Game Devlog #2 - The Visual Update! (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

Here it is! A new game devlog for the still unnamed project! (I really gotta think of a name for it before I release a closed alpha for you guys)

As usual, I'll be giving you a quick TL;DR of this week's progress before going into details: The game actually has visuals now! I've implemented a visual menu system, cleaned up multiplayer synchronization, implemented an OpenGL shader that'll take care of doing palette swaps for the game, made a character template base, and implemented mouse controls on top of the WASD ones

Phew, that was quite a bit for a single week hahahaha. I was able to do so much this time around because I'm now much familiar with GML, and also because of all the core stuff I implemented last devlog, as it provided a good base for me to implement this new stuff

Well, let's get into more details (and more importantly, pictures!)

New Menu

First thing I wanna showcase is the new and improved menu/ui system! (even though I didn't finish 100% of it yet)

I already had all the save/load functions for the settings and they were being applied correctly and stuff, but now we actually have a visual interface that's fully functional and dynamic

You guys  have no idea how many little details go into making something like this! I certainly had no idea what I was getting myself into hahahaha. You gotta consider stuff like changing states for the ui components/cursor, calculating collisions for interaction, making sure it's as customizable as I need to be in regards to values and colors and stuff. It's a lot more work than I had imagined!

I was able to get most of what I wanted working though, I'm just missing the components that require keyboard input (like the interface for changing controls, and text input like server ip and stuff), but that should be ready on the next week I work on the game

Character Base

I've finally decided on an overworld character base! I needed something small and a bit exaggerated for the players around the overworld and for once I really liked how it turned out

I have sketches and stuff for the more detailed portraits too, but they're not quite ready just yet to show so I'll be working on them a bit longer

Oh yeah, and this sprite template is fully modular too! all the limbs are separate and ready for me to create variants for body, arms and head, as well as clothing that the engine can render correctly in the future, so we should be 1 or 2 updates away from a character creator and a playable alpha version!

Multiplayer

Multiplayer didn't actually change too much in this new update if you can believe it. Most of the netcode was already implemented on the last devlog, but for this one I fixed some bugs dealing with player synchronization

In the future I'll be coming back to this and optimizing the server code a bit so it's much easier to manage and synch up entities and stuff. I'll also be implementing a better interpolation/prediction system to prevent player movement from appearing stuttery because of leg

Shader

I've learned a little bit of OpenGL in order to code my own palette swap shader into the game! You guys have no idea how actually simple the code is, but how at the same time no one in the internet has provided references on how to do it, so I ended up having to learn quite a bit of stuff just to implement this hahahaha

It's ok though, I'll be able to use this knowledge in the future to implement some more fancy shaders (I'm thinking ones for day/night system + objects emitting light), and the current shader works exactly as I need! I'm able to easily swap palettes for any sprites on the fly, which are already doing work to color all menu elements we've seen previously, and will play a key part on character creation in the near future

Mouse Control

And least but not last, we finally have mouse control properly implemented! WASD is still supported (and fully remapable too!), but now we're finally able to click to/press on a destination to move to, and control camera zoom with the scroll wheel

You might also be wondering that's up with a single square always being green while all the others around the character are grey, and that's because of me planning a possible future chunk load/unload system for the server. But that's a fair bit away probably

Alright boys, that's about all we got time for this week! We had massive amounts of upgrades and I'm really really satisfied with them!

Of course I have so much more stuff to implement in the future, but we can leave that for the next dev week, it might actually be a really good idea to alternate regular animations and game development, because it allows for me to "catch my breath" with either of them while I work on the other. It might be a healthy way of going about it

Anyway, I'll be seeing you guys next time! This week we'll be having an animation I've been meaning to work on for a while, and I think it's gonna turn out really really cool!

Seeya next time ❤️