Happy Apocalypse Day

Happy Apocalypse day everyone!

This is the first post on the progress for project Epok. So far there’s been great progress on getting the interpretation of Chat Mapper data into flash. The XML parser and data serializer is already complete. I can generally read in most of the useful data such as dialog nodes and keep their hierarchical organization. The obstacle I’m facing currently is dealing with Chat Mapper’s use of Lua for conditional logic. I spent last evening looking around for any readymade Lua to flash interpreters. I was looking at a project called Lufacode but for it not being supported since 2009 I ran into some issues trying to implement it with Epok. I’ll be looking around through other open source projects but if worse comes to worse, I can make a simple script interpreter that will achieve some very basic functionality for the time being.

My hope is to finish up the Lua interpretation and work on the dialog tree navigation this weekend. If I get that all working I’m on the fast track to merging it with my scene manager and dialog box code to create a chat mapper project visualizer. Things seem to be moving a bit faster than I thought so I’ll keep you guys posted.

Announcing Epok

It’s been a while and I’m certain that I've gone and made people worry again. There hasn't been any updates and my posts from before were getting more and more vague. The one promise I did make that I intend to keep was that if I were to ever halt a project, I’d have the decency to tell you guys. I can’t go on misleading you guys any longer and I’m announcing that I have shelved Cow Girl Farmer for the present time.

Yes, yes, I know that it’s a damn shame. I’m pretty upset about it too. Setting a goal and not making it is always a shit deal, but it’s better to bite the bullet and kill it, oppose to allow it to cling on the back of the mind and on others hopes.

So what now?

I've been busy learning plenty of new things at work and playing some interesting games out in the community.  With new ideas and a stronger technical toolbox I am prepared to march into a new project I’m calling “Epok”.

Read the rest after the break...

Little By Little...

It's been a while since my last post. I'm trying to prevent these from getting so spread out but it's really hard to embellish on things when so little happens.

It turns out that I'm pretty terrible at scheduling my job work time and my free time. Many late nights programming at work followed by attempts at coding on CGF afterwards has been nigh impossible. To remedy this, I'm current trying to code in the morning before work. I've been able to look at things for at least a half hour in the morning so that's some small daily progress there.

 If you are wondering what I'm still working on, it is those dratted scrollable dialog modals I've been playing with for the past forever. I've been spinning my wheels for a while on implementing a design pattern I've used in XCode iOS for selecting table rows. I'm under the impression that it is not working out very well. so I'll use another method and hopefully get pass that soon enough.

This week is going to be another slow work week however, since an awesome game I'm waiting on called "Castle Story" should have its prototype released Wednesday-ish. Ahh, distractions abound and motivation lacking; these are the cruxes of indie development.

More Nada

It's tough coming around with excuses all the time, but the fact of the matter is that I've been way busy with work. It's the good sort of busy, taking bigger projects, more responsibility, along with a good sense of accomplishment. I know you guys aren't so interested in my non-cgf activities, but right now it just can't be avoided.

At the very least I can assure you that I'm not in a "burned out state" or "fed up with things". In fact I have a pretty positive outlook right now and don't have anywhere near the same issue as when I last disappeared. Little by little progress is made, whether thoughts on my mind, or a function or two here and there; stuff is being done.

Take a short vacation and when you come back you might see things change. I'll still be here.

A Non-Update, Update

I let this past update come by way too late. I hope no one was ready to toss in some eulogies like last time. I've been super busy these last few days. Apparently, working in a start-up means you are at work all the time. So I've been pretty pressed for any sort of time whether for this game or anything else for that matter. This constant work load will lighten at some point once a certain work project is finished and we move offices.

So the quick answer is that no progress has been made in the past week. My plans and goals have not changed so I'm still shooting for getting a new version out in the near future. It just seems that the "near-ness" keeps getting pushed back.

I simply wanted to say to not lose faith, and that I am still trying my best here. Hopefully, the next news is a bit more productive.

Still Working on those Scrollables

Just to give you guys an small update, I've done some work on the scrollable stuff I mentioned in the previous post. It got a little hairy writing the code so I didn't finish it yet. I'll keep messing with it for a bit longer, but once it is working, it will mean that at least 3 or 4 major screens will have their primary features in. Next few days are going to be pretty busy for me so I'll shoot for the weekend to knock this one out.

Scroll-able Selection Menus

The past Labor Day weekend served as a nice bit of vacation time for me. I had some fun playing Natural Selection 2 since they released a pretty good update recently. Its a hybrid First Person Shooter  Real Time Strategy game that I'd recommend checking out (Google it). Unfortunately this means that I didn't devote much time to the project.

However, I did manage to designed out the new scroll-able selection menus that will aid in making selections and filtering large lists of items. This will take advantage of the new scroll bar system I've made and allow for special dialogs that will be populated by "button bars" containing a wealth on of information that should allow at-a-glance stat checking and comparisons. I was originally intending to put this off until after the next release, but I realized this would prove useful for the new stable screen in choosing selections such as cow girl jobs and diet. It will be much better than what is currently seen in the old build and it could potentially have features such as sorting by name or type or quantity.

With the plan made it will be merely an effort of coding it in with the some of the existing architecture, and with that the stable screen will be mostly functional. I'm still working out the design for the growth system but that should be finished soon as well.

Thanks again for sticking around guys and I'll keep you posted!

Dialog System Done, Re-Developing Growth System

After fighting with it for a while, I finally have the desired result and my dialog system appears to be working. I'm particularly giddy about the text crawl effect I've successful added. While it hardly adds much, it behaves just like a dialog in RPGs/VNs and can be fast forwarded with an extra click. Not nearly as intrusive as it sounds and looks pretty neat; take my word for it at least for now.

I mentioned that my next focus would be the screens, but thinking about the stable screen required that I finalize the majority of the properties cow girls have. In particular, I was stuck on the new implementation of the cow girl statistics. I need to carefully plan how I store this information so that it can easily be serialized for both saving and loading. When it comes to the physical stats of cow girl such as weight, bust, hips, etc it isn't safe to just save out the literal numbers as the growth system can be adjusted in newer versions breaking older data. I'm still in the designing stage, but I intend to reduce the system one that uses a few "magic numbers" and a total calorie count to calculate out the intended dimensions of the cow girl. The magic numbers will quantify the separate dimensions of the cow girl and when multiplied out with the total calories will produce the given dimensions.  That way, if I change the way numbers are produced, the cow girls should remain proportional to the way they are intended (which should still allow for some craziness).

With this bit of extra abstraction, it should be a simple matter to allow options for either imperial or metric measurements. Hopefully this pleases the many non-American players out there. If any of you find my explanation confusing, don't worry, it sounds a bit funny to me too. I'm sure I'll have a formula figured out and I can toss it up for the mathematically inclined to look at.

Slowly things are coming together. These next few milestones are taking me right towards a proper release. I hope to have the activity and growth systems in as well first pass of the farm system implemented for that release. I'll get the chat mapper stuff in afterwards so it may not be too much longer. Hang in there.

Working On More Dialog Stuff

I've gotten some time to think and I've designed a decent work around for the dialog issues that I mentioned in my last post. Essentially, I'll be using a system that will break up a dialog event into two parts; a begin and end function. The begin will fire off the dialog and release the execution back to the main game, while the end will only fire by an event triggered once a button is pressed in a dialog.
This may seem like what I originally was trying to do but I'm now testing passing functions as arguments. I'll have a single function a dialog begin, but I'll be able to pass it any "end" function I want that can be custom designed to receive unique information. I would like to draw a diagram but that might be a bit much.

Anyway, for this weekend I'm going to see if I can use this method and finish up getting dialog working, and then move onto getting the farm and stable screens up and running again. There didn't appear to be any interest in a livestream so I wont be doing one this time around. In the future there might be something worth watching.

