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.

Minor Update

Tried to stream for an hour but had to end early due to some unplanned business. Some minor reworkings done but will most likely finish those portions later in the evening. Will try to better plan an interrupt free stream for next time.

Working on Engine Revamping

I did a stream for the 2 - 3 hours I was working. Next time I'm working I'll plop another posting with a notice and link. Later I'll update with the work/change logs.

This time around I got to reworking the engine shortfalls I had. I was mostly rewriting some of my screen management code to make better use of the shared objects that will span the various game screens such as the primary dialog box, alert notifications, and help text boxes.

The next primary goal would be to create the interactive features such as buttons and drag and drop interfaces, that have all the bells and whistles that the default flash code just doesn't provide.

It may sound like I'm doing a lot of stuff all over again, but I have the benefit of the previous code to compare and improve. So hopefully things go through fairly smoothly. I may try to get another stream in Sunday evening, or at least Monday afternoon.

I did it again, didn't I? Let's try this once more

It's been a while and I've fallen off the radar like I seem to do every so often. It's not the best trait to have, but it's something I'm actively working on fixing. So while I doubt more words will do anything to assuage any hurt feelings or neglect, I feel it's best to give a summary of the current situation.

I'm done with University. I'm free to go and walk the land without homework looming in the background. This also means I'm actively job hunting and will eventually (God willing) get a job. In the mean time that gives me extra time to focus on this project.

I've gain plenty of flash experience working on a game project I did using Scaleform and have some fresh new ideas on implementing the game. This however requires me to take a few steps back and rework lots of engine things that are now cringe-worthy to me.

I have a pretty good action plan on what I want to develop for this game in terms of the scope and the stages of development but will still be willing to discuss potential features and ideas for the game. I'll try to resurrect my forum postings once things get moving again.

As for streams, I'll probably try using them again as they work as a good motivator and prevents me from doing other things like playing Skyrim. I'll give a heads up when I will try and get another steam schedule going.

Here's to the nth go at making Cow Girl Farmer!