Cool.
"It would be good for your development anyway. Postmortems are always useful to me when I design something, even if I never code anything"
Had the opposite problem. Spent a year coding all sorts of little systems, changing tools, coding new tools, and in the process the game that started out as a fun prototype some how lost it's magic.
"I have scraps of paper and notebooks full of games I'll never make lol."
It really is a tragedy isn't it?
Hopefully you designed the tools robust enough to use in other projects. That is probably why I am spastic about coding. I get bogged or bored doing something else so I switch to art or some other system. It took me years to have stamina for large projects (this being my largest now).
My notebook ideas will never see the light of day, but they are nice to go through sometimes. If I get a creative block or maybe want to pick up a month side project. Which are good just to clear my brain. Heck my last side project was a card game because I really needed to get away from coding. Again though it is the journey not the destination kind of thing. Even if I knew all the coding I do now 5 or 10 years ago, I don't think I'd have the mental fortitude to do this game now.
It is important to stay healthy. I've seen so many great games just die because the dev gets burnt out our discouraged. I get if it is your business and you need to make money. I believe it is important to fail often and quickly otherwise you'll be stuck doing a game you don't like and it will show in your final product.
Funny thing is I already have the sequel to this game mapped out and I am super stoked about starting that one! I keep telling myself not to rush this one, to get it right, do the game justice. Which I think is good. I've built a universe and story I am just excited to tell stories in.
Moving from Gamemaker to Love2D ate four months of my time but tooling was a big reason why. Before that my big thing was having to recode the level editor but I ultimately ate the cost. It has everything but multiplatform export but I decided realistically, as a first time developer, I wasn't exporting to the switch (for example) anyway. It still nets me windows, mac, and linux export, plus android (and ios I think).
Big thing was I realized how much reinventing the wheel in Gamemaker was eating my time. I spent a couple weeks writing my own tweening library, and then another week debugging it and a week more improving it for some edge cases and specialization. And then theres figuring out the work flows for using arrays as lightweight objects, realizing timelines weren't deltatimed, build times being 1-2 full minutes for a single change (versus other tools that have hot reloading), and so on. 2019 Q4 they're finally bringing functions and methods to objects, plus light weight objects. it was just a bunch of papercut type complaints. Yeah yeah I know, don't blame the tooling.
Eventually I just said "you know, I'd love to be able to export/import to json or another structured format without worrying about if the type conversion is going to lead to errors because of issues with embedding datastructures in datastructures." I wanted a flexible map format and it was just too much to work around GMs issues yet again.
It's still a great tool, but with Love2D I got full access to the filesystem, decent multiplatform support sans console, access to a proper scripting language, object support (and classes, and mixins with moonscript), fast rebuild/testing (seconds), the works. Also plenty of free libs to work with, instead of reinventing the wheel.
In fact I was looking at your map format and it looks like you're using CSV for it? It's funny because thats the exact route I'd started down before I moved to L2D. I was only looking at it because I think it would be interesting to write a map or scene editor.
I think we all like to keep a notebook (or in my case a stack of em lol). Your logic card game looks superfun. I have the opposite problem you do, doing art for too long fries my brain. Used to do art over at opengameart, just little things, was starting to get good, just didn't know what to do with it. Spent a lot of time teaching my sisters. You'd be amazed how easy kids tune out if all anyone does is give them praise. Long time ago I saw an article saying "for every criticism, give them three comments on what they did right." (and vice versa) or something like that and oh my god, it's absolutely true. Just the right amount of feedback on what to work on, and what they did right, and the encouragement of it works wonders. One of them is doing skin packs for minecraft, making $350ish checks a week. Couldn't be more damn proud. Kids are great, teaching is great. It's hard to break people of the "it's all about talent" mantra too. And the better they get the more they bump into the skill plateau and resort to thinking it's about talent, instead of 'work work work, practice practice practice', but thats true of any skill. Got it pretty well ingrained in them at this point.
Same is true of coding I guess. Have to build up your foundation and stamina for it.
The irony of staying healthy I'm only just now starting to recognize. 8 hours in a chair isn't healthy for anyone. "Fail quickly" I wished I'd known sooner, but "if wishes were horses," as they say.
If you already have a sequel planned out I take it that means you have plenty of content planned which is cool.
I'm really looking forward to seeing this succeed, and watching both the game's story unfold, and your own.
How big is your world map btw, and how many current locations do you have? I came across ellie's orphanage and steven's farm so far.
Game maker just makes sense for me. It has everything I need to make the game I want without having to write back-end stuff (my brother loves coding servers and stuff, that isn't for me. I like to see the code working :) ). I was writing Java games with LWJGL before GM and what would take me 2 months in Java took me a week in GM. It has limits for sure. There has only been a few things I didn't have (downloading a buffered sound from the internet). I also think they should pivot to a model like UNITY for their payment model. I'd love to teach my students with Game Maker, but I can't because of the cost (and also because it isn't an American company so I can't make them a vendor...).
I think I've seen a JSON plug-in someone wrote for Game Maker, but the ini files work fine for what I need (KEY, SECTION, DATA). JSON for sure would be more robust and mod-able. Which would be cool to add to this game, but it might be too late because I'd probably have to re-write a ton of stuff. Maybe not though.
The world's locations aren't much right now. They are only the two you've found. My next big push is to create all the location and then start added in the side quests. Finishing with up with the main quest line. The map right now isn't very big either. It will have to get bigger for sure. I am thinking also making BIOMES (like sand, rocky sand, dirty sand) LOL to give the different regions a different flair. The humans group will have a mud brick building style, the Karkadann will have reeds/stick walls (a more tribal feel) and so on. Like I've said before I have lots of work to do :) The human main town will come next, or so my brain thinks now.
Absolutely, use what works. At the time I came from a non-coding background. Tons of serious professionals moved from rolling their own to GM because reinventing the wheel on a lot of essentials isn't cost effective and can be mildly insanity inducing.
Biomes are an excellent idea if only for variety. I'd think, if you were going to explore the great salt basin for example, it might warn you before entering one of the tiles "you are entering the great salt basin. This area is particularly arid so you will end up using more water. Cacti are also rarer. Come prepared."
Alaska is cold, and unless the earths axis tilted after impact it can still be expected to have a cold climate, at least after dark. And deserts can get pretty cold at night to say the least. It wouldn't be unexpected to have some sort of penalty if the player travels at night, or a warning at sunset. Maybe make torches a requirement for further north, or for mountain regions.
The amount of dust after an apocalypse might create regions completely shaded in night. And lets not forget that alaska is known as 'the land of the midnight sun.'
Besides bandits coming at night, it wouldn't be unreasonable to say 'monsters come at night, put up lights!' just like wildlife in the old west, attacking ranches (but what do I know, I'm not a rancher!)
This is far and away from the original purpose of the thread but I have to ask, when did the apocalypse happen? Because by the time it did, alaska could have been developed as any other coastal state (maybe with a very rural, traditional interior. It's a big state after all).
If it happened in the future, theres no reason alaska couldn't have developed say, metros or rails between now and the time that the world went to pieces.