Event Director and Script Builder/Processor Progress

This past weekend allowed me to dive back into the Event Director and work on the Script Interpreter that the director will interface with. The director is now fairly solid, with the ability to be called with simple events and be able to control and modify the screens and game state data. It's much better than what I had going last week.

The Script Interp system purpose is to interface with the Chat Mapper "scripts" that will be all in XML. The idea is that I will be able to write dialog and actions into the chat mapper interface and the game will interpret those into actual functions and perform work. The system is currently broken down into 3 parts, the Interpreter (receives xml), the writer (converts xml scripts into function code objects), and the processor (fires off functions). I've gotten much further along with this script system than I figured I would. Both the processor and the writer are in with room for adding additional functions. The interpreter's framework is in but is hooked up to some debug code that is made to resemble part of the output I expect from the chat mapper xmls.

I'm pretty happy with what I managed to do but I hit a pretty bad set back that I was gambling on. I found out the hard way that Action Script does not support multi-threading. It's kind of obvious from a programmer's point of view, but I deluded myself with the familiarity I have with C++ coding that it would somehow work in the end. Before I make it sound more like the game was murdered, I'll specify that system I was using for handling dialog and messaging will need to be redesigned. Essentially, I wanted a dialog to pop up, allow input, and be able to output it so that it can be immediately used. Apparently, without multi-threading, I cannot "wait" for the player's input without freezing the game. Now I have to do some crazy solution that will use several event calls and some specific dialog output storage and function callbacks or weird voodoo. I have no idea and I'll be spending the next few days puzzling this one out.

Just another bump along the road, so don't worry about it, I'm just venting.

On a final note, I was curious about dusting off the old, Live-Stream account and wanted to know if anyone is interested in watching for next weekend. It would be mostly just me coding but I could always combine a QA and what not. If there's enough interest I can set a time frame.

Minor Progress and Weekend Plans

As predicted, I was pretty busy this past week. I did get the other job, so that week of extra hell was worth it. I'll figure out the transition to that work in the upcoming weeks and I should be back down to a regular workload soon.

As for CGF I have had very little time to get much of anything done. I got around to doing some work on the Dialog Box system and an early pass on the Event Director. The Event Director is going to serve as the interface between game systems like the job assignment and basic navigation with the dialog and event script systems. This is where the Chat Mapper stuff will interface once I get around to it. Ideally, I'll be able to have a shell that will allow me to force a few commands that will both guide and control screens and dialog conversations.

I say that it's a first pass as it was a complete failure last time I played with it and I'll be backing up and reevaluating my approach this weekend. But once this feature is running, I should be able to jump between screens and launch conversations using my new and improve system. Beyond that I'll need to rebuild a few more screens and we'll be back where I left off with the current version of the game. Hopefully exciting stuff, but still some ways away. I'll try and give at least another status update when the weekend is up.

More Design and Some Scheduling Changes

After taking a serious look at the main farm screen and coming up with some new ideas I've had to put some time into designing the new stable screen. The basic idea of the stable screen is that it takes the place of the cow inspector but also allows for job/activity assignment. In the act of combining and shifting the purpose of some screens I've come to new conclusions and ideas you guys might find interesting.

With the simplification of stats such as health into ability points, there's a few opening for different interactions with this ability point resource. One idea I struck on was using points for funding levels of physical activity that your cow girls will perform besides their job/activities. The basic idea is to have neutral non-effecting level and to have sedentary and active levels. Going down either way would cost additional AP (doing nothing can be limiting too) but provide different bonuses. I'm still figuring out what kind of bonuses there will be, but I'm imagining that sedentary lifestyles will promote bonuses to certain types of growth while active lifestyles can help control/ maintain figures. There could also be other types of bonuses and possibly demerits but I think it would be nice if they balance out making either choice useful in its own right.

I also wanted to add the ability to talk with your cow girls. These will be one sided conversations for the most part, but will demonstrate their mood or hint at secret stats and the like. I also plan for this to be a particularly important option for special characters that will have story lines or deeper interactions than your standard affair cow girl.

The visual layout will be more dependent on select items from collapsible drop downs. It's a bit complex on my end, but I want for it to be easy and intuitive for the player. I have some crude layouts on paper but the closer I get to building these elements the clearer these layouts will become. I also hope to use a much better scroll bar that I've developed that more closely resembles a classic one like on the side of your browser.

On some side notes I'm just giving a heads up that I'm going to be super busy this weekend so output will be low as well for the rest of the next few weeks. I'm looking at a new job prospect and I'll be doing some extra homework to get myself up to speed. If this works out I'll be pretty much be doing the same level of work as I am now for significantly more pay. Wish me luck!

And on a final note I wanted to share this cool game that Muhznit brought to my attention.
http://primalemotion.deviantart.com/art/Cow-Girl-Game-v-0-5-319386070
It's a fully animated flash game all about milking cow girls! Its quite similar in theme as I'm trying here so undoubtedly you should go and check it out.

Game Progress and Design Help

A note for those interested in helping with some design stuff, check after the break.

This weekend has been pretty great for me in terms of getting stuff done. The new screen manager is finally working. While it doesn't behave too differently from before, it now supports the independent nature of the individual screens and doesn't rely on complex coordination with separate managers in order to function. It also has support for simple transitions like pan or fade outs between screens, but I'm not sure how I'd want to use such a feature yet. I'd show a screen shot but the current state of screens is quite underwhelming. Those will come soon.

Buttons are now up to spec and have shed the unnecessary complexities from before. I now use a single button class which can be attached to special flash object and function uniformly. I still need to revise more complex button code such as drag and drop, but it should be drastically simpler than it was before.

Basic keyboard handling is in. While I've realized that there's a bit of work to get context sensitive keyboard navigation on screens, I can at least use the keys for run-time debugging commands.

I know this has been a long coming feature, but I got the framework for loading and saving outlined. I've explored my options and I'm going with using the local shared object system that most other flash games use. The trouble ahead comes in the method that I need to serialize the data back and forth between the saves and loads. Basically, I need to break down the various forms of save-able data into templates that can be interpreted back and forth. While it would have been easier to directly cut and past the Game State directly between loads/saves, I would run into the issue of version mismatches and incompatible saves whenever I update the game. This is the main reason I put off adding this feature for so long, but with some ideas I've gotten from work, I believe I can tackle this one competently.

I needed some help figuring out design issues which I go into detail with after the break...

New SSD and Some Design Stuff

This last weekend I got my hands on a new Solid State Drive. It was a decent deal, a 128 Gb SSD for $95 plus a $20 rebate. I never owned one before, so I re-installed my OS and dedicated software onto the drive to take advantage of its speed and its working quite well. Boot times that were a complete slog now complete in less than a minute and my tools launch reasonably well. I'm looking to finish upgrading my machine with a new high storage HHD and a backup external drive, but I'll be waiting some time for that in order to save and find a good deal.

As far as design changes go, I've been looking at the Farm screen and I've been trying to figure out how to better utilize it as an interface and a primary message screen. Before it was a bit packed with specific functionality with the job assignments as well as the navigation and alerts.

I'm currently designing changes from making it the all in one space to making it the player's "Control Center." This screen will be used primary for displaying the important information that changes day to day as well as provide a base for all navigation to other screens. I'm imagining a sort of system that will allow for daily summary messages that will populate changes in the cow girls, holiday events, crop conditions, etc. From this point, you can use buttons to navigate to screens such as the Barn which will be a combined Cow girl inspector and job assigner. A ledger screen that shows your finances over the course of the game. A full calender that lists important dates. A Storage Menu for managing inventory. Access to town navigation and more.

