Nope, right now there’s only one unique recipe that isn’t glop though, and I’m going to be changing all the non-unique ones since they were only there for testing.
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you can actually drop items by middle mouse clicking while highlighting whatever you want to drop, if you leave an area with an item on the ground, it de-spawns that item
I’m excited for the next update, now that Spacethumper is completed. Are there any particular plans for the farm game’s future or any details like calorie counts for each food item you’d be willing to share?
It strikes me as odd that you can eat a diet of gapple pies and lose weight.
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Right now there’s a ton of changes that I’d like to make to retry much all the mechanics and back end of the game, so much so that I’ve started working on more or less a complete rebuild.
All the sprite work and characters are going to be the same, but the big changes are going to be switching away from actual time to a player controlled progression so that people aren’t forced to wait around doing nothing, and I’m not forced to come up with hours of content just to fill one year.
There are going to be some changes to the map to make things a bit smaller and more contiguous, there was a lot of wasted space that I was being a bit ambitious with.
There’s also a lot of changes that need to be made to the backend. The parts that I made from the coding tutorials that followed are fine enough, but diving back into it after working on Spacethumper has just been aggravating. Hell, it might be best to just treat it as a separate project built on the bones of this one.
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I know it’s a lot of work, but seeing a few different body types as the townspeople get bigger would be really neat. The shop having custom ones is a great touch.
While I agree that would be neat, there’s absolutely no chance of that happening for any of the fully animated sprites. Even adding one would double the amount of sprites, and also double the amount of sprites for any future clothing or weight levels, and it’s already up to around 400 for every weight level and nearly the same for every new cosmetic option that isn’t a head. I would much rather be working getting the game reworked into something fun than do another 4000+ sprites.
That being said, I want to keep a good balance between characters with static vs. full animations moving forward, since there’s a lot more freedom with what I can do since it can be as low as one sprite per weight level.
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I’d say the only thing that really stands out sprite-wise at the moment, in terms of missing things, is that Rebecca and Roberta can’t be seen in their homes when they’re not at work. There’s also a bug at, I want to say size 4, 5, and/or 6, where long sleeve and short sleeve shirts show the wrong outfit- long sleeve option has short sleeves and vice-versa. Not sure if that’s been brought up before, but I didn’t notice it scrolling through the thread.
For sure, the mechanic and system updates are going to be nice. I think the current map size could work though, if you’re planning on adding some more npcs that might live and hang out around the map cells that are currently just travel spots, or maybe some activities or jobs there.
For fun, I decided to track a couple observations. It’s not fully comprehensive, since I didn’t test the decent meals long enough to see if scarfing them down every chance possible could eventually raise up to bigger sizes, but I think it’s reasonably accurate, from the standpoint of a player with no access to the code. Some of the size changes are more subtle, so I might be inaccurate in a few cases. I did notice that while eating gapple pies, my character was able to slim down to the smallest size.
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Playing through the game is quite fun but I do feel there are plenty of Quality of Life changes that could be made
- Some way of indicating player character hunger (when they can eat; perhaps growling or a status icon)
- A recipe book so players can see what ingredients make for what food
- Perhaps a way to fastforward time in the game
- More clarification on the controls
And of course…
-Debug mode
If all of these can’t be implemented right now I understand, I just feel like it would really help out players
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I’ve been working on a major rework for the whole game for a bit, I will say that the hunger indication and time issues have been dealt with, and the controls have been simplified quite a bit so that there isn’t as much confusion regarding them. I haven’t put cooking back in yet, so no recipe book at the moment. As for debug mode, I will probably never have that be a player accessible feature since it’s only used for testing stuff and breaks the code in a lot of ways if not used properly.
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Glad you are coming back to it and working towards a new path! A lot of game development is about working in circles and often time redoing / reworking what one has already made into something better!
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I know a debug mode will never be available, but perhaps one day if you have the free time, you may want to add a player friendly creative mode.
Basically just something for the players to mess around with without messing up the game.
And of course, best of luck!
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Yeah, I’m figuring this is what most people are actually wanting when they ask for a debug mode, something to mess around with the weights and skip time and stuff. That’s one of the big reasons why I don’t want to make it a feature for players. The stuff I put in for debugging is meant to be used in conjunction with Gamemaker’s debugger and would be pretty useless to anyone who wasn’t using it that way, and making a “creative mode” introduces a lot of issues that.
A good example is, for instance, if you could just skip as many days as you wanted anywhere, let’s say from day 3 to day 7. Well if an NPC spawns one place on day 7 and not day five and you skip time. They aren’t going to appear there, that situation would have to be coded in. Or say there’s an event that triggers on day 7 and is affected by something on day 6. Day 6 never happened, which leads to at best the event breaking and at worst a crash. There’s just a lot of edge cases that get introduced (way, waaaaay more than what I could even think of right now) that would need to be solved to make something like that even worth using. Basically anything linked to the event system (which is most things) would get really screwy if any other part of it could be changed freely.
I dunno, maybe I’ll make a little side gallery version of the game that’s just the wardrobe and some buttons for fattening/slimming once the main game is in a good state for people that just want the sprites and don’t want to play the game, since there isn’t really a middle ground that doesn’t create a lot more work.
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By the sounds of things, any debugger you make would simply add to the list of possible bugs, which ironically would make debugging harder.
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Yeah. Sad, but I do appreciate the fact you went out of your way to let the players know about this!
Can someone help?
The head patterns don’t render/can’t be changed from ‘none’.
Different heads have different selections for their available head patterns. Some of them don’t have head patterns at all.
Thanks for the info and sorry for bothering you.
Also can add a similar time fast forward from the debug mode into the main game?
It would make the game less grindy/make the game easier to grind.
As per my post above, making a debug mode that consistently skips time and doesn’t just break the game would take a lot of time that would be better spent on other parts of the game, so I will not be putting a player accessible debug mode in.
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Perhaps an item food item you can get that’s fattening enough to bump you up a whole weight level each time?