This blog entry was first posted on 25 June 2022, on Hadrosaurus Software's official Patreon. For more blogs like this, and more in-depth development updates as we race toward the release of Acronia, visit our Patreon at patreon.com/hadrosoft and join at any tier today!
Developer log 2
June 25, 2022
Clarissa:
And just like that, another two weeks have gone by.
The past month has been a personal challenge for me, as the Lobdegg and I have come into this venture with very different working styles. They tend to push ahead with new ideas, whereas I'm more cautious and prefer to discuss things extensively until I'm convinced it's the right course of action. Our differences have been magnified by the fact that I lack personal confidence in many of the areas necessary for a successful indie game: self-promotion and marketing, networking, etc.
This created some minor conflicts a few weeks ago, where I felt they were jumping the gun and leaving me out of the loop on certain decisions, and they felt I was dragging my feet too much on important promotional and development-related decisions. The truth was somewhere in the middle: we each needed time to adjust to each other's working style, and we needed to communicate more effectively. Now that we've realized that, and pledged to do it, things are going better than ever!
I also really need to get out of my own head: stop telling myself that I can't do certain things, that I'm not a good writer and marketer, that I'm lacking as a designer, and so forth. Whether those beliefs are well-founded or not is irrelevant. Whether I actually do possess those skills, or I need to learn them, getting over that emotional hump will be vital for making this thing a success. If the boss lady doesn't believe in herself, who's going to believe in us?
Even through it all, one thing was always clear: we both share the same vision of making great games, fostering a healthy and positive indie gaming community, and helping uplift other indie developers. That's never changed, and won't.
Why am I telling you all this? It's not to stir up drama, and I promise I got the Lobdegg's blessing before going ahead and posting it. It's because I feel like it's a good idea to share not only our progress and our successes, but some of the challenges as well. Making a game is hard, and running a company is even harder. Over the course of a single day two months ago, I went from the owner of a studio that was pretty much imaginary by virtue of the fact that it was only me, to collaborating as a team leader. That's a huge adjustment, and it hasn't always been easy. Those challenges are just as much a part of our story as our successes.
But also, I feel like it's important to let anybody else who might also be struggling, know that your similar experiences, thoughts, and pitfalls don't make you unworthy or a failure. You're already a success because you've started—which is more than most people do. So keep at it! There's no problem you can't get past with communication, empathy, and a dash of pluckiness.
You got this!
the Lobdegg:
We’ve been trying to come up with better tools than simple command line programs to convert and prepare assets for Acronia. To this effect we’ve been working on a one stop shop kind of app that will make building core game files and even expansion content as easy as humanly possible. We call it Lumpy!
We’re still working with a relatively rudimentary interface while we flesh out all the tools necessary for the asset types we plan to support, but it’s already capable of rebuilding the alpha content from scratch!
Our plan is to release a 1.0 version of Lumpy in time for the registered release of Acronia so that modders can easily develop their own content. There are also plans in the pipeline for more support from this tool in future projects! We look forward to seeing what user content you all will be able to create with Lumpy. ^.^
Clarissa:
On the code end of things, the past two weeks have been focused on refactoring. My codebase for Acronia is... fine, but it’s definitely the code of somebody who has spent the last decade programming in C++, in a heavily OOP-dominated style, on modern systems. I used a lot of wasteful abstractions, and made everything a class, whether it needed to be or not. In the interests of performance and binary size, I’ve been culling as much of that cruft as possible. This has had the effect of slashing over 2,000 lines of code, and made the binary at least 50 Kbytes smaller.
(If you count replacing STL vector and string classes with my own home-grown replacements, then we’ve actually shed about 200 Kbytes. Every byte counts in a DOS game!)
Earlier this month, our artist Sarah finished up Allie’s sprites for the shareware version—including dedicated sprites for all the different weapons that the characters can carry (previously, I was only using a generic gray “rifle” sprite for everything, and the player had to look at the HUD to know what their active weapon was). This turned out to be a lot of graphics, but we’re mitigating it by splitting the character sprites into components: one sprite for the legs and another for the body and arms. We’ve also decided that each character will have two special moves that can be triggered with the press of a button. Allie’s are a dash move that can damage any enemy she hits, and a dodge that makes her invulnerable for the duration. The plan for the next dev cycle is to program in those moves, and then put out a stable release for the Gary Gallimimus and Haddy Hadrosaurus tiers—so keep an eye out for that!
We’re also working on setting up our bug tracker over the course of this next update cycle. When we do, invites will be sent out to all new and existing Gary Gallimimus- and Haddy Hadrosaurus-level patrons.
Clarissa:
I’ll end on something I found hilarious. Before resuming development last month, it had been about nine months since I last worked on Acronia, let alone played it. So when I tried playing it recently, well...
Geez. I couldn't even find all the secrets in my own game pic.twitter.com/XVLeijb27D
— Clarissa the Dogcow 🏳️⚧️ (@ClarusPlusPlus) June 12, 2022
😂
Until next time!