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Hi everyone! ^w^
Last devlog we gave you a sneak peek at the cats we're concepting for the desert planet. Well, we got a little carried away... in the best way possible! Here's what we've been up to!
Creatures of the Dunes
After the last devlog, I couldn't stop sketching! I've been exploring all kinds of species ideas for Planet 3's roster. Some came from brainstorming sessions, but a bunch actually came from you guys during my Picarto streams! ^w^
I'm really happy with a lot of these ideas! The planet is going to have a roster of very interesting inhabitants (and the ones that don't make the cut can still be placed on Haven or elsewhere!)
What species would you like to see combing the dunes? And more importantly - which of these fellas would you like to get to know in a more... scorching hot setting? :3c
Shifting Sands: Tileset Challenges
While sketching creatures, I also started concepting the desert environment itself. Designing a desert is trickier than I expected! ^^
Most of our tilesets use hard edges and right angles. Doesn't really work for sand. So I've been figuring out how to do smooth, organic shapes.
Been experimenting with making these shapes work with our tileset style without turning everything into a visual mess. ^^
Small Color Palette / Color Grading Adjustments
We're also taking this opportunity to address something that's been bugging us: the negative space in our tilesets. The dark areas have a bit too much saturation, which makes it harder to create depth and let foreground elements pop.
The plan is to try out these adjustments on the new planet first. If we like how it looks, we might gradually bring some of these improvements back to the existing areas.
Nothing concrete to show yet - just wanted to mention it! I would love to be able to consolidate at least the dark negative space color to a black tone that is consistent across all or most tilesets.
Under the Hood: Dealing with GameMaker Compile Times
Bunny here. While Cookie's been getting sand between his cheeks, I've been wrestling with something decidedly less pretty: our compile times. x_x
Kincaid has grown so much that every test run now takes 2, 3 or even up to 5 minutes for each run. That's 5 minutes of staring at a progress bar every time I want to test a tiny tweak or squash a small bug. It adds up quickly and leaves me frustrated some of the days where I've been stuck on fixing a single issue with slow progress.
There is a feature in GameMaker that should make compile times faster, but for some reason it bugs out on our project. Ive been in touch with the support team but they're at a loss too. Even tried to build the whole project structure from the ground up, asset by asset, to figure out at which point it fails, but it turned out to be a huge waste of time.
With most engines this is not a big deal: You can make a lightweight version of the game that only includes the relevant files and then rely on Git merge/rebase to bring everything together again. In GameMaker though, thanks to their "unique" project structure, it doesn't work. The project structure is not at all reflected in the file structure and instead it relies on a web of JSON files, which aren't really pure JSON files either, but their own unique flavor of them.
Basically this means working with branches and relying on merge and cherry-picking commits is a nightmare.
The other day I found a tool called "stitch" by the studio Butterscotch Shenanigans ( https://github.com/bscotch/stitch ) which was build for exactly that problem. It is a bit out of date but I managed to make it work for the most part.
(Meanwhile I look at everyone switching over to Godot with jealousy in my eyes xD)
Not the sexiest update, but future-me will thank current-me. xD
What's Next?
More species concepts (and maybe some early animation tests!)
Finalizing the desert tileset approach
Continued pipeline improvements
We will keep you updated on the next part of the journey!
Until next time!Cookie & Bunny
P.S. - We've heard some of you had trouble with the Discord invite link on itch etc... We're on it! If you've been trying to join, give it another shot soon.