It isn't too large of a change, but I feel that this will provide relevant information at a glance and ultimately aide the player. I'm still looking into the details of what exactly each of these screens will have, or which will be available, but this should at least provide some idea of what is to come.

Free Game Idea and Donation Goal Reached

In a previous post I mentioned messing around with plenty of RAGs games and how they were filling my mind with all sorts of ideas. While not too many of the ideas were very relevant, I did settle on an interesting idea for a new RAGs game. Now before you get too excited, I'm just throwing this idea out there, I'm not planing on doing it myself. I just need to get it out there so it can stop occupying brain space.

So imagine a text based rpg in which you play as a woman who gets trapped in an alternate world where fatness denotes beauty and status. In order to survive you must gain weight to first of all not be mistaken for a slave, and then interact with a world that puts an unusually high emphasis on ones weight. You can climb your way up the social ladder by gaining weight and putting on certain appearances and interact with the right people. Or you can keep to particular low weight to take advantage of your physical prowess (over the heavier natives) and become a member of the society's under belly. I imagine themes between balancing your own needs and desires as to get ahead, but not lose oneself to hedonism and corruption (or perhaps head straight into it whole heartedly). End game could be finding a way back home or become a master of that new world.

This is something that can be done with just narrative, or as a RAGs game with visuals as well. I'm not going to pretend its a unique idea, but I think it's something that could be really cool and relevant to some people of our tastes. So have at it creative peoples, your are free to take the idea if you so wish, no credit is needed. Just share it so that others ( and me ) can enjoy.

In other news, I've just reached a donation milestone! Thanks to your generous donations I now have enough to purchase an Indie License of that Chat Mapper software I mentioned back a few posts ago. While I still have yet to get a good test drive of the software and build the necessary XML parser, I do have high hopes for integrating it with the project and using it as a solution to my dialog and event driving. I wont buy it until I'm certain it works, so for that case it doesn't work out, I'll be able to use the funds for something else. So thanks again for your attention and support, I'm still trucking along but I hope that my next few posts are filled with more exciting updates.

Screen Manager and Dialog Work

I've made a small amount of progress this weekend. I'm still deep into my re-factoring goals but I'm close to putting my ideas to the test. I've redone the Screen Manager to use a form of "Double Buffering" system. Previously, I held a reference to every possible screen all at once. Something around 10 fully loaded screens with initialized objects. I'm in the middle of testing holding no more than two screens at any moment. I have a single front buffer that displays the current screen and a back buffer that loads the next in coming screen as soon as it needs to. Once the back buffer is finished loading, it will fire off a command to swap buffers bringing it to the front while bringing the other to the back and safely unload it. This will take some testing to demonstrate the performance benefits but this may be best as each screen can now independently manage itself without the need for an all encompassing puppet master. This double buffer system has also given me ideas for possible transitions between screen which are commonly seen in Visual Novels.

The other system I'm working on that I'm pleased with is my new Dialog Window system. Before I treated Dialog Boxes as one off events with hard coded custom logic for which ever screens required it. Now I've developed a suite of common dialog boxes that all screens can readily spawn and customize. These include things such as Alerts, Confirmations, Input Boxes, as well as the main Dialog box. The real awesome part is that they can perform their job independently from a single function call and output the result to a single object. This is a vast improvement from the button nightmare I had before.

On the non-code front, I've been looking at bunches of different free erotic games for further inspiration for CGF. I ended up playing tons of RAGs games found on TFGames. While quite a few of those games are well made, and share some pretty interesting ideas; None seem to attempt to achieve what I'm trying right here in terms of scope and theme. Even so I might be pull some narrative ideas out and finally give an actual environment to CGF. I'll make sure to keep you guys posted.

Lazy Summer Steam Days

It's been another week and boy has it been an unproductive one. I was hoping on getting some work in on the weekend but with two Birthday parties and Steam Summer Sales nothing was going to get done. Hopefully by Wednesday I'll get Anno 2070 out of my blood and will myself to work. I'll let you guys know what actual progress gets done as soon as I accomplish something of note. Until then (or next week), later.

Designing, Planing and Less Coding

I've been trying to get around the whole lack of physical coding time by spending most of my downtime time just writing designs and code in a notebook. Hopefully this will end up saving tons of time for when I actually get a chance to do more work on my computer. I'm really happy with the architectural changes I've been making which is shape up to be a huge improvement. I think I have what I desired with screens utilizing a form of Model View Controller relationship. I've decided to use a combined Viewer and Controller relationship with custom models that are then attach. These individual screens will be self sufficient, and not rely on accessing pure Global variables. Before I had a separate manager that were running a muck changing code in too many different classes at once. The new screen manager will simply load and unload screens as needed and the dialog editor will actively drive the event logic for the screens. For example, when you enter town for the first time, you maybe greeted by an npc and share a small conversation. Later when you go back to town, the script will remember that you already had that conversation. This will work nicely for events that will happen in common areas, but the exact sequence of these dialogs will be managed all through the dialog editor. These scripts will be running on top of the primary farm game mechanics allowing for me to properly separate out the various levels of interaction. I still have quite a bit of planing to do, and I'm hoping I get more time to actually mash some code in, but I believe it's coming along nicely.

Looking at New Dialog Editor

In my last post I mentioned that I was looking for a good solution for my scripts and dialog woes. After some searching I came across something that might be just the trick. The software is called Chat Mapper, and it is a complete dialog designer and editor tool capable of exporting to a usable XML format. On the site you can take a peek at how the interface looks and has a couple of demonstrative demos.

I imagine using this will tool will provide a structure in which conversations can easily follow and progress with less hard-coding and mind twisting logic. I can see I would be able to separate two major aspects of the game (farm management and visual novel aspect) and run them in parallel oppose to being hopelessly intertwined. This tool may also allow other developers/writers to get involved without me having to build a separate complex application tool.

The immediate challenge is building a robust parser that understands the XML scripts. Unfortunately the trial version does not allow XML exports but there's an example XML file for me to look at on the site. If I'm able to get something I like out of that I may go ahead and purchase the Indie License. I might dip into my donations to pay for it, but I at least see that as a relevant and worthwhile investment for the project.

Progress Update

I've gotten around to doing some coding but it isn't anything too remarkable.The majority of the new refactored data classes have been framed out. There is now a distinct separation between the reference data and the dynamic game data. These classes now have a extra levels of abstraction that should aide in keeping the base data better encapsulated and less likely to run wild like they did last time.

Other than that I'm working on designing a new game text script manager as the last one was completely glued to a Global function call. I want a robust system that can handle dialog trees and work in parallel with state changing scripts. I'm pretty much at a loss for what to do at the moment, but I'm going to be reading up on a few articles that might provide some better insights.

And one more note for the Americans, happy Independence Day.

What I've Been Up To

It's been too long since my last post, and its only fair that I share what's going on. This past weekend was jammed pack and I had no time to code. However, I've been baking my plans and strategies in my head these past few days and got some time today to finally pour some out. Wasn't too much work, but it feels good to get some progress while the past few days have been frustrating due to my limited availability.

For those code minded, I found a better example code for the Model/View/Controller stuff I talked about before which can be found here. I'm using a slightly modified version of this code that provides a solid base for the various screens that I use in the game. The idea is for every screen to have its own MVC setup which will greatly aide in the organization of the code. Before it was just a cluster fuck on a single location with global calls left and right. Now, everything can be encapsulated correctly and pull only the necessary information each screen requires.

I'm going to be sitting on my button re-designs for a bit longer until I create some better plans. That way when I make time to code I can just blast it in. This seems to be working well, hopefully things will keep rolling.

Weekend Progress

Sorry for the delay in giving a progress report. This last weekend was pretty busy and I really wanted to get post something last night but I was playing Assassin's Creed. I swear it was nearing the end but it just keeps going.

