Tuesday 8th: Still thinking about the narrative. Not really getting anywhere. I'm even thinking of scrapping it entirely. It's difficult because there's a lot of other stuff on my mind at the moment but sometimes that's not such a bad thing. I've come up with ways to wrap up each story as they are, but at the moment it feels really tacked on and doesn't have much to do with the gameplay. So we're going outside the box and getting the hammer out. What's missing from this game that all the other games have? Exploration. I could waffle on and on about how I came to this conclusion, but when it comes to the story, this is it. It doesn't make much sense, but it really does in terms of game narrative. Now I know why so many games have such bizarre narratives. Without revealing too much, the long term decision for the story uses a lot of the same elements but makes them dynamic. Instead of having this separate window and narrative going on with the clients and their dialogue and selling blueprints, this will all be done in game on the map. There will be various walled off organic sections where the player can build. In and between these sections will be these 'clients' who will disappear and often drop a blueprint or reward as well as clearing the way. These 'clients' will function similarly to the quests such as 'feed it 10 msm' and may have some dialogue. Resource nodes like the Forest and Mine will spawn naturally here and cannot be built. They will often be occupied by another Space God and will have to be convinced to move. Some 'clients' will not disappear but will instead keep rewarding the player if fed, so you're directly feeding the monsters. This will entirely replace the Export Box. I'm really happy with this idea to take Human Factory's quality up a big notch. This will be a fair amount of work though, so I want to make sure all the existing stuff works first. Then we can work on turning Human Factory from a Sandbox to a Game. So that handles the item on my list 'sort out the story' for now. What it means right now is essentially ignoring it because it's not worth putting too much work into this dead-end story. Back to actually working on the game... programmed the disappearing of Arms and Legs just like with the Head for then they are removed. In this case, with the possibility of showing 0, 1 or 2 Arms/Legs. Next is to really look at buffs and then I'm on to aesthetics before getting techy again. I have this simplified form that would do just fine. However, the interface for the Buffs should have room for lots of detail and flexibility. So, I'm going to start by adding more detail to the class 'Buff' so I can give better feedback to the player and automate more about the effects of each unique Buff. Capped the low end of HP as per someone's recomendation. Wrote the effect of Genies to force parents to pass on certain stats. Wrote the effect of Hacks on application, making sure for Hacks and Genies to only allow it from an Injector, not Eating or Gasing. Now I have to write out the Buff for each Item that has one (before we were just making a new one each time based on the name). I will also need to effect the stats on the Buff for Make Item. This will take a while. Wednesday 9th: Think I'm going to keep 'cocktails' in the game in the end. Maybe I'll cut it later. In this case, I just have to remake the placeholder building. Thinking more in the design frame of mind. Maybe it's crazy and it's too drastic a change, but I'm being sufficiently restrained I think. Just still thinking about the new narrative with the organic biomes and progress gates. Also in the design of how some of the machines should look and work now; namely the Food Processor which has been redesigned as like a weird tentacle that eats power and shits food. So yeah, unless some force of nature or wisdom stops me, I'm going to go ahead and gut the entire dialogue/story element from the game as it exists. This is so I can really simplify what will now be called 'sandbox mode' so I can test all of that and upload a build when it's stable, then go on to this new form of narrative progress. Wrote out the effects of each Cocktail which I hadn't done before. They're a bit weird and probably terribly balanced, but we'll fine tune that/remove entirely depending on how it plays. So in theory, which means subject to hours of stressful testing and fixing, everything works. We have our current version of the game just with placeholder assets. So my next step is to gut the story and add the simplified way to unlock buildings. Then make sure all that works, then I can go in and do some assets. First, let's backup the project. Ok, gutted all story, quests and everything related out of the game. For some reason I find this really satisfying, like dead weight is being lifted. Like popping a spot. Made it so all buildings are unlocked by default. First press of play. Unfortunately the game won't load with an old save file. So, I've made it a fresh one and unfortunately everyone's saves are now dead. Thursday 10th: Surprisingly, everything pretty much runs as planned. All Quests/Dialogue is ignored, the game just begins and you have everything unlocked. I'll need to do a proper test to make sure and there will undoubtedly be lots of UI bugs. Getting kind of sick of starting new games and making Factories, especially with this uninspired narrative we've had so far. Thinking very deeply about how to proceed. I think the best thing is to go back to Another Rogue for now. I spent some time thinking about what I'll be doing exactly when I come back and came to this conclusion: Just play the game from scratch with the current 'sandbox' mode and build everything. Then it will be much more clear. I will have a blank slate to write narrative onto and probably do the assets first. We'll see. So, back to Another Rogue. See you in that devlog. Friday 11th: On Friday I had 2 of my wisdom teeth pulled out, so nothing much achieved this weekend.