Writer's Welcome.

It’s October, and my thoughts are already turning to National Novel Writing Month, held in November. During this event, budding novelists attempt to write an entire novel, 50,000 words minimum, in one month. This is a huge undertaking. In the past I’ve only completed it once or twice, with many fails in-between.

Right now I am both going to university to complete an IT degree, and working full time, so time is scarce. Do you remember that awesome, juicy new idea I mentioned a few months ago though? I finished the outline of it, and plan to at least try NaNoWriMo with it. If I get real quiet in November you’ll know why.

Dev Update

My game broke again, but it broke similarly enough to the last breakage that I more or less knew how to fix it. There’s now an item in my game and the player can pick it up. Well–it disappears when the player picks it up. It doesn’t go into the inventory yet. That will be the goal for this week. Onward!

Recently, its been all over the game developer forums on reddit that game ideas are being stolen. Unscrupulous people will read dev logs like mine, rip the idea out of it, and use AI to release the game ahead of the developer.

If you’re from the writing world, this is nothing new. AI has taken over many basic writing tasks. I worked for a long time as a ghost writer, and I can tell you this is the usual pattern:

Them: We’re not paying you any more! We’re just going to use AI!

Me: ….Okay. See you in a month.

*One month later*

Them: We used AI and it [insert hugely embarrassing, very public mistake here]. We need you to write for us again. Here’s a big tip.

It’s happened enough that I know the pattern. My income never really went down after AI became commonplace, because it hallucinates and does weird things. Even when it doesn’t, it’s pretty easy to spot AI content because it lacks human innovation.

As far as my game—I don’t even know what I’m doing. I don’t know where this game is going. I doodled a cute island with tons of locations with my daughter, and drew some cool monsters with my son. The goal here is to learn how to code, practice pixel art, and generally have fun. It’d be super difficult to rip an idea that isn’t fully materialized yet.

I’m not worried about AI, and I don’t think you should be either. There’s always room for human talent.

After my last post, things went from bad to worse in my game. I made a smart decision, which was to make my player a prefab and move it outside of the scene to try and pick the player freezing problem. Unfortunately, when I did that my entire player disappeared. I spent days trying to figure out what could be the problem.

I tried commenting out various sections of code to see what the problem could be. I tried adding debug scripts that told me if the player was still there just not visible, or if it had been destroyed.

Finally, I discovered one of the scripts I made to try and make my player stay was essentially the same as a different script, and it was shorting everything out. I deleted the redundant script, and now everything works! You can enter the house, go back to the farm, and open the inventory system and everything works great!

Next step, add an item!

I’ve made quite a bit of progress on my game. You can now walk around the house, into the house, and bring up an inventory screen. I’m having a strange issue however, where the player freezes when you exit the house and go back to the farm. As you’ll probably be swapping between these two scenes a lot, I really need this to work properly. I have not yet figured it out, but hope to sleuth it out more when I’m less busy with work and school work–and story ideas.

I am still diligently slogging away at my current WIP, and have finally reached something like the middle of the story. I hate it a bit less than I did, but I’m going to have to put it away a long time when it’s done before I can fix it. I’m hoping to have it done by November. Even if it’s not, I plan to put it aside to participate in NaNoWriMo this year. I haven’t participated since 2020ish. Looking forward to it!

Have you ever been grinding through a project, only to get distracted by a shiny new idea tantalizing you? This week, I had an almost complete story idea fall into my brain while I was working. I simply couldn’t wait to get home and start working on it.

The problem with this is if I just start pursuing this one, sooner or later it’s going to be the grind and there’ll be another new project and a whole train of unfinished projects.

I’m so far balancing my inspiration for the new and the dedication to the old by continuing writing the usual daily word count on the original project, and then working for a few minutes on the new one. This way I won’t lose any of the new idea, but I’m still making progress on the old. The old project is about half way to completion for the rough draft. I expect it to be ready to rest in about 5 months. (I only write 100 words a day on it due to full time work, full time college, full time housewife, and still wanting hobbies.)

For those who just want Dev updates:

On the game front note, I added my building to the scene and am currently trying to get the character to go behind the roof but in front of the door. This has caused no end of struggle on my part. I have had my character crawling like an ant over the top of it. I have had her unable to get within throwing distance of the house. I have had her able to go behind the house, but no matter what I do, not in front of it.

