Dev Diary - 5/8/20 - Haulin’ Oats And The Dope Game Remaster
Hello there, my dear friend. Welcome back to another development diary for Haulin’ Oats and The Dope Game remaster. As per usual we will dig right into all the newest things.
Haulin’ Oats
With the Steam Game Festival right around the corner, much work has been put into getting the game’s demo ready. It does include, however, necessary work for the next alpha build too.
The screenshot here shows the implementation of the achievements and statistics; as well as the new menu layout which probably doesn’t look a whole hell of a lot different. It is now centered. Stats and achievements will be active in the next alpha but, obviously, not the demo.
Multiplayer may not actually be in the game until alpha v0.0.3 depending on time. Right now the focus is getting the demo and alpha v0.0.2 done by Valve’s May 15th deadline. That being said, if it doesn’t then v0.0.3 will be along much faster than v0.0.2 was / is.
The store page is ready as well but a trailer is also being put together before I make that live. Nonetheless, it’ll be ready for you to check out and wishlist by next weekend.
The Dope Game Remaster
The Dope Game also got a lot of love this week. There was a lot of polish for the remaster beta testing and an update to the warning screen that Google loves so much.
All the main menu stuff got their face-lifts finished and systems tweaked. The major difference besides graphical is the leaderboards will now show the top five players in each category instead of the top player. Also Steam backed-up statistics were removed due to long-standing issues with keeping them synced correctly. The game will rely on itself and CoaguCo servers to track everything. Now that it’s all out of the way, the last push to polish up the main game loops is on.
Most likely the holiday events will not be active in the remaster version until the each holiday happens; then it’s back to normal afterward. Also the Russian translation will be delayed for a bit as new text will require new translations to be made. However, pushing some graphical elements to text elements (based on Haulin’ Oats design) will allow localization to be easier.
That’s it for this week. There should be much more to show next week thanks to a crunch session and quarantine!
Dev Diary - 5/1/20 - Haulin’ Oats And The Dope Game Remaster
Why hello. Here again for another quick rundown of things that happened during the game development process? Surely. So let’s get to it.
Haulin’ Oats
This week was more revamping menu stuff because who doesn’t love fixing what ain’t broke, a new guest character, and more Steam Game Festival prep.
As pictured above, Maury is the new guest character; normally the guest characters have not been shown but eh. This shows his achievement icon, playing card, and character avatar. I’m sure you can guess who he is a parody of.
Some brainstorming was done on the game’s trailer, since it should probably be ready for the store page when that launches; which should also be up for the Steam Game Festival. Including a demo which will be based on the next alpha update and also updated frequently on the road to release.
The Dope Game Remaster
Credits were tinkered with and more under-the-hood stuff.
This work-in-progress shot above shows the lovely dialog avatars from the current version of the game reworked to be character / actor icons for the credits page. That title clearly isn’t going to be in the final version, nor the background.
Also coding for the city loop and Stashware were worked on but no cool pictures of that stuff. It was mostly tweaking things and making it more efficient; also cutting out all the old 32-bit INT code and making sure it still works.
That’s it for this week!
Dev Diary - 4/24/20 - Haulin’ Oats And The Dope Game Remaster
Hey there, folks! Time for an even shorter version of the weekly dev diary. But wait, shorter you say? Yes, I didn’t get much done at all this week due to a very tall pile of projects, both digital and in real life.
I’m hoping this week is more productive on the game development front but nice weather and quarantine definitely detracted from that. For those that don’t know and might care, I live in the country so there are tons of outdoors things to do.
That being said, here’s some brief blurbs about what was done and some pretty pictures to go along with that.
Haulin’ Oats
Coding itself took a backseat to some drawing and set-up for Steam’s Game Festival this summer.
The warning screen that shows up when the game starts was modified a bit. The banner is new the the text is more readable. Not a super important thing but hey.
More stuff was done for the Steam Game Festival, mostly in the Steamworks back-end. The store page needs to be active soon and a demo needs to be produced. Luckily, the next alpha version will be trimmed down into the demo; which I might have mentioned last week.
The Dope Game Remaster
What very little time there I had for the remaster was spent on finishing up some character models.
As seen above, Pinky the gun shop owner, got finished. I also got the hospital nurse and bartender done. Sadly no additional code was finished this week, but most of it is just porting and minor changes from Godot 2 to 3.
A major one being the use of 64-bit INTs which did not exist in Godot 2 and was a big fucking headache when it came to any kind of financial transaction... which the whole damn game is based on.
