Panda Penguin Games: October 2016

Sunday, October 30, 2016

dev blog #13 - new techDemo 0.3

and here it is!
the next techDemo version is finally presentable

Twin Star - techDemo 0.3

the 3 new major features are:

Journal

with the journal you have a menu where you can keep up on your quests,
people you met and your skills

in order to see any NPC info in the "People" tab you have to find and talk with an NPC first
after this initial contact your journal will update with the infos you have on that NPC

at the current stage all the info there is cosmetic as there is no function behind them,
but you get a glimpse of what I'm going for in future updates!
Scene Manager

now we get to the first juicy update for this game!
with the implementation of the Scene Manager it is now possible to start "scenes".

These scenes are where the fun is as you go through them like a dialog but this time you get more or less hardcore content displayed.

At certain parts of the scene there needs a decision to be made regarding the way you want to continue the scene. To do so a "minigame" will start where you have to hit the "choice" you want. Just hit "E" or your left mouse button whenever the crosshair is over your choice 3 times to progress (the mouse does not need to be there too).

Right now there is no penalty if you fail the minigame and for testing purpose you can activate the only scene available each "night".
Event Manager

this is a pure background system that handles events. Whenever something in the gameworld gets changed an event is triggered first to perform that change.

Best example for this is the "night" mode for Lena:
When "night" time is reached an event is called to place the activator at Lena's door so you can start the scene. In addition her door "status" and her bed "status" is changed too so you can see a difference visually compared to other times (like "morning")

other than these there are some minor tweaks and the "achievement popup" that notifies you when you discovered a new NPC (and more in the future).

Please note that the scenes images are far from "finished" as some of them are slightly misplaced or the camera angle changed slightly (for the same perspective). For now I won't render this scene again because I want to focus on new content first.

If you are part of my Patreon Early Access group you can download the new techDemo 0.3 now

download techDemo 0.3

read more about this group here: Early Access Info

this update will be available for public in two weeks from now on 12th November!

Thursday, October 27, 2016

dev blog #12 - new demo in sight

brace yourself, new release is coming!

the current status of techDemo 0.3 is "almost finished" as all three of the new main features are in place and all I do right now is cleaning up some scripts to get rid of bugs and infinite loops and stuff like that

you can expect a release for early access Patrons by the end of this week.
public release will be 2 weeks later from that day but you can read more infos on that here at the early access page

on release day I will also post some detailed infos on what changed or what I added and so on but for now I can show you a bit more of the new scene manager

or the "People" menu in your journal where you can keep track of the friendship progress with the various other NPC you will encounter in the game (for now it's just Lena tho)

so just a few more days until the next release, see you then

Saturday, October 22, 2016

dev blog #11

so I'm really busy working on the new features for techDemo 0.3

I already finished the "Event Manager" functions which allow for dynamically adding/removing quests, dialogs, scenes, pickups and NPC and basically all the things that can be changed during things like a quests (locked doors, chests, etc)

as it is a pure background function there is nothing to see on the players end but I can show the progress of the "Journal" menu which is shaping up (and is not finished yet at all)

while rendering more "steps" of the first scene I also worked on an interactive part of the "Scene manager".
Instead of just progressing through the scene in a linear way there will be a choice based system which can lead to multiple endings (good and bad) of that scene.

to achieve this there is a "mini game" to select your choice which is a circulating crosshair that passes by the choices you have and depending on what you "hit" the scene will progress accordingly

you got a limited amount of time to choose and have to hit the same choice 3 times in order to progress this line of the scene. you can choose to abort which will end the scene in a harmless way (no penalties) but if you miss any of the choice "targets" you get a bad ending including penalties like friendship decrease etc.

the design of the "mini game" is temporary and just to test the core functionality of the background functions, like most of the game once the framework is ready I will upgrade the game design graphically.

Monday, October 17, 2016

dev blog #10 - bugs!

BUG!

