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.