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.