So the first reports came in after the release of techDemo 0.2, apparently there is a bug in the "Start Menu" when you start a "new game" with mouse controls.
It can happen that your new game then won't start with "Monday - afternoon" but "Sunday - morning" instead.

you can work around that bug for now by using the keyboard controls instead and start a "new game" by pressing "E" and not clicking on it

the main problem here was that for both inputs (mouse, keyboard) to work there are two separate calls in the code to start the new game, one of them was an old version from the time when there was no save/load implemented and somehow I forgot to update that one too.

that is fixed now and (hopefully) won't be a problem in techDemo 0.3 anymore!

whats next:

as for new stuff to come, I'm heavily working on the 3 major updates that come to 0.3 which are:

Scene Manager
to load and handle those juicy scenes you guys want
Event Manager
to dynamically add/remove NPCs, items, dialogs, etc on runtime (like quests)
Journal screen
which, for now, gives you an overview of
- active quests
- people you met
(and the info on their persona, like habits, relationship, friendship status, etc)

in the meantime there is still rendering going on in the background to get some nice shots for the first scene that will be Mike sneaking into Lena's room at night and doing all sorts of naughty things to her

Thursday, October 13, 2016

dev blog #9 - new techDemo 0.2

here it is!
after more than a week of coding background functions I can now release the next techDemo

techDemo 0.2

it features some major new gameplay functions
so what's new:

mouse control
the game now fully supports mouse input (in addition to regular keyboard control)
point-click movement
drag&drop inventories
browse dialog choices with the mouse wheel
revolver quick menu
called with a right-click (or Q) you can spin it with the mouse wheel (or WASD) to gain quick access to
- Inventory
- Smartphone
- Journal
- Save/Load
- Options
(list might change in the future)
save/load/continue
one of the most important features in a game, finally implemented
you have 5 save slots available (might change in the future to more)
NOTE: if you close the game via the X or via "Exit" in the save/load menu nothing will be saved since the last time you saved (if you did)
time and day
the time system divides into 7 days (MON-SUN) and each day divides into 5 segments
- morning
- noon
- afternoon
- evening
- night

in the future this time system will be used for specialized events that can only take place on a given day and time. this function is already in place as you can only "end the day" at the bed at "night"

as always please keep in mind that all the graphics are still temporary until the basic framework for the game is done. once that is achieved I can spend more time fine tuning the graphics and add more "content" to the game.

until then it will be called a "techDemo" as there is not much actual content to call it even a "game"

so what is coming for the next techDemo?
I know I have said that this techDemo will have new scene(s) in it but it just wasn't possible to implement them as coding the save/load function took way more time than expected.
BUT: as the next part that gets implemented is the "scene manager" you will get at least one scene in the next demo update to test the functionality of it!

enough talk! gimme that techDemo!

Link: download Twin Star - techDemo 0.2

Mirror: https://mega.nz

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

dev blog #8

writing your own save/load function is more time consuming than I thought...
I had to re-write some of the background functions that do the heavy lifting to be more save/load friendly in terms of how they provide or process certain data.

saving already works quite well so my main focus is now on the load function.
the tricky part here is to make sure all things get loaded properly and get moved/placed in the world where they belong (like pickup items, NPCs,...)

as for the mentioned first scene.... this will have to wait for techDemo 0.3 because the way I want to implement scenes is way more code intensive than first estimated.
so in order to let you have some of the new features first I decided to move scenes implementation to 0.3 and release 0.2 once the load function is finished

I know! you guys want "action" and you will get it.... but not with 0.2, sorry
in the meantime, take another preview render for the still unfinished first scene

of course the scene is a bit dark as Mike was sneaking into Lena's room at night with the hallway light as the only light source coming through the half opened door.

Monday, October 10, 2016

dev blog #7

so right now the save/load functionality is almost finished, just catching some obvious bugs.
what is also finished is the new inventory layout. note that all the graphics are still temporary and most of the things you see at this stage is just the framework that will be equiped with actual graphics later on.

the new inventory fully supports mouse controls like drag & drop and browsing through the inventory slots by turning the mouse wheel.

(note the "pantie" item between the inventories, it's getting dragged but the mouse pointer won't show on the screenshot)

a right-click cancels any ongoing D&D or closes the inventory if nothing is dragged. dropping an item on an occupied slot will switch out the dragged item with the one in the slot

I also reworked the dialog system to now handle multiple conditions
(like: have item X in Y amount + time NOT noon + ...) so it is more versatile than before.