With excuses out of the way, my latest work has been heavily on the whole refactoring issue. I've established some of the new engine classes and I'm working on organizing it better than my earlier attempt. Basically, I'm following a better Model-Viewer-Controller scheme that will make the code less interdependent. It's the sort of stuff I've been talking about since forever, but it's quite a wonder once you see it action (as a programmer) and you can swap things left and right with no problem. The window system I'm using now should allow me to have better control of the content by keeping the data and the display separated.

My next main concern is the problematic button interface. I'm looking to take better advantage of event dispatching and less on using Global variables. However, this one is really, really important so I'm going to take as much time as necessary to get this right.

Mostly boring stuff I know, but hang in there guys.

Change of immediate Plans

While coding the farming screen items I discovered how poorly my button group code was made. It's not very well made for dynamic instances. For instance, I wanted to put multiple field instances on the screen in which would have a changing button that would turn from "Plant Seeds" to "Harvest Crop" or hide the button. Not to mention the fact that I wanted the number of field objects to be dynamic. My current system would require a ton of hard coding that would be useless to me once I switch over to a better system.

So I went and spent last night getting headway on doing the refactoring first. This means that farm system testing update I planned wont be coming out soon until the refactoring is done. This is necessary due to the nature of development. You simply don't have all the proper solutions until you understand the types of issues you encounter during the development itself.

I really do hate leading people on and not delivering but I know that the only way I can progress is if I can do these other lengthy changes first. I'll be sharing my progress through design change explanations and interface previews like I had sometime before. In parallel, I'll also be focusing on building tools for testing particular features that require fine tuning. Gagecoalbrace had helped give me the idea to build a tool for testing the growth system independently from the game. It could utilize volunteers to try and balance variables to make the outputting results more reasonable. I'll be sure to let you guys know when this one is ready as well.

Some New Design Ideas

On my ride back home on the bus (I never did get that car), I tried to figure out some better design for CGF. My previous attempts have been mostly in the "meh," category, but I feel like I had a sort of brain blast today.

The first major design change that I believe will be for the better is the transformation of the current fatigue system. Right now, you need to carefully track the health status of each cow girl, even though you are most likely repeating the same activities and have to switch out to rest after so much time. This makes the management system more tedious, rather than helpful. My proposal is changing the fatigue system to an "Action Point" system in which every day a cow girl's AP is restored to her respective maximum. You will be able to queue up as many activities as you can limited by a AP price per activity. The idea is, once your cow girl grows and becomes more skillful, certain tasks will reduce in AP cost and her total AP reserves will increase allowing for more activities. You will not run into the problem where your cow girl is suddenly too tired one day when she was fine the last day.

In order to take the best advantage of the AP system, I believe removing the shift system would be best. Right now it's forced with a training and work shift which have little distinction besides the available tasks. Throwing all the activities into a single pool for a day will solve issues such as at a glance planing and reduce the number of clicks to organize said day per cow.

These simplifications will allow me to build interfaces with greater utility and purpose. I would like to know if anyone has an particular feed back or additional opinions on these ideas. I'm planing in implementing these and other changes like it during my refactoring process.

As for a release, I'm working on it right now but don't feel comfortable on giving an ETA. My last estimations were just terrible. I'll try and update down here depending how tonight goes.

Weekend Plans - Derailed!

So I've found myself in another busy weekend. I wrapping up some last school things including graduation (I finished back in November) and that's all taking place soon. Kinda sneaks up on you when you aren't looking. The plan for tonight, and if I have any time Sunday evening, is to get out that prototype of the farm system with a few bug fixes.

I'm itching to do plenty of refactoring, but I'm saving that for after this release. I hope I'm not hyping this farming feature too highly with the time I've had you guys waiting on, but I'll do my best to get it out this weekend.

Update


Welp, It's Monday morning and I'm afraid to say I don't have the system working to satisfaction. I ended up being much more busy than I originally accounted for and my last night effort only highlighted additional issues. I'll be getting home earlier these next few days so I'll see what I can do tonight and for the next few days.

No Release Today - Sorry!

I don't mean to dash peoples hopes, but I didn't get enough time today to get a proper release in. This simply means I'll work on it little by little during the work week. I'll make sure to keep you guys posted on future progress and will of course put up the release once it's ready.

More Farming Progress

Doing things slightly differently today. I have a nice block of time and I plan to get as much of the farm system working as I can today. Ideally, I'll try to get a build out this weekend, but it's too early to tell at the moment. There's no streaming planned, but if you want to catch me, you'll find me on Fenoxo's chat which can be found here. I'll most likely give an update when I wrap up my work later tonight.

So I managed to do a bit more work in implementing the farm system. The majority of the system is in. You can now allow cow girls to do farm work as an activity which will provide a small cumulative bonus to field crop yield. The actual farm system logic is implemented, I just got stuck on my terrible button implementations and the pop up for choosing which seeds to plant. It will really help once I get the re-factoring going.

I'm not sure what my time availability for tomorrow is, so I can't guaranty that I'll get a build before the weekend is out, but I'll try.

Perforce Fun

It was nice that we had a long Memorial Day weekend but that just means that I have to fill my hours in the remaining four work days. Therefore I've been generally exhausted from long days in the office and the stress for my company's pending E3 announcements. While I'm not high enough on the totem pole to really feel the heat, the tension is high all around. I expect to have little output until the weekend, but I thought it was best to give a little info.

But besides making excuses, I did manage to get around to playing with my own local Perforce Server. It's something I've been meaning to learn to do for a while and it's not as terribly difficult as I once thought it would be. For those who work on projects, especially group projects, a type of version control system is a must for keeping you material backed up as well as readily available to team members. The magic is that I can review changes between files over time and backtrack as necessary in case of bugs or other issues that occur. Perforce also allows you to organize your changes before you save them onto your server and provide all sorts of labels and additional information. While it may sound like overkill, it is really worth learning how to use and is an invaluable tool. Using my personal server will give me a bit more control over the service and still allow outside users access. When/If I get a team going on this, everything will be ready to go full throttle.

Sorry if this post became a bit too tech focused or sounding like an ad pitch, but I felt it was at least valuable to share.

Progress on Field Screen

The stream ended up a little short. It might be a better idea for me to try and work earlier. As for what I was able to do, I made some headway on the field screen. Fairly simple stuff, as I was quickly noticing how entangled my code is and trying to remember how to set up specific objects I've previously modeled. I've arranged a few windows to provide the interface for viewing the status of the player's fields and what character's are currently working the fields. I'll spend the next effort in actually wiring in the functionality.

 The second thing I'm excited about is trying out my own personal Perforce server. For those interested, Perforce is a version control service that not only backs up your projects, but also provides the ability to backtrack file changes and grants access to multiple users. It's similar to SVN, but it has a few more bells and whistles that I've learned about from my job. I'll be using this along side of my re-factoring efforts in order to build a stronger foundation for the project to stand on.

Weekend Plans and Potential Saturday Stream

So I was driving home from work today and my car went kaput. The engine belt was damaged and I had to get it towed to my house. Not the greatest or worst thing in the world, but you will see how it matters in a moment.

The current plans for the weekend revolves around building a functional prototype of the farming system. You will be able to grow a few crops to either sell for profit or provide food for your cow girls. I'm still figuring out the specifics of the system, but my aim is to test out at least one type of prototype in order to get player feed back. Depending on how the system turns out I'll see if I can quickly release an update for everyone to toy around with.

While I'm receiving feed back on the farm, I plan to re-factor much of the engine base code. I've been recently reading the "Pragmatic Programmer" and have come to realize that my code is strongly non-orthogonal. For the technically interested, this means that the code is not well modularized or separated. Much of the code has overreaching dependencies that as exemplified in the book, is not unlike the difficulty of flying a helicopter. The goal is to make cleaner, maintainable code that will be easier to expand on as well as debug.