Well, that’s it for this week. Hopefully next week will have more!
Dev Diary - 4/17/20 - Haulin’ Oats And The Dope Game Remaster
Hey there, folks! Time for another week of the seemingly ever-lasting development diary updates.
Haulin’ Oats
This week was more under-the-hood multiplayer coding as there were some unexpected bugs in the lobby system as well as bug in my GodotSteam module. Nonetheless, that took up a lot more time than one would expect.
This week’s screenshot is of five unused character avatar assets. Unfortunately I didn’t have a good way of contacting any of these folks and am rather unknown myself. However, there are some guests that I was able to get a hold of and will be appearing in the game as locked characters. They will not be announced and you’ll have to find out who by playing.
Also, Haulin’ Oats will be part of the Steam Game Festival so those of you who aren’t in on alpha access can give the demo a try. The demo will be comprised of one go-around and locked to one regular character; and obviously no multiplayer.
The Dope Game
More work on getting single-player ready for the beta branch? Yes. That mostly included getting all the code ported over from Godot 2 to Godot 3 and various performance changes made.
Last week you saw a work-in-progress of the loanshark’s crackhouse which has been completed. As I am working through each area, there are minor tweaks being made to interfaces which are borrowing some functions from The Dope Game 2. Those are mostly suggestions from the community about things they’d like to see added.
New features for the loanshark include paying down heat for each section of the city or everything all at once. Also the amount of money you get from new loans will depend on how many you paid back prior. The more you pay off, the more Sweaty Mike will let you borrow. Makes getting a certain achievement easier too.
That’s all for this week! See you again soon!
Dev Diary - 4/10/20 - Haulin’ Oats And The Dope Game Remaster
Good evening. Time for yet another dev diary update for both Haulin’ Oats and The Dope Game remaster. So take a seat by the fire but please sit at least six feet away.
Haulin’ Oats
This week was more multiplayer code and interface work.
Sub-menus have been moved into the menu bar, this is also true for all other areas like stats, leaderboards, credits, etc. More graphical assets have been created for the multiplayer sections too.
The code underneath should be done up to the point of actually playing with other folks. That will be the focus of this coming week as well as polish to the existing game loop.
The Dope Game
This week was getting more of the scenes completed so that a working build of single-player was, well, playable.
As you can see above, the loanshark’s crackhouse is all updated and pretty much ready to go. This screenshot also showcases all the new assets in one place, as far as the dialog and HUD are concerned.
So far everything seems functional so I’ll be moving on to other areas where the NPC’s are and get those out of the way. Once all of them are done and the basic city area, a single-player test will be made available in the beta branch on Steam. Then I will move on to the multiplayer.
That’s about it for now. See you next week!
Dev Diary - 4/2/20 - Haulin’ Oats And The Dope Game Remaster
Hey there! Time for yet another weekly update on what the hell is going on.
Haulin’ Oats
Networking, networking, networking. All that was done this week was getting the net-code added in; all Steamworks stuff. Even put together some crude interface for multiplayer.
Right now lobbies can be made and joined. Player avatars get pulled from Steam and displayed. Servers can even be joined. There are more tweaks, beyond the visual, that need done plus a lot of testing.
The next beta version is basically waiting on this to be done before it is uploaded, thus modes will not be changeable at the time.
The Dope Game Remaster
This week I got side-tracked on working on multiplayer for The Dope Game and got bogged down in redoing all the Steam and Itch.io assets.
Here you can see the new capsule and game icon. Also had to go through the wide variety of capsules, titles, and icons for everything.
Also, I am aiming to release the remaster version on the fourth anniversary of the game (May 30th). That should give enough time to get it all done. I think.
That’s it for this week. Hope to have something more exciting next week!
Dev Diary - 3/27/20 - Haulin’ Oats And The Dope Game Remaster
A few days later than late but here nonetheless. Time for another weekly update.
Haulin’ Oats
Mostly another week of graphical tweaks but there was also multiplayer…
You can see above, the main menu has some letter shadowing added to make it more like the newer logo. Also makes thing pop a bit more and easier to read.
More importantly, multiplayer stuff has been added in. A lot of the Steamworks functionality is in but nothing has been tested just yet. The first test, lobbies and servers, will probably be next week. Then there is a bunch of overhaul to make the game work with it.
The Dope Game
More drawing this week. A never-ending onslaught of art assets to be converted.
