(Non)Progress Report and School

It's been a while since I last posted so I felt it was necessary to get some sort of report out to you guys. Life has been pretty busy and hectic the last few days; with money problems and school starting back up. So I've been a bit busy taking care of a few things. Because of these things, getting work done on the game this week has been very difficult so I have little to say on progress.

But fear not! I'm still fully committed on going through with this project and getting towards that alpha and beta and stable end product whatever that may become.

Sorry I couldn't say the wait was for an awesome preview but I felt that it was better to say something than keep you guys in the dark. Once I get back into the groove of my classes I'll be able to find and schedule the time I can work on the project (and maybe regulate my postings times). At the very least I should be able to get some work done either tonight or tomorrow evening.


Pic by Woot

Building Interfaces

Hey peoples, I've been pretty busy with a part time job this weekend, but I wanted to share with the progress I've made thus far. Much of the back end is done especially the text parser and the event system I've implemented. The other parts will be implemented as their needs arise.

The focus these past few days has been creating the interfaces in which the game will be played in. Essentially, these are the screens in which all the action will happen in. I'm not quite sure if I'm using the most efficient setup, but I have movieclip objects for each of those possible screens which a manager will actively toggle and switch between depending on the needs of a particular event. Since I'm using Flash Builder 4.5 to develop this game, I'm now able to import graphics and objects I make directly into the project. This is great as the Debugger can recognize these and actually provide useful information instead of just telling me I borked it. Soon I'll have a small portion of the game flow working, such as player creation and limited options for cow girl activities. Will probably quite a few weeks more before I being asking for alpha testers to get in on this.

As far as the idea front, I'm drawing blanks. Just been so busy with other stuff that all I can do is aim for getting this game working. There have been some more good ideas discussed in the forums and I'll be digging through some of those when I get my head a bit more clear.

Text Parser Progress and Story Ideas

I finally got around to hammer out some more code today. I think I figured out the Regular Expression stuff so it should be a bit easier writing the next bit of my text parser. So far my parser can read in specific functions with custom arguments in the XML files that will automatically grab relevant information from the game. This is a vital piece for my conditional logic for sorting events that can be activated at any one moment.

Pretty awesome, but its only 1/3 of a single function. Progress is progress though.

In non-code news, I've been thinking about the back story for the game while riding the train. In a forum thread I mentioned that I wanted to put the setting in an ambiguous modern day rural area. The kinda setting you get from My Neighbor Totoro. A place seemingly behind the times due to its rural nature and where strange magical things can happen.
As for the reason for cow girls, I was toying with the idea of a human breast milk craze becoming the natural order in this world, effectively replacing regular dairy over the span of a decade or so. To fill this demand, an ultra corporation effectively gets indentured servitude legalized for gathering "employees" that work full time as human cows. Something mysterious happens and the ultra corporation collapses completely creating a void for the supply of milk and leaves the twisted laws behind. Therefore "organic" farms pop up everywhere trying to fill in the supply while taking advantage of the new slog of workers that either sell themselves or are forced by debt.

Kind of a twisted situation to not have to call the cows slaves, but "indentured servants." I'll take any constructive criticism for this idea and try to improve on it.

Finally, I was thinking that it would be great as part of the player's origin to start with a default cow girl of their choosing which would set the initial theme of the game. The first character I've imagined is Matty, a young, cheerful girl that grew up in the nearby town. She always had a love for the farm life and repeatedly visited the farm you currently use before it was converted from using regular dairy cows. She has a fascination with cows and wants to try and become one herself with your help. The only thing is, that she has hardly anything to work with, being a tiny thing with no curves to speak of or any practical farm hand knowledge despite her love of farms. She offers herself to be your indentured servant with the potential to be a great cow girl for your farm.

More ideas to come.


Pic by Katou Hayabusa

Working on XML System and Stuff to Come.

I've been pretty busy with other commitments at the moment but I wanted to share a bit about my tests with XML.  It is looking pretty fantastic right and I plan on dumping a ton of effort into using it as a primary engine component for storing the majority of the game's data. The idea is to steer away from hard coding much of the expandable features of the game such as items, events, flags, attributes, effects, etc and use robust wrappers to account for all the sort of random things a developer would want to make. Want to create a quest line where you can find the legendary potion of the fertility goddess? You will be able to set up a series of events that can land you the rare potion item that gives entirely new attributes or effects that cause your character to grow in any numerous ways. Certainty you can be more creative that that, but that's the goal with this system.

For those inclined, here's a sample of what an item may look like in xml.


<item name = "apple">
<type>food</type>
<price>10</price>
<icon>apple.png</icon>
<effects>
<effect>targetCow.Health + 10</effect>
</effects>
<description>
A delicious red fruit. Known for keeping medical staff at bay.
</description>
</item>

You will be able to add numerous effects as well as custom ones by adding entries into a separate xml file for effects. I'll try to provide a guide for using this stuff once it gets there.

While this XML stuff is great, I'm currently stuck on writing much of the complex parsers needed to read all this random bit of information. I'm knocking my head against the wall a bit, but I've managed to find an opensource string to math expression parser made just for Actionscript 3.0. I also rediscovered something called "RegExp" or Regular Expressions, something I used for finding and replacing specific text in my last game. Apparently it's much more powerful (and convoluted) than I originally thought, and may prove useful to this part of the engine.

Once this is all taken care of, a HUGE part of the game will be done. Still, it will still be time before I start grabbing alpha testers as I haven't even begun getting any actual interfaces yet. Hopefully that will also mean more previews and less walls of text. Time will tell. And if you actually read this far user, I thank you with this awesome image below.


Milk Maid by Gunneko on Pixiv