As for my plans for the stream, I'm looking to spend time on Saturday either in the morning or late evening. As I hinted earlier, I'm most likely going to go car shopping this weekend and not sure yet when that will be taking place. I'm hoping by Friday night I can get a time for those interested in joining in.

EDIT: Looks like it will be Saturday evening. I'm going to aim for 8:00PM(Central Time) but I can't guarantee it yet. I'll plop a new post when I start.

Fixed a few issues

I had a bit less time to work than I thought I would this weekend. Saturday morning was my open time slot and it just so happened the fuse box was being replaced at that time. Oh well, it needed to be done.

Looking over the code, it was much less cringe worthy than I thought it would have been, so I guess that means I'm improving. I was checking on the few bugs that were reported and I added the feature to deplete food as it is eaten. The cow girl can also end up skipping a meal now if you no longer have any food. There are no real demerits set but as expected this will result in a net weight loss. Later on you can expect sickness and maybe even death.

There was also an issue where weight wasn't being applied correctly for the milking task. The idea was that milking would cause minor breast growth over time, but the wrong values were being triggered. I'll be testing these a bit first to better tune the growth.

The issue mentioned about getting cow girl bars stuck on the screen is a bit more obscure for me, so if anyone can provide a test methodology to reproduce the bug would be greatly helpful.

I'm also finding myself struggling to find a good balance in design for implementing the farming interface. I'm still not too happy with the current design for the cow girls' role in farming. I'm thinking around too many ideas on how exactly a cow girl activity will effect crop growth. Would they simple boost its growth rate? Will greater skill mean a faster boost? Is there quality to consider? What does it mean for more than one cow girl to be working the fields?

I thought I had these things figured out but as I checked my notes, it appears I never really settled on it. Not to mention how it would actually display still remains a mystery. If you guys have any ideas I'll certainty listen.

I may try to stream next weekend if I get some decent plans down first. I'll try and give a date and time by Thursday or Friday.

Sorry for the Disappearance! An Excuse and Future Plans

I can only begin with an apology. I can't help but feel that I've taken the mantel of an abusive parent that will give his child abandonment issues. While words can only convey so much, I'll first at least give some form of explanation.

The last few months have been difficult to say the least. Being out of school for over 5 months and not having any form of work/income was getting a little too much for me. Working on this project helped keep my morale up but this last month I was panicking. With some pretty poor timing I had originally decided to get artist on board and raise funds to do so. After the first week or so with little success with getting people on board I couldn't face my combined predicaments and tossed all my efforts into getting work and coping with my personal onslaught of mental despair.

Luckily, just recently one of my contacts finally pulled through and I was just able to get a full time position at a game developer company. This has pretty much been a dream come true for me and has been a major boost to my morale and provided a much needed structure to my previously unemployed time.

While this does mean I have physically less time to actively work on this project, I now have that drive to work again. I'm looking towards using my weekends to spend time on coding CGF with the weekdays doing some minor planing. The work I did between the last build and now isn't substantial enough to warrant an update yet, but I'll at least give a progress update this weekend. I imagine most of my time will be used reacquainting myself with the code base but I'll see what I can do.

I must especially apologize to those that have been kind enough to donate towards this project. I've gone and updated the donation tracker here and I'll make an effort to date my tracker updates. The funds I have collected have not been touched, as they were originally intended for hiring artist help, but I'll need to either find help soon or strategize another proper use of these funds. It was asked in a message so I'll mention it here; I will not share any of your identification or personal information that I receive from the donation. It's only a common courtesy.

Thanks for sticking around.

Also, I wont bother deleting any of the criticism I've received because some times people need to say what's true. It should serve as a nice reminder.

Slow Few Days but Plans are Made

The past few days have been slow for me in regards to the project. I've been spending time on a few other necessities so I haven't gotten around to updating. Sorry!

However, I've been getting plenty of extra feed back on the last version, and it seems there are a few obscure-ish bugs that need crushing. A few of them should be simple but I'll have to look deeper into the game breaking ones.

In other news, I am currently designing the farm system and was having a small discussion with some users on the best sort of implementation. There's still a bit of haziness on how it will exactly work, but I am trying to build a system that allows the player to choose their seeds, grow crops over a time span of days, use cow girls to assist in crop growth, and harvest those crops for either sale or food for the cow girls. I'm also looking into making the seasons relevant to the crops as well as other Harvest Moon type features. I'll have these features more or less ironed out soon in terms of design and start coding once I have something I'm happy with.

Beyond that I see the introduction of some exercise activities and more balancing of the current activities effects on cow girl growth. There's also the cow girl trader and then we might be able to start on narrative and  an actual "story."

On a final note I just wanted to say that I received my first donation! Thank you very much for your contribution. I promise to continuing bringing more quality content to the game and I hope that you are excited for what's to come.

CGF V0.12 Released! Also Accepting Donations!

Hey everyone, I'm happy to release Cow Girl Farmer Version 0.12! The main changes here are the new stores available and some major inventory changes. You can now sell items through the shipping crate at your farm. Check the bottom of the post for the change log. While not much has been added in terms of content, some nice milestones have been reached and I would like people to try out the new interfaces and tell me what works and what doesn't.

Download Cow Girl Farmer V0.12b here!
Version 0.12b has a quick fix for store buying calculation issues.
Version 0.12a has a quick fix for the milking crash.


The other big news to share is that I am now opening up donations for the Cow Girl Farmer project. It isn't a secret that the game needs art and I fully intend to get quality content into the game, however, I'm currently searching for an artist to help me reach this goal. The kind of person I'm looking for will need a degree of talent, but more importantly desires to be a continuous contributor to the project. I also feel that it is only fair that an artist that devotes their time is compensated monetarily for their effort, as I wish to foster a professional relationship with my partners. This however calls for the need for donations as I'm not quite well off at the moment. My goal is to ask you fine people that enjoy CGF to please donate for this cause if you can. I am aiming for a goal of $600 dollars between now and the next few months. This should be enough to attract a willing artist as well as help me in my current financial circumstances. Future donations maybe geared towards fulfilling specific content requests.

If you are an artist that is good with UI design, character art, or environment art, interested in joining this venture please contact me either by email or you may add me onto skype. My information is available on the side bar. Also note that I'm not looking for a single master of all these traits (although that would be awesome), multiple artist can easily be involved with this work.

Thanks again guys for sticking around and please enjoy!

Cow Girl Farmer V0.12a Change-log
---------------------------------

• Removed Drag Drop Testing Screen
• Fixed Cow Inspector skill slider
• Scaled back text size in dialog box
• Added hover text manager and hover over info logs
• Edited and moved date information
• Player gold now visible
• Added more items
• Split player inventory into separate lists - Rucksack, Feed Box, Shipping Crate
• Ability to move contents between inventories
• Can now sell goods by placing them in the shipping crate and advancing a day.
• Altered the effects of food on cow girl growth. Generally dampened calories from foods.
• Implemented minimum cow girl dimensions - Can't go below 90 lbs
• Added temp icons for items
• Fixed noted typos - Thanks Kamujin!
• Fixed issues with milking and receiving milk bottles.

NOTES:

• You must place food in the Feed Box for it to be accessible to the cow girls. The initial food is placed there by default
• Seeds are purchasable but not yet usable.

Inventory Swapping Success

That whole theory of mine from the last post actually came to fruition. I am now able to transfer items between two inventories with a simple drag drop interface that seems fairly intuitive. The next few images illustrate the process of transferring an item from your rucksack to the feed box.







The input area of the pop-up will only take valid number input and is set to the maximum transferable by default. You can change it to any valid number between 0 and the max to transfer fewer items. So far there aren't any apparent bugs with this system.