By doing so time skipping is now possible via the Ficus, the PC and the Bed but not every skip option is possible every time (like Bed - end the day: only possible at time=night)

in the meantime I'm also very busy rendering the images for the first scene that gets implemented before the next demo release. since each image takes render time of about 2h it is going very slow. I also found out that my CPU is actually bottlenecking my graphics cards while rendering so I turned CPU support for rendering off which sped up things a little

Mike is up to no good in this first scene but I won't spoiler anything ;)

Saturday, October 8, 2016

dev blog #6

right now there is not much new to show off as most of the new features are purely background functions
I had to adapt the whole system to implement the save/load functionality in a way that it makes more sense.

only optical upgrade is the new icons for the new revolver menu and the day/time display

that's all news for now as I'm busy finishing the save/load functionality

Thursday, October 6, 2016

dev blog #5 - animations

since mouse point-click controls are implemented I figured the game needs some sort of quick-menu to let you access the important menus.
so I coded a rotating "revolver" menu that you can call with right mouseclick (or Q) and control with the mouse wheel (or WASD)

the menu icons are temporary until I get the time to make some individual icons.

animations?!

while working on the new inventory design I rendered a 3 seconds animation in DAZ3D which took over 4h for a resolution of 480p :O
the intention was to test if and how I could integrate animated scenes to the game so I needed an animation first (duh!)

with 30 images per second the animation is made up of 90 images which I can easily integrate into the GameMaker engine (runs at 30 FPS naturally) but the downside of it is high load times to the game as these 3 seconds of 480p animation totaled in 75MB of data already

you can check out the animation running on GameMaker engine in this "small" test built:
controls: +/- changes the animation speed by a small amount
LINK: https://mega.nz/#!chdlmaJD

here is a crappy GIF conversion of the animation (GIFs run at 10 frames/s that's why it looks so slow)

I'm not sure if animated scenes are viable at this point but I'll keep looking into the various possibilities of implementation.

the next tech demo is right around the corner, I just want to finish some more features first before unleashing it onto the public so there is more to try out than in the previous tech demo

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

dev blog #4

the major part of the last coding session was implementing the mouse controls.
thanks to the built in A* pathfinding algorythm of GameMaker I only had to finetune the grid used for the pathfinding calculations

biggest problem here was to handle doors as they can have two different states,
open or not (compared to walls and other "solid" objects)

depending on each doors own status the path grid had to be adapted for each pathfinding attempt

I also upgraded the various interactive objects (like containers, beds, NPCs etc) with "action spots" (blue circles) where the pathfinder will walk you if you click that interactive object directly to start interaction right away once you arrive there

to offer more mouse abilites I also added a "hover" function that highlights objects with their names if you can interact with them.
the bold red square is the current mouse position on the grid (not captured with the screenshot)

next will be the rework of the inventory system which was implemented only at the "backend" without a meaningful "frontend" in addition to mouse support for that as well

I plan to finish the save/load functionality first befor the next tech demo release

and with more and more framework features shaping up I plan on rendering some more images next so you guys have something more appealing for the eyes instead of all this tech gibberish :P

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

dev blog #3

busy busy working on extending the framework

added working doors that can be opened, closed or slightly opened (for that little sneak peek inside)

in foresight of the yet to be coded day/night time cycle I already added a dialog to advance a given time of a day (who gets the reference here? :P )

in addition to some world style upgrades I already worked on the games start menu and the current framework part in progress is the save/load functionality

Sunday, October 2, 2016

CPU BBQ

getting my CPU all worked up for this 3840x3840 render job in DAZ3D

luckily it's watercooled sufficiently enough to not be a problem

dev blog #2 - playable tech Demo

so I was busy working on the dialog system and NPC interaction framework.

for now these two components work in a way that I can start focusing on the next framework parts

I'm also happy to present the first little tech demo that you can test out to see ...well... not very much at this stage of the project but I just wanted to let you take part in the development process in a more "hands on" way

also I'd appreciate any bug or problem feedbacks... yes/no/maybe?

get the tech Demo here:
LINK: https://mega.nz/#!pwl1zJIZ

this little tech demo shows the following features:

world generation
wall tileing, walkable area, object highlighting
interaction with things
locker, npc, items on the ground
context based dialoges
no key? get one
Lena ignores you?
see the spoiler at the end for more info

Saturday, October 1, 2016

Lena concept

today I messed around in DAZ studio a bit to create some poses for Lena

my plans for here are some sort of "shy on the outside but naughty inside" attitude