As you can see above, the Sweaty Mike’s lair got a facelift this week; though the shading isn’t don’t yet. While the list of assets that still need swapped over is long, it is probably time to get the multiplayer up and functional too. Hopefully next week’s update will be more about multiplayer!
See you then.
Dev Diary - 3/18/20 - Haulin’ Oats And The Dope Game Remaster
Hello there. It is that time again for another weekly update on what’s going on with Haulin’ Oats and The Dope Game remaster. Enough introduction to a thing you may or may not read, let’s get into it.
Haulin’ Oats
It was yet another art asset week and fixing up some minor bugs in the character selection process. Even hooked in the Steam username functions.
HUD trays were also updated; though in this screenshot they show up in their debug state. Now they will only show what items the player has and slide back under the top portion like they did in pre-alpha. There is a little animation where the slide back out when an item is received or taken. And, of course, can be toggled at any time. Granted there is a reason I switched it before, and surely that’ll come up again.
Now that the character selection process is fixed up and redesigned, all attention this week is to updating the last of the squares and testing them for bugs. Then on to adding in another win condition: placed wins.
The Dope Game
The art just never stops. This week was more redrawing character set-pieces for each interaction.
As shown above, each character was redrawn with a lot more detail and some changes made; mostly because up-scaling never really works. Surprisingly, these character set-pieces take a lot more time than one would expect and will probably go on for the next two weeks of updates (surprise, surprise). The environment shots take even longer.
Nonetheless, everything is a 1:1 drop-in so no code needs changed out for any of this thus saving some time down the road.
Well, that’s about it for this week. Join me next week for another rather uninformative update on where things are at!
Dev Diary - 3/12/20 - Haulin’ Oats And The Dope Game Remaster
Hey there! Another day later than usual and another rather boring (for you) week of updates. This has been mostly a week of art and non-game development stuff. Let’s get to it.
Haulin’ Oats
Art assets were the focus this week. Still a lot more stuff to draw for alpha version 0.0.2 and most of what I did was focus on consistency across sections of the game.
This was mostly making certain text match the new logo and updating all associated images in various parts of the game like the main board, main menu, and square interaction pop-ups.
Since the new guest characters have been added in, I also spent a little bit of time expanding, re-writing, and bug-fixing the character selection process right before turn selection. There are now even placeholders for the guest characters who do not have cards drawn yet but should before v0.0.2 drops on Steam / Itch.io.
The Dope Game
This week’s Dope Game progress was also all art. Still slogging away at environment and character upgrades. Here is an example of the new versus old Alpheus Park.
Next week I hope to show off some of the character upgrades. Since the next major holiday in-game is Halloween, the seasonal environments and character changes will probably come after the game updates on Steam; mostly to save time on development and since it’s not really urgent.
Again, nothing too exciting and I’d wager nothing too crazy next week either as it is more drawing and less coding!
Cheers!
Dev Diary - 3/3/20 - Haulin’ Oats And The Dope Game Remaster
Hey there! So the dev diary is a day late this week; kind of spaced it with all the different things going on. That being said, let’s dig into what’s new.
Haulin’ Oats Status
More progress on the Steam setup. All of the header, capsules, and additional assets have been created and entered, both for the store page and community. During that process the main title got a little update with modifications to the font and a darker drop shadow added.
Statistics and achievements were all entered with quite a few of the achievements showing the specific progress towards obtaining them. All depots have been set up and are ready to be filled. Even though alpha v0.0.1 is buggy, it is added as a placeholder for v0.0.2.
The store page still need finishing and trading cards will be added at the very end right before launch.
As far as the game itself is concerned, I am still plugging away at getting all the new square animations rigged and the underline square code updated. Most of it is the same but the there are now instanced scenes for the banner and text backing so they can be animated and reduce the code-base per square.
Hopefully all the square will be updated to the new system this week and move on to the last few bits before getting alpha v0.0.2 shipped out!
The Dope Game Remaster
This week was a lot of drawing. Pretty much only drawing actually. Recreating all the background environments is quite the undertaking; especially since they are more detailed.
The shot above is of Crockfort / the main title screen and you can see the pretty significant changes that have been made.
Also the character avatars have been dropped due to the way the new dialog window is set up. The avatars, however, are still being re-drawn and will be added to the credits page next to the names of the people who played those characters.
The face-lift for the dialog interface will have a line of coke that slides into frame based on who is actually talking. Granted the player mostly just picks a response choice. Here we see what the full interface looks like with all the test data in place. Pretty fancy compared to the original.
That’s about it for this week. See you next week for more updates!