The next challenge is using the same setup with the shipping crate which would display the potential returns the player will receive for shipping their items. I also just wanted to thank you guys for hanging in there, as I know progress may feel a bit slow at the moment, but it should lead to more awesomeness.

Working on Inventory Stuff

Warning: Mostly code talk ahead.

I spent time today building on the Shipping Crate idea and boy was that a can of worms. I quickly found out I had to redo my inventory system a bit to compensate for having separate storage for items that the player retains. Right now there's the player's main "Rucksack," a "Feed Box" for food that the cow girls, and the shipping crate.
While that wasn't too bad, when designing the actual interface for allowing inventory transfer I ran into some other features necessary that I hadn't figured out. I imagined having two drag drop lists on a screen labeled by their storage name with their contents. Drag one item from list to the other, and record the changes. Simple right? Nope! I need to know how much stuff a player wants to drag over. This requires a freaking pop-up with input text for item quantity as well as confirmation and cancel buttons.
I did have an already established pop-up reserved layer that the drag drop interfaces use. So far I've built a pop-up interface that uses this layer and should have all the features I need. Not quite all together yet, so no pics tonight. But hopefully it will come togeather soon.

Store Base Progress

I spent some time working on the store and I've gotten most of the functionality working pretty well. I can populate whatever items I wish from a list and can now purchase items through this interface. The player can change the quantity of the product they wish to buy and the prices immediately update on the icons themselves. You can see how the store currently looks in the screen below.

Note that the listed items in this example are all duplicates and cost 1G each.

After some additional designing, I've made the decision to remove the player inventory from appearing at the store screens. You will not be able to sell any items or goods directly at a store. To replace this, I'm taking another page from Harvest Moon and implementing a shipping crate at the farm. The player will need to place whatever goods they wish to sell into the crate and in the following morning the products will be sold. I'm still figuring out the specifics, but I imagine more drag and drop interfaces with a predicted gold count that will be earned. This will take some more time to get working, but I think it will be for the best.

Unproductive Weekend!

I just thought it would be fair to mention that I haven't gotten much work in the past two days due to Terra Online. There's currently an weekend closed beta going on and I wanted to give it a shot. While I think Terra is a great game (and its so pretty), it is an MMO, and I just can't afford paying for something that costs as much as Skyrim and still requires a monthly subscription. So at the very least, I wont get sucked much further into that...

I should be over it by Sunday, so I'll let you guys know of any actual progress on the CGF.

Working on Store Inventory

I've got a nice block of time to work with today between 1:00 to 4:00PM. I figured I'll make it a stream to make up for the lack of updates yesterday. I'll be working on getting store stuff in, and I'll have the mic on so you can ask me anything. I'll also be connected to Fenoxo's chat. Like usual, use the link is on the sidebar or below.

Join me on livestream here. Now Online. Stream over.

During the stream I've managed to develop a bit of the store system and made the store inventory box. It consists of a definable amount of drag drop buttons that display their prices. Hovering over them will identify the item as well as give its description. You can see this in the image below.




I have quiet a few more things to go before the store is ready for use. While the player inventory will be very similar to the code I wrote for the store's, I still need to get the shopping cart and a bunch more buttons working. Hopefully, things will continue to go smoothly.

Hover Text is In

I've been mostly doing planning and designing for the next few features. The next focus is getting the town and more importantly stores in the game. I have all these other ideas for potential stories and town characters that I have to try and not get carried away.

The one step that I worked on to get the stores working is adding in a proper hover text feature. Many software interfaces use these, as they act as help text for identifying icons and buttons. The system is simple and I can turn any object I want to have a hover text. In the picture below you can see it being applied to the skill icons in the cow inspector. It is dynamic too so it will change size dependent on how many lines of text there are.


This will allow me to shove much of the store item text onto the hover text freeing up screen real estate. I'm imagining having a large box with a scroll bar with the stores inventory represented by square icons in which the player can drag them into a shopping cart. I can do the same for the players inventory in the case they want to sell items. Small buttons at the top would act as tabs to toggle between the different item types a store offers, such as seeds or food. We'll see how that goes.

Cow Girl Farmer V0.11 Released!

I dunno where I found the time but I've Marathoned us to an earlier than expect release! To download use the link here or on the side bar. I've outlined pretty much all the changes I've made below, so take a peek and try it out. Please note while it seems like a ton of stuff was added, there's still crap loads more to go. This should at least give a better feel for the game, so please enjoy and share with me any and all feedback. No matter how critical it maybe.

Download CGF Version 0.11 Here!





Change Log for CGFV0.11
-------------------------------------------------

• Added Vital Stats on to roster buttons
• Added Vital Stats on Cow Activity Items
• Temp portrait image
• Added icons for vital stats
• Changed Cow Activity Sets from button interface to drag drop interface
• Added Results Display
• Press enter/return key to trigger dialog box next
• Added Text Parser for dynamic story text.
• Revised various Activities Text
• Added cow girl fatigue. If they are too tired, they will not do activities.
• Added growth modifiers for participating in events
• Leveling up a skill will appear in result box
• Happiness and obedience stats can now be increased
• Added improved activity text with 100% less face kicking
• Added new activity Over Feeding
• Toggling between cow girls in the inspector now takes 2 click rather than 3

Streaming for Streams Sake

I feel like getting some stuff done early today so I'm looking towards streaming until Noon whenever. The focus today will be implementing the parser and trying to write some better text that takes advantage of the dynamic word replacement. Never really tried writing on the spot like that but we'll see.

I'll be starting in a bit. Streaming now! I'll probably be going for a quite a while more than I thought.

Join me on livestream here. Stream is now over.

Welp, looks like this more or less became a marathon for me. This goes against what I suggested earlier but I will have an update later tonight. I'm putting a few new things but it's still only a slight improvement. I'll make a new post with the release once it's ready.

Added Result Displays

I got around to doing a few more things today. I managed to finish up with the vital drag drop implementations that I left off on last night as well as implemented a few other features.

Some of the feed back suggested that having to click several times to forward through the shift change notices was tedious. I added keyboard handling; specifically, enter/return key presses for forwarding through dialog boxes. I can also add further keyboard key support with the implementation I used.

The bigger achievement I've managed was building a Result Display system. Going with the tedious screen issue from earlier, I cut out the second text notification of stat changes and made it into a separate display that appears when the activity story text appears. Take a look at the image below for an example.





This system allows me to queue up an entire summary of results and groups them with headers of the cow girls that the results are associated with. This would make it possible to show a shifts results all at once. I may hold back from using that, however, as I still want the story text to be associated with the results. The empty space in the center can be used for displaying a job related graphic down the road.

The next tasks I'm aiming for involves implementing my text parser for this version of CGF. I was looking over some older code and I had made and I had no idea what craziness I was doing there. I'll just have to read back up on Regular Expressions to get up to speed. Basically, this text parser would allow me to use dynamic text that can easily replace cow girl names into stories as well as shifts in mentioning their dimensions such as the difference from tiny chest to humongous tits.

Covering the parser and implementing new activity text should put me close to releasing the next version. I'll see what more features I can come up with before then to cause more delays. :D

Feeling Close to complete with Drag Drops Interfaces

I've been a bit busy trying to implement the Drag Drop interface in conjunction with the original button interfaces and I'm nearly there. As you can see in the image below, I've gotten the drag drop assignments working fairly well.






You may also noticed I drew in some place holder art for the vital stats and I also scribbled a portrait since the white box was getting pretty bland. The last drag and drop switch-a-roo here involves removing girls from an assigned task by dragging them off and out. It seems like a reasonable UI move but you guys will be the final judges on that.

