Tag: programming

February 2023 Status Update

After another very long hiatus, I have another update, this time about all my projects.

I made my last post almost a year ago with the best of intentions: to engage with my audience and work as an author/programmer full time while working a part time job. Then one positive pregnancy test, house purchase, promotion, and child-birth later—here we are. So here’s another update on the status of all my projects and where they currently stand.

Devilspawn

Due to a variety of circumstances, including those mentioned above, the most recent round of beta reading for Devilspawn was brought to a screeching halt around June. Since then, I have only sent out 3 chapters. Since consulting with some of my beta readers and author friends I have once again decided to split Devilspawn into three separate volumes, as each of the three sections of the novel can stand alone, enhanced by the other two. I have lately been working on compiling the first of those volumes, which has been beta read and is entering another round of editing.

Other Writings

On that note, after struggling for some time with finishing the next short story in the Maxwell Novacek series, I have decided to put it on hold for the foreseeable future. It is likely that I will return to it at some point in time, but I do not know when that will be. I have, however, begun working on other writings, set in the Paladins of the Crimson Cord universe of Lorelai (though with significantly less traumatic elements), that the perfectionist part of my brain has a much looser hold upon. I hope to be able to give at least some preview to them soon, though I am planning on releasing them as novellas rather than online short stories (I may still post excerpts online after the novellas have been released).

Lady Luck’s Chosen Few

One area where I have made a lot of progress is in my work on Lady Luck’s Chosen Few. Within the past year, I have gained a much stronger sense of direction and have a more solid foundation prepared that I have already pushed to the website, with expanded rules hopefully on the way. There is still work to be done, but I believe the new state of LLCF is far more playable and far more in line with my original vision.

Kyklos

Finally, we come to Kyklos. I don’t want to supply any promises I may not be able to keep, but I believe I may at least have a gameplay demo ready within the next year. I have made significant progress in the last year fine-tuning my pixel-art capabilities and learning how to better structure the overall code for the game. As of yet, I do not have any new images I’m ready to release, but I will be making a roadmap post with accompanying images whenever I do.

Conclusion

If you’re interested in following my progress, consider subscribing to XavierMakes so you never miss an update. If you wish I would have more progress, consider spamming the Facebook page instead of asking my family members when my next story is coming, so I have a constant reminder that people actually want to see more. Until next time (hopefully in less than a year from now), happy making!

Devilspawn and Divus Update

In lieu of releasing a chapter of Isle of the Dreamer (coming next week), I’ve decided to post an update on other projects I’m working on.

Unfortunately, there is no chapter of Isle of the Dreamer for this week, due to various things going on. I have, however, made progress on other projects in the past two weeks. Significant headway has been made on the most recent draft of Devilspawn, and actual work has been done on the video game I am working on, Project Divus (NP). More details below.

A Demon in the Night, Book I of Devilspawn

Unfortunately, Devilspawn sat dormant for several weeks while I got distracted by the wonderful prospect of doing nothing and lazing around all day. On the bright side, I have broken free from that temptation and made significant headway to the tune of and additional 30 pages.

As I write this, I come to the realization that I have given little to no updates about the writing of Devilspawn. Ever. Better late than never, I guess.

The first draft was 321 pages and the five people who read through it adored it. That, alongside actually finishing a draft for once, was a great confidence boost.

However, much to the dismay of the woman who is now my wife, I was unhappy with that draft. This was for two primary reasons (that are actually just one reason in disguise): (1) the draft had a lot of ‘downtime’ – periods where nothing would happen, involving multi-month gaps in time – which resulted in (2) a lot of plot threads being introduced in the final stretch of the book as they were being tied up. So, I decided to write out the second draft much differently – namely, by filling in the gaps, which padded out the book quite a bit.

The problem is that this made the book very long. It didn’t drag on, mind you, but it became quite long in the process, with many plot threads introduced toward the beginning of the book that wouldn’t be resolved until toward the end. Based on the length of the second draft, that probably wouldn’t have been for another 200-300 pages, which would be less than ideal. Thus, splitting the novel into two books.

Now, I could, of course, just write the whole thing out to its full length of 600-some-odd pages and then find a nice breaking point. The problem is that, with the way it was being written, that wouldn’t work very well.

Devilspawn is a character-focused narrative rather than a plot-focused narrative. There are several major plot points toward the middle of the book that would work as a nice finale for Volume I before transitioning into Volume II. The issue with that would be that its right smack in the middle of multiple character arcs. This would make the book feel incomplete.

