Highly productive week on SnowBound (Patreon)

I was looking back to see what I'd completed this week and was amazed at how much work I got done. In fact, it likely isn't that much but after months of drawing and coding ONLY art layers, it seems like a lot to get 4 separate things done in one week!

First, I finally drew the actual hero walking animation. No more blue-man!

Then, I figured since I have the man working, I should get your follower working as well. I plan to also draw all the frames for a female follower, but so far I just recolored the man image to get the code working. Since I usually include optional gay content anyway, I will keep this art for the future. Likely, the player will choose the companion at game start... Likely, I'll include some optional ways to gender-bend the follower in the game as I usually do too.

It was quite the challenge getting the follower to actually... FOLLOW... the player as opposed to COPYING the player's movements... I really took for granted every game that does this. After failing a few times, I actually decided I'd better convert the game over to correctly-coded classes... I hate classes, even though they are better and more logical and more concise and easier to understand and easier to debug and everyone uses them and progress is unstoppable and... sigh... so, a day later I had classes working... Wow, look at my modern code... But then, I had an epiphany how to code the follower without classes! So, I deleted the classes, pulled up my old code and am happily using C-style, no++, no-class code again!... I REJECT PROGRESS! Here's an image:

errm... What was I writing about? Right, so the follower needs to be behind the player, but if the player turns around behind is now... in FRONT! So, that is what the image above is showing: The art drawing layers switching order. Eventually, I will have the player ability to stop your companion following you. Like, you might want to leave them in the Tent or set them to collect resources or something. That will be later when I get dialog interactions working.

Speaking of the companion, I coded in all it's Stats too. So, s/he will get hungry, thirsty, sick, cold and tired. Meaning you'll need to feed him/her. So, I added in the option in the Inventory:

You can now drag food to the follower icon and see his/her Stats bar increase from your actions too. Eventually, I'll allow giving non-food items when dialogs work, so s/he can ask you to find/craft items for him/her or you can set tasks for him/her to do.

That got me thinking what would happen when the companion stats get too low? Well, s/he already won't undress without shelter, so I expanded that to cover the other stats too... except Energy. If his/her Energy drops below 20, s/he will actually fall asleep. It was just for humor at first, but then I noticed you could still... undress the sleeping companion as the image below shows... and that was REALLY funny. S/he will even wake up after awhile and get mad at you.

Oh right, I also added mittens! So, s/he is no longer walking in the snow with bare hands. All in all, a quite productive week. Next, I'll be testing much of the code I wrote this week. I actually just today fixed a bug with the Cup showing in two spots, but there are always more bugs I find during play-testing. I am hoping to get started on dialogs soon. It will likely be the most complicated thing I do in the entire game... So, I am trying to plan it out properly. Anyways, that's all for now.