I believe I should be able to get that last portion working tomorrow, but I wont have as much time to work on CGF this weekend as I promised a few friends to get work done on another project. There's still a bit of content I want to add still so I don't think a release will happen this weekend. Of course I'll be keeping you guys informed so keep coming back to see what I'm up to.

Drag Drop Interface Progress

I've been in a slump the past few days but after figuratively slapping my self a bit today I managed to pull through the majority of the Drag Drop Interface code. I am quite please with the current results as you can see in the images below.





As you can see from the images I can set separate groupings of what I refer to keys and locks combinations. The locks associated with the currently dragged key make their presence known to the user and change color when it is the key collides with its closest lock.

My crazy theory more or less worked and I got nearly all the features I desired implemented with a working inheritance model so I can customize the drag drop objects and use specialized functions to do just about anything I could want when they would normally trigger.

While the images above is a test using simple geometry, I should be able to stick all the buttons and interfaces I want into the key instances that are dragged by the player. I will need to re-code the current relationships between the button interface and this new drag drop interface. Hopefully this goes smoothly, but I'm backing up all my code incase something explodes.

Sorry for delays in alpha updates, but time and will power have been in short supply. Hopefully this bit of progress pushes things further.

Progress on the Drag and Drop Interface

Warning, mostly code design talk ahead.
I've been tinkering away at the Drag and Drop issue and I've designed a form of a solution. While I can't give any screen shots at the moment, I can at least explain the theory of the interface. The Drag and Drop system is split into 4 separate objects, a "Drag Manager", "Drag and Drop Object","Drag Target", "Drop Target". Drag and Drop Targets are properties of a "Drag and Drop Object" which is managed through the manager. The Target objects act as containers that can hold any graphic or button item  and behave as their own original type (such as a button), but also carry the dragging drop ability. The other important feature is to create cues for the player to understand the drag drop interface exists. When the player begins the drag the potential targets will stand out with a highlight. Once the drag is complete the highlights disappear.

If anyone has ever worked with flash, there is a native dragTarget feature for Movie Clip objects. However,  that pre-made solution isn't enough to deal with the craziness I require. When ever you use that feature, it glues an object to your mouse. I need to be able to take that object and make sure it is visible at the top most display layer, can access collisions from objects on other layers, and then become an entirely different object as soon as the player lets go.

I feel like I've gone a bit rambley with this explanation but it seems to be working so far. Tomorrow I should have something visible and work out the kinks.

Targets for Redesigns

I haven't gotten around to doing much coding, but I've been doing some planning towards solving the current crop of issues. This will be more or less a wish list rather than the an exact plan of action as it may take time to develop one step over another.

• First off I'm going to implement stat info to the job assignment buttons such as the much needed health stat. I was leaving space for relevant skill progress but using that space for stats is much more important. I'm thinking of using an icon with a percentage would be best and I could have at least 2 if not all the primary stats displayed in that space.

• Make the job assignment process more intuitive. The suggestion of only showing cows not currently in the current selected job on the roster list makes a ton of sense. I will get rid of the extra buttons on the bottom of the roster screen and apply a drag drop solution. This should lower the click count a bit and removing a cow from a task will be as simple as dragging the cow off a task list and releasing the mouse. Cows removed this way will be put to the rest task.

• Shift change job confirmations will still try to tell a story, but I will make a stat summary box that will show the stat changes  instead of a second text message. The stat summary will display at the same time as the job confirmation text. I also plan to make the enter key effect the dialog box button, so less rapid pace clicking needed.

This is just what was on my mind and wanted to share. If you feel there's anything more that I should add or have better suggestions please send them my way here.

Plans Moving On

So I've been receiving tons of feed back. Thanks a bunch guys, it helps me figure out the problems quickly and allows for me to plan necessary corrections. One of the most common things that's cropped up is general spelling and grammar issues. I'll admit that most of the text was pretty ill-inspired and intended as a place holder for now. It's evident that I didn't even  put it through a word editor, but please do note that I will improve on the writing quality as we go onto future versions.

The other major issue that I'd like to address early before going on is a few knuckle head UI choices I've made that need resolving. The first being the absence of a cow girls health bar on the job assignments and too many clicks for assigning jobs. I figured it's better to fix something as important as vital UI as early as possible rather than building on top of something that will need to change further down the line.

What this all means, is that I'm going to spend some time solving these issues before I get to increasing/improving content. It is much to early in development to expect daily game version updates as some of the other developers are capable of so I'll steadily do releases as I feel is fitting. I imagine I may have some other changes included with the UI improvements ready for next time, but that's still to be determined.

Thanks again guys for testing out the game, and little by little, this game will begin to take shape.

Cow Girl Farmer V0.1 Alpha Released!

I had a pretty busy morning so I'm barely getting around to begin work and stream. As always, please follow the link below or on the side bar. The agenda today is getting the final visual elements in place to allow for an alpha release. I'll try to put it out for download after the stream, baring unforeseen consequences. We'll see how things go.

In the stream today I managed to implement a display for time. It shows what shift you are in, the day of the week, month, etc. You will notice that I'm using a Harvest Moon styled calender and this will be important later on in development.

With that taken care of, I'm proud to finally release the first alpha of Cow Girl Farmer!  Its been a long road but the show is just getting started. For now just try it out, tell me what you think and I'll get going with my next plans for the project.

For those unfamiliar with downloading .swf files, all you need to do to run them is open the file with your browser that has Adobe Flash installed. That's it.

Download the CGF_V0.1 here!

Surprise Stream! Activities Fleshed Out

So I have a large block of time and I want to get some stuff done and figured I'll do a stream. I might put up my mic, so if you hear someone rambling it's just me. I'll be watching the chat logs from Fenoxo's chat and the local livestream chat. Not sure how long for, but from now to maybe 3PM (GMT-6).

I will be going over activities and maybe other stuff. We'll see.

Stream is now over.

Thanks to the few that were able to join me during the stream, it made things a bit more interesting and certainty kept me going longer. The stream timer claims I went on for close to 5 hours. In that time I was able to add the Farm House location and implement sex based activities as well as create calculations for successes and failure for the other other activities as well. There are unique messages for how successful the activity was as well as varying rewards. The writing is pretty bland at the moment and will be better once I get to designing better scripts.
I still need to add a few more visual elements to the game to finish preparing it for other's to use. I'll most likely get to that tomorrow. I may try to do another stream around the same time, but I'm not sure what time I'll have available again. Depending on how much I get done tomorrow (and how much others push), I'll see if I can get the release out that night. But this is certainly not set in stone.

Cow Inspector Pretty Much Done

I managed to more or less finish all the statistic displays of cow inspector screen. The last two items being the status effect and diet boxes. You can see what it looks like at in the image below.


You can also switch the cow's diet to a different food item found in your inventory as shown in this image below.


The other various buttons listed on the screen may remain as place holders for now and will do stuff at some later point in time, but otherwise the screen is pretty much done. This leads me towards setting up the game flow to simulate the actual game for the purposes of the alpha. I'm still not sure what final features will be included besides what I had listed on my about page. I'm thinking of not including the item usage beyond the food items though.

Also remember that this is going to be alpha, the very first one at that, so there wont be much to fap on except for number porn. I expect to make descriptions and events as interesting as I can with continuous iterations and input from the users. Thanks again for hanging in there and check back here the next few days for the release.

Status Effects

I was feeling pretty lazy today but when I actually got to working I noticed something missing from the cow inspector. A space for status effects! I had forgotten all about adding this important feature. Status effects could be a wide range of things, but they will function as special add-ons to a cow girl which can have variable duration. Think of status effects in an RPG like Final Fantasy, if you are poisoned, certain bad things will happen at specific intervals. Buffs are also possible as well as progressive states. These status effects will be activate from activities, items, special events etc. I have a couple of ideas in mind for a few, but I'll implement those depending if the jobs I release will utilize them in some way.