This caused a lot of consternation on my part, because the house is on two different layers, and the part I want her to be able to walk in front of I have set to ground level. Why is she still going behind it, but not behind the ground?? Older Smart Self I’m sure will update us in the future with the why. In the mean time, it’s giving me a migraine.

This past month saw a number of major goals met in my game. I finished the sprite sheet for the character, learned how to paint the tile sets I made into a “scene” in Unity, and successfully got the character to walk around on it. The coding ended up being the easiest part of the entire process, as I have spent a lot of time practicing coding but not as much time learning Unity.

As of right now, the character is unanimated. She faces you the whole time while the character moves. I ran into an issue with Unity where it kept saying my animation (which didn’t yet exist) was ‘read-only’ and there was no button like the tutorials showed. I eventually figured out how to create animation sequences for each direction. Next weeks goal will be to come up with a code that tells the game which animation sequence to use depending on which direction you’re going.

After that, I’m at a bit of a cross-roads. The general recommendation is you work on each area until it’s 90% done and then move on to the next area. I agree with this, but I’m not sure if I should finish doing the whole area with the really really rough approach and then refine, or if I should refine the sprite and background before moving on.

There’s such a lot to be done, not really sure what is best.

I was planning to just update once a month, but I hit a bit of a milestone and wanted to share. I got a rudimentary tile set done, including grass, dirt, and a house. I just need them to be able to test whether I can make an animated sprite move around a background, and not walk across the roof of the house or anything.

The house was a bit scary for me, so I kept putting it off. I finally told myself it didn’t need to look good and just needed to be done, polish can come later. This is what I got done:

I thought it was funny because my art skills visibly improved while working on the house, and you can pretty much guess in which order I completed each section. I will definitely have to rework this piece so it looks a little less wonky, but right now I love it’s charming, crooked little self.

I am currently nearly done creating a sprite sheet for the character, and then the next huge step will be seeing if all the coding practice and Udemy practice I’ve been doing are enough to make my character wander about. We’ll see!

It has been about a month since I last updated here. The majority of my free time this past month has been spent on coding, with the last two weeks focused on learning Unity. Unity is a game engine that works well for 2D pixel games.

I’ve finished 4 branches of the “Unity Essentials” pathways to get oriented in Unity, and am currently working on the C# coding pathway. This has been the most interesting one because while it has been fun making my own quiz games and calculators, it’s hard to see how these coding challenges are going to help me make a player walk around a screen.

In Python, I knew how to blit a character onto a screen from a sprite sheet and walk it around, but have not yet attempted this with C#. I’m hoping to do this soon instead of relying on prefab stuff in the tutorials.

Character Development

Another huge area of growth has been character development, an area I’ve just about wrapped up. One of my chief complaints about my favorite games is that there are so few characters, it doesn’t feel like a small town. It feels like a single neighborhood of a small town. Because of this, I have 6 or so villages scattered around the island, so there are more people to meet.

This unfortunately means lots more character outlines to do, but I’ve just about wrapped this up with only about half of two different villages left. These are just rough outlines of the characters, with dialogue, quests, etc. still to be done, but it still feels good to have this much done on it.

Pixel art and Beyond

I’ve also worked on pixel art a small amount, mainly just working on a sprite sample and some possible magical crops. These aren’t terribly great yet and lack detail, so I won’t be posting any samples at this time. Nothing to see here, just a plant with eyeballs.

I did watch a summery of how ConcernedApe built Stardew Valley, and was even more inspired by it then before. We apparently have a lot in common, and the fact that he did his entire game solo, including the music and sound effects, made me want to try that as well.

Unlike Eric however, I have no musical experience whatsoever, so added a musical development course to my Udemy education and have been learning about gaming music ever since. It’s not promising. I can turn the music development software on and vaguely navigate it, but have yet to make a note of my own music. Pray for me.

Writing

Have I mentioned that it’s not writing itself that I enjoy, but having written? I do feel satisfied seeing my published works out there in the world, but getting a new piece out is always dreadful. I hate how dull and boring it is. The plot is boring. Nothing happens. No one will ever want to read this.

It’s only after I have finished the monstrosity that I begin to like it again. It has to rest in my edit pile for at least a few months, and a shiny new piece started. Only then, when that piece becomes dreadful, can I go back and look at my old work and love it again.

I’m about half way done with my monstrosity, but I can’t wait for it to be over so I can get to the fun part of shining it back up again.