Oh hello!
My name is Chroma, and I'm here with my partner-in-crime Nyxilis and we're gonna... complete our first game. I do the show and he does the tell, except in the case of this devlog, where you're strapped in with me. Mwahaha!
Birthday Adventures is a game where you are a ██████ on a ███████████ after ██████ ████ ████████. You'll need to █████████ and █████ ███████. Got that? Good! It's going to be a very pulpy space adventure with simple tasks and not a lot of real science to worry about.
The engine I've decided to use is Adventure Game Studio. It's very free and the simple games it outputs are exactly the sorts of things I want to be making. While there are alternatives they seem to be built for doing So Much More... and one thing I don't want to do is fall into the trap of having too many options. I work full time, so I want to make sure my scope stays manageable. I want something that works before I have something polished.
You're going to see a lot of placeholders.
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I'm going to start the devlog on day 5, due to a couple things causing a slightly late start for us and me skipping a lot of really uninteresting planning stages for you. This is our first room, and where you start. As you can see it's a fairly goofy looking lab with some... things in there. I'm using paint tool sai for my backgrounds and sprites, as that is the program I'm most comfortable with drawing in, though you will probably see me use photoshop here and there for proper cleanup. The very first thing I did was lay out that default background perspective, and on top of that I've thrown a bunch of singular sketches. Each item on a different layer, for moving around and copy-pasting
Our actual game size is going to be 1000 X 800. I'm using cartoon graphics instead of pixels, so I feel that's going to have a more unique feel for a game that is expected to run in it's own little window. This room though, you notice, is wayyyyy longer. Twice as much, in fact?
Why?
Because AGS scrolls rooms automatically. It's a very nice little thing and I so very much appreciate not having to work in blocks or scroll around in my edit window. This is probably not exciting for anyone but the very newbie me, but it must be said, it's neat.
After some fiddling around with masks, we now have this!
Check out that little dude! He's the default character in AGS. He's not scaled anywhere near to how I want the character to scale, and is... very ill fitting. But he is default, and a good way to see things work. Also as you can see I've left the game in Sierra style Default. At least for now. It is, again, very simple, and exactly what I want to do.
Tomorrow I plan to work out a real character sprite, and do some more fiddling in that room.
