Exactly 2 weeks ago, Sunday, November 11th, I made a rather poor decision. I do these quite frequently, at least on a small scale, so this was hardly out of the ordinary; but about 3 or so hours afterwards, I knew I may have really messed up.
I had reopen my old Echoes of Lotus code, from the Summer of 2016, and started redesigning whole thing from top to bottom.
Now, you may be thinking "Josiah, how could restarting work on this thing you have designed have been a bad decision?"
Well, that's a good question; allow me to explain. I am a student. I am in studies right now. I had 3 paper's due that week, none of which I had totally finished; I do not have time for this!!! (Don't worry, I finished all of the assignments in plenty of time)
So, after nearly an entire Sunday, Monday, and half of a Tuesday recoding over half of the engine to make some massive, much needed improvements (read: fixes), I slowed down a bit, and worked on redesigning some of my art. Now, you might be thinking "Oh, you just reopened it; you don't need new art yet. I'm sure what you had in 2016 was fine". Well, you would be 50% right; the other 50% would be the art that looks like this:
That is a rather poor looking Lotus. It's supposed to be the main character of the game, travelling beside the player, offering a unique viewpoint of humanity and this new world the player has just stumbled onto, and it looks like a knock-off Flowey clawed (leafed?) its way out of the pixel factory. This was one of the designs that needed to be refreshed.
So I sketched some ideas, on a scale of 1-5, from most flower-like to fairy-like:
After asking around and a bit of redesign, I settled on a nice 3.5:
(Yep, that's white out; I erased the face 1 too many times)
After that, I sketched one last pose on how he would ride with the player. You see, the idea was that he would simply sit on the player's head; not an unreasonable thing for a small flower, like the original design. But this new one, I worried it would look perhaps a tad ridiculous if he was just sitting criss cross on the player's head for most of the game, so I drew this:
After that, I was sold! His small, child-like body and leafy, sprite like design weren't what I first imaged, but seemed to fit the character I had personified so nicely, I knew it was a great match.
Now, the hard part. You can anthropomorphize a plant, I think I did a fairly decent job; but what about an animal? No, not just any animal, a crab; a creature with a head and body so inhuman, I couldn't find a nice balance between the animal and human shapes that visually represented the character I wanted depicted. Could I have just chosen another, simpler animal? Sure, but the inherent, often malicious nature of a crab, anatomically, fit well as a representation of young-ish, but tired spirit I had written. And so, A CRAB HE WOULD STAY!!!
After a while, I figured I had some idea:
...And everybody said he (the bottom design) looked creepy... T_T But, I couldn't think of anything better, so for now, that's how he looks. A friend of mine tried to draw an idea. It looked like if Genma Saotome and the Buddha had a weird looking old man crab child; not a bad design, just not what I was going for.
Technical Stuffs:
So, when redesigning the program's code, probably the biggest change was switching from a state machine, a method where the game only runs a single mode at a time, such as only running the map or only running a fight, and a lot of things pertaining to maps and fights are global variables, to a state stack, a more advanced structure where states such a Map, Fight, Cutscene, and so on, are stacked on top of each other, and the program draws all the states from the bottom up, only updating the top state. I felt like Oprah, reprogramming this part, "You're a State subclass, and you're a State subclass, EVERYONE'S A STATE SUBCLASS!!!" But, after I sorted it all out, with about 10 or so State subclasses, it made the overall structure of the program much easier, allowing me to add and remove states as needed, preserving the data underneath. Of course, there are still a nice set of global trackers, but these are still organised, and only need to be grabbed by the top, updated state, giving me an ease of mind that my map won't suddenly change itself when I have a Cutscene stacked on top of it.
Narrative Stuffs:
So, the story was pretty much set, even back in 2016 (remember, I had a good 5 months to develop it). I have tweaked minor things here and there (it's always remained in the back of my mind), but recently I have rewritten some major parts to create a concise, self consistent, and branching storyline where the player's choices can majorly change the outcome of the game (similar in the vein of Undertale or Bioshock). The backstory lore is pretty much exactly the same as it was a couple years ago, though I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing...
Anyways, that's all for now. School's gonna be getting busy soon as finals approach, so I don't think that I'll be making a ton of progress before the Christmas holidays; though I do hope that a (super rough) demo will be finished by (or at least around) New Years, though I can't make any guarantees. I'll be back when I have more news!
Thanks for your support!
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