Thus, my decision to simply start the next draft with that in mind: restructuring certain character arcs to be resolved before that point and pushing off other character arcs to be introduced after that point. Obviously, some character arcs will still span across both books, but the plan is to make Volume I feel more complete in itself, which is more pleasing in the eyes of readers and traditional publishers, should I end up needing to go that route.

Project Divus (NP)

Project Divus has seen many roadblocks in its production, not the least of which is my own laziness. The other was trying to work with a rather lethargic and disagreeable partner.

The starting area, with the main character swinging a sword

So, there’s been a shake-up in the production team, and I am now proud to announce that I will be working on Divus with my wife, Olivia, who will be working on the majority of the graphics for the game as well as helping me with level design. The two of us together have made what I would call significant progress on the game in the past two days. The starting area of the game is mostly completed, the Player Character (PC) can walk, can’t walk through walls, and can swing a sword. I say ‘can swing a sword’ and not ‘can attack things’ on account of I am currently having issues with making the code recognize certain colliders in the engine.

The Old Placeholder Graphics (left) vs the New Graphics, made by Olivia (right)

Other than that minor issue that I’m sure I’ll resolve soon, production is coming along quickly, especially compared to the last 8 months, where nothing was done except the creation of placeholder graphics (pictured above) that were very obviously based on those of the Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening.

Moving Forward

As previously mentioned, there is not chapter for Isle of the Dreamer this week. Rest assured, you lovely people who actually read it and keep asking me or my wife for more, another chapter is coming next week (hopefully). What I’ve been trying to do lately is release chapters on the second and fourth Fridays of each month with short stories being released on the Fridays between (thus, Sunny and Raphael).

The unfortunate reality is that life gets in the way of these sorts of things, especially when you haven’t actually released anything that can make you money (or don’t have a following at all) and have to depend on a day (read: 3 o’clock in the morning) job that leaves you feeling like time doesn’t exist for some reason and nothing matters.

That said, my goal is to release another chapter this upcoming Friday and another chapter the Friday after that, then return to the normal schedule. My hope is to keep releasing chapters and short stories alongside weekly status updates on the various projects I’m working on. If that doesn’t happen, see previous paragraph.

If either of the projects above happened to pique your interest, subscribe to my blog, either through WordPress or by way of using the email entry field on the right. Also, hop on over to our Facebook page and give us a like, leave us a comment, or share with your friends. Thanks for reading, and Happy Making!

A New Project: Untitled Game

Xavier describes his creative process in making a (currently untitled, text-based) game and discusses other topics such as programming, game development, and linguistics.

I’ve begun work on yet another project, because I have difficulty focusing on only one project at a time (or, rather, I have difficulty focusing on one project for an extended period of time, resulting in me rotating which project I’m working on).

The project itself is a currently untitled and I’m not sure what the main story will consist of (though I have a general idea), but I know a few things about it:

  1. It will be created using a game engine (story-making tool?) called Twine. That means that it’s going to be a text-based game, kind of like those old choose-your-own-adventure books.
  2. The game will take place in Kithria, the world I have created for low-fantasy stories, games, and whatnot.
  3. Like most of my other works, it will explore various social themes, including (but probably not limited to) racism and sexism.

Below are some of my thoughts so far as I’ve been working on the game.

Working with Game Engines

Disclaimer: I am aware HTML is technically a markup language and not a programming language, thus why, when I’m referring to both, I use the term ‘computer language’.

HTML is relatively simple as a baseline. Before I started working on this game, I had a little experience with HTML during my time as a CS major and the web developer for the Daily Egyptian. I could take a template that already existed and mess around with it to make the website I wanted. As well, I could make a (admittedly garbage looking) webpage from scratch fairly easily. What I could not do was create a beautiful webpage from scratch. And I still can’t. But Twine is based in HTML, so it should help me learn, maybe. Right?

Wrong!

I learned a similar thing when I first started working on Project Divus, in which I played around with Unity a bit. For those who don’t know, Unity is a game engine that is based in the programming language, C#. Making a game using Unity, however, requires more knowledge on how Unity works than how C# works. This is because Unity has its own classes, methods, and functions built in that the programmer needs to know how to call properly. Unless you’re adding completely unheard of functionality, the chances of you needing to know C# seem to be pretty slim, and knowing C# won’t make you proficient in using Unity.

