
- Tower should have a wait time and upgrade animation for upgrading
- Animation for selling too
- Force through one free tower upgrade at the start?
- Rework powerful to be “crit”
- Other balance:
- Reduce starting gold by 40 or 50
- Other polish:
- Sound for creep death?
- Red number for crit
- Sound for creep escaping
- Sound for wave sending
- Added sell animation
- Added upgrade animation
- Reduced starting gold
- Increased upgrade costs
- Increased creep health
- Added chill speed cap, permastun prevention
- Reworked powerful to be crit
- Added crit text
- Fixed poison bug
- Added pack creeps
- Added sound effects for creeps escaping and waves starting
- Fixed some bugs around wave display
- Made upgrade button flash if you aren’t using it
2023-06-09
- Healthbars
- Try tower upgrade cost being cubic or less formulaic
- Fully upgraded towers should be powerful
- Balance powerful vs poison
- Change “generous” to be towers in range
- More principled way of deciding which creeps belong to which wave?
- Maybe add flying creeps?
- Modulate for chill, poison, stun
- Label hovertext?
- Add up to 50 waves
- Sounds
- Timer and effect for sell and upgrade
- Towers should have an STATUS_MULTIPLIER stat!!
- ANIMATION for shooting
- Right click to clear building state
- Replace powerful with a critical strike
- Regular creep waves should get powerful a bit faster - we have too much AOE. Boss waves are fine
- Thick creep waves need substantiall more health to make up for their slowness
- need a min move speed
- Level 4 and 5 cost shoudl be higher
- After stun you’re invuln for 0.4 seconds?
- ADD DAMAGE TEST: option to send damage test after winning
- Reduce starting gold to maybe 100?
- Also creeps in general need more health
- FIX TWO BUGS:
- ReShape animation should only play if the reshape matches the tower
- We need two animation players so that the white thing can flash separately?
- Added healthbar
- Added modulation for status effects
- Added status multiplier for towers, adjusted powerful bonus
- Changed tower upgrade cost and damage again
- Reworked generous
- EVERYTHING should feel imbalanced
- Free upgrade at the start and a warning if you haven’t used it
- Got balance to an ok state?
- Explosion sound done
- Added shooting sounds
- Added animations for tower shooting and tower being reshaped
2023-06-08
- Finish UI tweaking
- Settle on SOMETHING for top view
- Nicer single creep / tower viewer on the bottom
- Tower selection should un-toggle after building unless you are holding shift
- Polish
- Make towers flash when they’re upgraded
- Add a wait time for ReShape, tower upgrade, tower sell
- Sounds (shooting, explosion, creep death, creep free)
- Screen shake when a creep leaves?
- Particles when a wave launches?
- MAYBE add “sniper” and “generous” towers
- Balance
- Tweak all the numbers
- Another mega productive day
- Helped a friend with interview prep
- Roughly completed the UI, it’s not embarrassing anymore
- Added hotkeys for everything and buttons for everything
- Added “generous” and “farshot” mechanics
- Added reset / pause mechanics
- Added win / lose screen
- Added logic to prevent blocking!!!
- Many other small visual tweaks
-
Did a first round of balance tweaking
- Need to add health bars
- Need to change generous to only be towers in range
- Timer for upgrades and selling, some kind of effect
- Sounds
- Modulate for poison and chill and stun
- Animation for shooting: squish inside of tower
2023-06-07
- Add current wave, next wave, score
- Add “pick one of three” system for upgrades
- Debug option for “pick any upgrade for free”
- Finish UI tweaking
- Make ‘current selection’ look nicer, at least
- Extremely productive day - the game is now playable!
- UI looks awful but is almost fully functional
- Missing “next wave” “pause” and “reset” buttons and a few hotkeys
- Right sidebar doesn’t look right yet
- Added a wave viewer just like DesktopTD + score
- Added “pick one of three upgrades” system
- Learned a bunch of stuff about buttons, how to make easy nice flat buttons with rounded corners, etc
- Learned enough shader stuff to fade the background when the game is paused
- Game balance is pretty far off, needs serious tweaking
- Would be nice to have one or two more tower kinds?
