It’s been quite a while since I last updated. This, of course, was intentional. As I stated in my previous post, my goal is to get the game to a playable state from start to finish. I’ve been busy. Very, very, busy.

The short answer is, I’m still on track to achieve that playability goal before the end of the year. The long answer is, there has been a ton of new revelations, and development behind the scenes that has occupied a bit of my time that resulted in a betterment of my game. With that said, I probably won’t update again until the end of the year to inform you guys about the degree of playability I have achieve.

For now I want to discuss where I’m at, what I’ve been doing and what I plan to do.

Since the last update I’ve been finalizing the item document along with a rough draft of the most important events within the 7 year span of the game. Now, my goal for the next month will be hyper focused on one thing, I want to play through the 7 years JUST with the VERY basic gameplay loop.

Week Starts -> Work Job ->Buy New Items -> End Week -> Daughter Grows -> Next Week Starts

This is the core gameplay of a daughter raising sim. This doesn’t include the personality stats since that’s related to the macro/micro events that happen throughout the game world.

I need to make sure this core process works without problems before I push forward with anything else. Getting an effective core working will require me to have a series of essential items fully working in game. I now have 95% of all items documented but most of them are not in game.

The reason for this is due to a game feature I’ve been wrestling with for MONTHS and I’ve finally fount a workable solution. The feature in question is the glossary system. A glossary in game lists all items, characters, locations and world information so the player has a reference for information in one location available at any time. It’s also useful for collection purposes. Many game similar to the one I’m making uses a glossary system and it just wouldn’t feel complete without one.

Sadly, a glossary system is not available in the framework I’m using. So I’ve been spending months trying to come up with a work around. It even got to a point where I was going to just give up on the idea of including one in the game. That was, until I had a revelation.

You see, Ork Framework can not list items that are not in the player’s inventory, but it can list items in a shop. What if I just use a shop as a sort of faux glossary. Each time the user sees a new item, the shop will auto update with the new item. Of course I’m leaving out a lot of detail but the final result is, I now have a solution (it doesn’t use the shop but something similar yet with more capability) to list all the items in game just the way I want it.

With this problem out of the way, I can start adding in items without worrying about having to come back and make changes. (can you imagine having to go back and edit 100s of items because you forgot a small detail effecting each item?? NOPE, not me, get it right the first time I say!)

Besides that, I’m getting very close to having all the core art I will need in the game. I’m still deciding where I should cut off my requirements for any additional art I want. Never the less, I can’t wait to start showing you guys all this wonderful art that will be in game.

Code wise, thanks to recent events I had to make some changes to my GUI so inventory lists will better support large numbers of items. I’m hoping to keep any single list under a count of 99. The last thing I want is poor performance in a pure 2d game.

Playability Status: 50%

In the last month I will be razor focused on playability of that gameplay loop. Truth be told, I’m pretty confident it will work fairly quickly,(most of it is already done) the real time sink will be the data entry. (the items, remaining characters, and other unforeseen nuisance)

So much more stuff happened that I didn’t bring up but I touched on most of the relevant information related to my end year goal. I’ll talk to you guys again in the final update of this year. Until then, stay well folks!!!