This also applies to Twine. The only actual HTML I have used in the 6+ hours I’ve spent working on this game (at the time of writing) is to make a table so my buttons don’t look weird. Other than that, it’s all been calls to macros built into Twine or SugarCube (a sort of secondary engine built on Twine), none of which are accessible in basic HTML. Both pieces of the engine (Twine and SugarCube) have their own documentation, just like basically every computer language (Unity also has such documentation).

This all comes down to one main idea: engines themselves are, in effect, child languages of whatever language they’re based on. This is perhaps why creating an engine is so difficult and time consuming – in fact, many developers forgo it because creating a proper engine can take years for a relatively simple game – because you are trying to build a new language.

As well, this goes to show that just because someone is proficient in a given computer language doesn’t mean they’re proficient in engines based on it and vice-versa. Although, knowing a single language from a family of languages makes it far easier to understand other languages; e.g. object-oriented languages, such as Java or C#; or Romantic languages, such as Spanish, French, or Latin. Obviously knowing one language won’t make you fluent in the others, but I know of plenty of university students who have been able to decipher Latin documents because they know Spanish.

Nothing in Game Development is Simple

I already knew this was the case. Most people who have tried game development already know this to be the case (probably). Those who don’t know this to be the case would be anyone who has never tried to develop a game or watched someone develop a game (or who has used a very simple drag-and-drop engine, which generally aren’t powerful and are less of making a game and more making a level in a game unless you really know what you’re doing and you put a lot of time and effort in, but I digress). Making what you think could be the simplest addition to a game takes a long time. I mentioned before that I have spent 6+ hours working on this game in the past two days. All that time was spent on character creation (which I’ll discuss later), and that part isn’t even done.

On top of that: if you’re not careful, a single wrong word can spend hours to fix (especially if you, say, wrote a line of code that you knew you would be using again and just copied and pasted it to the new location only to later realize it was wrong). On the bright side, none of the bugs I accidentally included in my code took hours to fix. They each took half an hour, and there were approximately a lot of them. Most of that time, of course, is finding out what you did wrong; often, once you’ve found the problem it’s fairly simple (though it’s usually either changing a single character or sifting through the whole document to find every mistake). I once had a project to create a parser for a programming language in one of my CS classes; it took me 2 hours to figure out how to fix it (with the help of my manager at the DE of the time) and all I had to do was change a 0 to a 1.

So, yeah, programming ain’t a walk in the park. But you probably already knew that.

Trying to Make Things Interesting

I mentioned, like, a bunch of lines ago that I spent over 6 hours over the course of the last 2 days working on character creation for this game. That’s because I’m trying to make things interesting. You see, appearance (and gender) in this game is more than an aesthetic choice. My plan is to make it where characters in the game will make judgement calls based on what you look like. If you’re a Shelezar but look like a Mikri and the character happens to be racist against Mikri, they’ll treat you as such. If you’re a woman and you’re interacting with a character that thinks women are lesser than men, they’ll treat you as such. The flipside is also true: if you look like a Kapfian, military personnel may favor you because Kaps are known for their combat prowess. If you’re a woman, members of certain cultures will favor you because that’s their culture. And setting up the appearance mechanics – the part where the player determines the character’s appearance on top of the part where the game goes through and sees what people group they might be confused with – took me most of those 6 hours. That means that I definitely need to make that appearance mechanic matter. Because you shouldn’t devote time to something that won’t matter. It’s bold because it’s a life lesson.

The main issue I need to find out now (before I move on from character creation; that’s right, it’s not done yet) is whether I want to follow through on another idea I had: basing the game mechanics on Lady Luck’s Chosen Few. Right now, the mechanics I have set up for the game are fairly simple and much more reminiscent of standard TTRPG mechanics: a number is generated and modified by four attributes the PC has (in this case Endurance, Strength, Agility, and Wit) and the result of an action that has multiple (more than one) pass-fail states is determined based on the final number. It’s simple and it’s easy. Making a game based on LLCF mechanics will be far more complicated. That being said, trying to work those mechanics into a text-based game like this will be a lot easier than trying to work them into a more standard video-game. So, I still need to make a decision on that.

Conclusion

So far, I’d say I’m happy with this project. Despite the pitfalls I’ve run into, it’s going pretty well and I’m making some decent headway. Admittedly, I should maybe not be putting another project on my plate, but I’ve decided to disregard that fact in an effort to add one more thing to have consistent updates that I can share publicly, alongside Isle of the Dreamer. So I’m making this now.