Boatventure: Log 2

Newer concept art. Not in new resolution.

After roughly a week of development, there's actually not a great deal to discuss. This week has been spent mostly organizing some bits of code, adding in very small functions (like health bar drawing, screen shake, and zooming in and out (automatically)), and tracking down a memory leak that was INEXPLICABLY caused by Game Maker: Studio's absolutely awful debugging console. Literally, I spend every day for FIVE days rewriting all the code in Boatventure because I honestly thought that the memory leak might have been my fault. It really impacted how well-written I thought my code was and in a lot of ways burned me the fuck out; all for me to just figure out (on my own btw because Yoyogames apparently doesn't respond to tweets or questions about memory leaks) that the memory leak was being caused by the Game Maker debugger.

Needless to say I was extremely upset that I wasted so much time when Yoyo Games' "professional" software, that costs roughly 400 (soon to be 700) dollars, causes unexplained memory leaks in your games because they can't spend a few hours to fix their debugger.

To be honest, this experience has in a lot of ways soured my opinion of Yoyo Games and their Game Maker: Studio software; but if their 1.2 update is as good as they make it sound I might consider sticking around and using it. Otherwise, I will probably port the project to Unity and make it there instead.

Regardless, because of this situation I've burnt myself out and decided to recover by doing a "thunderdome" with the team. We just decided to begin writing an actual story for the game, so we thought a thunderdome would be a good way for all of us to end up happy. A thunderdome is a technique where each person on a team comes up with a fully fleshed out and detailed design for a certain thing, independent of one another. After everyone has their fully developed idea, they all present them to each other as equals and discuss the merits of every idea presented. Ultimately, the team chooses the best ideas from each proposal to make it into the game. We're currently doing this for the history, characters, story "beats" and overall feel of the story.

Outside of that though, nothing new to report, but here are two older pieces of concept art.

This was made by Jack, our musician. He scaned in some textures and was testing them in this image.

This was one of the original concepts for Boatventure. We don't really like it as much anymore, but it's nice to show!

Expect Greatness.
Ryan Huggins~