-
Game needs sound
- Rank 99 neon white I’M FREE
2023-06-06
- Subclass creeps
- quick creep - normal health, fast
- resistant creep - half as likely to be afflicted
- thicc creep - double health, slow
- boss creep - 10x health, 10x gold, normal speed
- Wave display: Current wave, next wave, etc
- Add a debug option for “select any upgrade”
- Move to “choice of 3 random upgrades for this tower” otherwise
- Replace buttons with my own buttons
- Make the UI look a little nicer
- Finished creep subclassing
- Added much nicer wave spawning - creeps are delayed, less geometric less likely to overlap
-
Figured out how to theme buttons so that they look a little better, UI looks better
- Rank 102 Neon White
2023-06-05
- Implement all upgrades
- Add gold
- Subclass creeps
- Wave display
- Make it look nicer, particle background effects
- Good productivity day
- Implemented all upgrades except burning ground, which I may ignore
- Added gold and lives
- Some visual tweaks
2023-06-04
- Weekend day off
- Rank 121 in neon white tho
2023-06-03
- Weekend day off
2023-06-02
- Move to real art
- Implement all upgrades
- Subclass creeps
- Add gold
- Wave display?
- Particle background effect?
- Really late start oops
- Mostly reworked art, it doesn’t feel too bad anymore
- Global top 150 Neon White
2023-06-01
- “Pick an upgrade” workflow to test out upgrades
- Can select towers to view their range + stats and upgrade them
- Can select creeps
- Move to wave-spawn for creeps
- Think about creep collision?
- Very high productivity day
- Added upgrade picking, implementing several upgrades
- Added individual tower upgrades + selling
- Added tower selection, creep selection, tower range viewing, etc
- Adding creep wave spawning
-
Dealt with collision by just disabling it lol
- Game is very close to playable
- Need to settle on art to visualize what it’s going to look like
- Hit top 200 on global Neon White leaderboards :)
2023-05-31
- DAY OFF hung out with friends
- Finished all gifts in Neon White
- Hit top 500 on global Neon White leaderboards
2023-05-30
- Toggle between towers via numkeys
- Teach towers to have different range, etc
- Maybe toggle show range?
- Longer range
- Bullet split
- Bullet Pierce?
- Wave spawn instead of individual creep
- Can select tower?
- Really late start because I’m not an adult and can’t go to bed on time
- Moved to viewport and shrunk bullets, game looks better
- I had forgotten how viewport works
- Added system for tracking upgrades on a per-tower and per-tower-kind basis
- Sat down and figured out how the game should actually work since it was fuzzy
- Started implementing complex upgrades
- Went to Wonderville playtest, played RAGBALL by https://twitter.com/PlasticBagHand
- Wonderville is good
- Creeps can still block each other
- Art needs updating - should look more like CCT
- Need a UI for picking upgrades so that we can test them
2023-05-29
- move ColorTD to new project, remove grid hacks
- generic-ize towers + add upgrades
- maybe draw background dynamically
- Rewrote as ReShapeTD, much less hacky / nicer to work with
- Components directly tell pathing grid what points are in them, no hardcoding
- Only place we multiply by cell size is right before creating grid ids
- Everything else functions in global snapped to grid positions
- Everything relevant is a child of battlefield, so don’t have to think about positions much except mouse
- Feature parity with old code
- Creeps can block each other - try making them bounce?
- Weird re-connected signal bug
-
Art is bad
- Need to add dynamic calculation of range, fire rate, and bullet splitting / pierce / etc
- Then settle on an upgrade system
- Maybe you socket your “gems” globally but can upgrade individual towers as well?
- Add wave spawning
- Add gold
2023-05-28
- Break day, no programming
- Played TotK
- Tutorials still heavy-handed
- Finished Neon White
- Final boss fights not super fun, kinda like Celeste A-sides
- Not interested in re-running exactly one boss fight, bummer