Devlog #19 - Joker's Trip: Living the Dream (Patreon)

[beep beep beep] you turn on your tactical display to find: a new Clown Control devlog

Hey! We’ve been hard at work. This devlog is more of a general update rather than “let’s learn about game development.” That being said, we do have a little bit of tool stuff later on :)

So first things first, bar update is coming along! TT drew some choice mini cgs (one for each current gambler) and I've placed them in game and did the necessary tasks to make them work. I’ve also finished programming most of the VN-esque systems, and once those are ironed out, I’ll move onto programming the eleven new drink abilities we’ll be adding to the game!  

Their unlock methods are simple: watch a bar convo with a gambler that orders that drink, and it’ll be added to your list of available abilities! In the future these will require some sort of upkeep (I.e. you’ll have to buy uses after unlocking) but for now they’ll work as abilities do at the moment, unlimited. 

To get into the nitty gritty of things, the Logic of unlocking and viewing bar scenes needed a bar meta data system to keep track of what you unlocked, what’s available, and the initialization data. For example, what’s the flag that needs to be enabled to see this bar convo? Which character is going to be spawned, what’s their initial emotion and state of dress, and etc. 

To do this I decided to build another tool! The bar metadata builder. This isn’t part of the dialog studio, I don’t want to add to that app until I optimize some of it, but it has a different enough function to justify being a different tool. It’s a React/Node/Express webapp that adds bar metadata to a json file that gets copied into the asset folder when ready. Fancy words for a form, but God it’s worth it. We've been keeping track of bugs in Joker's Trip, and a Vast majority of them are related to dialog, specifically the ones written and encoded by hand. Typos and mistakes happen! I don’t want that for something as important as metadata so I took the time to build the tool. It took exactly one day to build, but it’ll pay off in saving me time Not hunting for the dumbest bugs ever.  [big tip for any aspiring devs: catching bugs early (and taking time to actually design things) saves you exponential time later.]

Also, to be blunt, I needed practice in React web development again since I uh. Got let go again. It's cool when your company is killed off by its parent company. Bummer, but that just means I get to work on Joker's Trip more! 

“Hey why are you studying for web development? Why aren’t you just applying for roles in game dev?” Lol! Lmao. Big teehees. But for real it’s mostly so doing game dev still feels like a fun thing to do and not my Actual Job. Regardless of how much of a dumpster fire the game dev industry is at the moment. 

That’s all to say: thank you for sticking around! You help this cursed to be unemployed freak pay for insurance. My appreciation for you all is bottomless <3

Much like the drinks at Joker’s Pit!

Love you~

Leo G