I'm going to have some more time the next few days to keep working, so I'll keep you guys posted.

A few tweaks here and there

I had some free time today to get some work in. The major thing I was able to fix was the structure of my scroll menus. My original (crappy) implementation required unique classes for each separate instance it was used in. The trick I used was forcing all the content that would be managed by the scroller onto a single container property of the scroll bar. This is a pretty simple solution that allows me to still manage the content inside the container from controller classes from the outside. The nice thing about this one is that I can use that single solution for every instance and utilize only a single class for it.

The other tidbit was fixing some logic code so that it no longer scrolls an arbitrary amount, but scales by the amount of content is on the page. In other words, if there's less content than there is window, the scroll bar does nothing; if there's a ton, it will scroll as much as needed for the last bit of content to appear. Like, you know, a proper scroll bar.

The one issue I have yet to solve is the sticky characteristic of the scroll button. It uses a begin drag function when it is clicked and is suppose to stop once released. However, if the player releases off frame, the release doesn't trigger and it feels like you have fly paper attach to your mouse. I'll put some thought to this problem, but it is something that can be fixed after the alpha.

I suppose this wasn't as interesting as getting more activities in, but those will need to wait until next week. I wont be around the next two days and the earliest I may get some more work in by is Sunday night.

Working on Cow Inspector

So I had started early and ended an hour earlier. Got some work in but had to cut it short because other business happened. I'll get some more stuff done today as soon as I get free time, but no more stream for the day. There will be a further update later today.

After some more time spent on the Cow Inspector I've nearly completed it. It is accessible from the Farm screen and allows the player to view the details of their cow girls.



As seen from this image there are vital statistics such as health, happiness, lust, and obedience as well as their physical measurements and the trained skills the cow girl knows/is learning. The buttons on the right are mostly options and actions you may perform. The item I still need to put somewhere is at a glance information for the cow girls diet. The empty center space is reserved for a graphic representation of the cow girls if I can get artist involved with the project.

After this I'm going to go and build some more activities and write some decent descriptions with dynamic text. I'm sure there will be tons more bug fixing to go through as well. As I mentioned earlier, I will be gone for half the weekend so it will be pretty much impossible for me to get the Alpha out before the weekend is up. At least I see that I'm still on schedule for the end of this following week.

No Work Progress but Streaming Planned

The last two days have been pretty busy for me. Was stuck trying to finish another flash game and going to an interview. Hopefully that works out. Luckily, Thursday, I will be pretty free and I expect to get some work in; so I figured to try and stream it. The focus will be building the cow inspector screen and getting all those features together. Not sure how far I will be able to get, but I'm going to commit around 3 hours or so.

The plan is to work from noon to three (GMT-6) or possibly later. As usual, I'll be lurking in Fenoxo's chat room. We'll see how things go.

I hate scroll bars

So I went ahead and tried to make the scroll bars for the menus. Scroll bars have some pretty good support in Flash when working with text, but I was pretty much left to my own devices on the type I needed. It took me a much longer time to get through than I thought would be reasonably possible but I managed to create some sort of solution. It's a sort of hacky solution, and it's hardly inheritable and its a special case implementation every time I use one; but hey its in there. If anyone has any tutorials or reference on someone making menu scroll bars that move more than just text please send them my way. For now I have a single image that shows it in action.

I've designed much of the layout for the cow girl inspection screen and I just need to implement it. This will be interestingly more complex than the other main game screen as there are several forms of information that will be displayed using small scroll boxes and various pop up overlays. There are several buttons here for setting the cow girls diet as well as talking to them or getting a character description.

This one should take me a few days to do if I do it correctly, but things seem to be moving a lot faster than I imagined. I'm going to be away for half the weekend so that might cut on a bit of progress, yet at this rate it is feasible to have an alpha out by late next week. Don't hold me to that though, as I still want there be some sort of experience to be gained from playing rather than just being my guinea pigs. We'll just play this by ear.

Working on Growth System

I got some time to work on the game and I was busy finishing up the item system and did some work with the growth system. To clarify, the growth system is one of the key features of the game. It essentially, is the expansion portion of the game that allows you to transform your cow girl workers over time. Dependent on the food you feed them and the work they do, they will over time express changes to their figure such as getting bigger boobs, butt, bellies, or simply gaining weight. The changes to their physics will effect the way they gain skill experience but will not be overpowering to the degree in which certain figures dominate specific roles. The growth system isn't one way, as special diet plus exercise and hard activities can work against it as well. I see that it could be a dynamic experience that will allow players to have a variety of cow girls without outright role casting.

While the system is capable of doing all these in its current form, an enormous amount of effort will needed for testing the weight scaling and make sure it all adds and feels correct. This will probably be something toyed around a lot as the game progresses.

As far as project progress goes I've come to the realization I will desperately need a type of scrolling feature for many of the menu systems I've already implemented. There's only so much info I can fit on a screen at one time and its not something I've made before so I expect trouble. But with that taken care of I can get down to the cow inspector and be heading towards Alpha.

Ciao.

So I got a second Moniter

The main reason I didn't want to do any live streams was due to the fact I don't have a second screen. I recently rectified that problem with my galaxy tablet. It had just occurred to me that there had to be some sort of android tablet as a monitor software and lo and behold there is. I'm testing it right now and it seems to be working well, and streaming seems to work too. So the plan is to test out more streaming during the morning. I'm shooting for 9AM to maybe 1PMish GMT-6 Saturday(today). Hopefully I wont oversleep and could get some more stuff in with the pressure of potential onlookers. We'll see what happens.

Join me at my livestream link here or on the sidebar.

Streaming is over.


The stream went on for about 4 hours. Thank you guys that stopped by, hopefully it wasn't too dull. I managed to complete the activity shift system so that you can now progress shifts much like in Daisy Strike's Otherworld game. I also built the skill system with a leveling up system for the various skills the cow girls can train. The last thing I started was the item system.
Beyond the item system, the only other tasks before alpha is getting the growth system and the cow inspector screen in. Those two are the gorillas in the room and may take some time to tackle. After that it's some code tidying and I can release the limited Alpha.
As far as more streams, it will be on a "as soon as I can" basis. I have to change gears and complete another project before Wednesday, so I'm not sure when I'll fit in more time. But I'll keep you guys on the know.

Ciao.

I'm Back with Stuff to show for it!

Excuse me again for the long absence. They are again, inexcusable, but at least this time I can say I honestly got some good things done! I've beefed up the game engine with many of the features I'll be needing. The additional screens and overlays I will be adding will have most of the functionality already built in so I can really get trucking now. The biggest accomplishment was getting the activity assignment system for the cow girls functional. The player can choose locations for activities and assign their cow girls to the active activities, which will remove them from what ever they were doing before. The great thing is that I can use as many activities as I'd like to this system with little additional code. Take a look at the images below and there's more text after that.








I'm currently implementing the shift cycle system that takes the information from the interface and performs the activities which will show descriptions and provide results. After that I'm looking at making the Item system, the Cow Girl Growth system, and the Skill system. With those done we can start to talk about Alpha. Yes, Alpha, the one you guys will be able to try out. I've been pretty productive the last few weeks so I can say with some certainty that we can cross that bridge in the next few weeks. The feature list for the alpha will be a set number of cow girls to use, at least 4 activities to use, some form of growth system, skill progression, and testing item usage. The town, character creation, and save/loading features will have to come out later as well as more advanced features such as quests and stories.

So thank you for holding out and being patient. God knows the world revolves whether I'm here or not, so thanks for keeping interested. If you wish to reach me you maybe able to find me lurking in Fenoxo's chat room or just shoot me email. If I plan on doing any streams I'll throw a post up before hand, but I'm not sure at all if I want to do those anytime soon.

Ciao.