facet-project

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[throwing confetti] this is still not dead, but it is now officially on the backburner because that thing i was pitching to a creative partner did get picked up!

(announcements of what that IS are pending while we write up a schedule - and i'll definitely post about it here - but i'm hoping for a 2026/2027 release on it, since it has... a MUCH smaller scope than this)

so i guess if you keep following this blog in cold storage you'll eventually see SOMETHING out of me, but for right now i need to zone in. hunker down. and i'll keep fiddling with this in the meantime since i'm really cutting my teeth on the current thing we're working on (which means when i actually get real time for this again i'll probably be able to do it better) >:3

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hey!! this project is still trucking!! i just haven't been updating much because it's my busy season at my actual dayjob (october-january is my crunch time) and also one of my old creative partners is showing interest in dusting off one of our older projects, so i've been coding the demo for that real quick (way less work than this project, if anything comes of it, it'll probably release before this game)

but!! i do want to pick up the monthly logs on this one again, hopefully end of january or february? i've been working on a lot of chicken behavior, it's super cute when i spawn chickens and have them running around the screen (right now they're colored blocks, gotta finish up the pixel art...)

anyway! i'm not dead, that's all i was gonna say! have a good rest of the year!

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october devlog!! (two days late, thank you tumblr for glitching out on me on halloween :/)

AAA. OKAY. finished a big thing today since i was like "this update is going to be late Anyway i might as well fix this one issue before i upload"

but before that. did you know i've been working on this project for One Calendar Year??? i feel like it hasn't been very serious until this latest build but maybe that's recency bias talking. anyway cool stuff below the cut

anyway! what i did this month... unfortunately there was a hardware snag in the music production thing, and i've gotten it fixed! which is technically music progress but not in a way that is exciting. so instead i actually went and finished the basic player character movement!

this thing was a MEAN BITCH to code in for like. a lot of reasons. which i won't get into right now unless someone's super curious. but trust me when i say this took so long to actually Get The Way I Wanted

(sorry she's walking on a blank grey background... i don't want to show the testing field Just Yet)

just a little up/down/left/right walk animation for now!! there are still some tweaks i need to do to the animation manager and the controls - of course, i will be doing this Forever And Ever. especially when i start making other things to put on the map. and as i was testing this i realized there were a couple spare pixels out of place (shoutout to the magically growing shirt collar on the walking upwards animation)

(and i'm still trying to figure out if i'm going to make a bespoke running animation or if it's just going to be making the player faster and having things like the ponytail flow farther behind... it doesn't really matter for now that can be a Later Decision)

but also, i made a promise to myself that i wouldn't post about any game characters until they're In the game. and the player character for nightshade mode, which is what i'm building first, is a character... so i might round up some of her concept art and make a post about her sometime this month.

i'm going to stop promising what i'm going to work on Next Month because it always seems like i have to change directions midway through?? maybe that's stage fright since i'm Posting about it. but i do want to finish off some of these player animations and get some other ones in there, like the ones where you're using tools and sitting and such. but also i need to fix a save bug too... we'll see what i actually get to doing this month.

but as far as Next Longterm Goals... it took me about eight months to get from Zero Code to the end of the prototype build... and then after that i've been spending these months kind of organizing what i need to do next

so Next is... doing the same thing i did last year, but with more knowledge and purpose this time.

i'm hoping to get another one-week build of the game done by june, but with all of the game's systems in place and without placeholder text or visual assets. i'm going to measure how feasible that is at the end of the year before making another pact with my brother to hold me accountable for doing that, see if i need to adjust the goalposts, but i think i can do that. (and then after that, it's making all of the content for spring, summer, fall, winter... but for now we're sticking with spring)

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tumblr is glitching out horribly tonight because of the boop paws so i'm probably going to post the devlog stuff on saturday (i have Plans tomorrow and probably can't post then) :/ it's all Done but tumblr keeps logging me Out of my account whenever i try to get the devpost together. anyway happy halloween!

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going "oh shit i won't get this done in time" and then realizing i. already programmed part of this in the previous version of the game. and all i need to do is fix the animation player. thank u past version of me

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[lying facedown in the mud] i brought my tablet to my parent's house to work on spritework for the week i'm here but i forgot. the pen for it

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september devblog!

this one's a littleeee quick and another one of those months where i can't like. show a chicken png and go "i did chickens :)" it's a lot of background processes and first steps to make things easier for me in the long run. 90% of this is me going "well i can't show you this. but know i'm doing it" and for that i am Sorry

this month was weird because i changed trajectories a few times. so i got a lot of Little Bits of random stuff done in lieu of doing anything Super Huge. i always feel weird on these months because it feels like i'm slacking but it's getting things set up to do big leaps later (and giving myself grace, one of the weekends i was supposed to work on this was the weekend the damn hurricane came in, ha....)

so remember when i said the prototype was slapped together with rubber bands and bubble gum? so whenever you entered a menu, i did an oopsie and had the player inputs Freeze instead of disabling movement. which resulted in a lot of softlocks where you couldn't get out of a menu without knowing the secret developer menu code that i made for debug. so now i'm working on a player state machine that knows what kind of movement the player is doing, which can turn off when you're menuing or when your movement is otherwise disabled! which makes the movement a lot more sophisticated (and a lot of work to set up and test). this is not finished yet but i've got the skeleton of it done, i just need to finish up the walking sprites and hook it up to the animation manager

some things i was working on was actual game Design: figuring out the nitty-gritty behind gifting and relationships, tying down what events and festivals happen at what parts of the year, writing down What Assets I'd Need For All Of This and paring down/throwing out old parts of the game document that don't apply anymore

and then story design stuff too! there are many story and plotlines running around town and i've started tying some of them down and seeing what can weave in with each other. i'm mostly focusing on nightshade mode, which is the shorter story mode i'm building before doing the custom character route.

and some of the character storylines requires me to do research on certain things i don't have firsthand experience with, so i'm getting that all squared away. don't look at my google search history. you'll think i'm a murderer trying to work through a bunch of different identity issues

next month is going to be Musical Lockdown. i have a week dogsitting for my parents with access to some of my dad's recording equipment and By God I'm Using That Time To Its Fullest. i have other things to do but that's the most important for october just because i don't get access to a quiet studio space too often. i hope these dogs don't mind it when i start shredding on the violin for like three hours at a time. i'm bringing extra strings i'm anticipating wearing my current ones out.

i know i said i wouldn't post music demos on here but like.. man i feel bad i don't have a lot to show off!! here's a shitty phone recording of my un-amped violin playing a teeny tiny melody i don't know what to do with yet

also, psst... no promises, but since next month is october... i may post a bunch of doodles of concept art of some of the townsfolk's scarecrow festival outfits. not doing a full inktober or anything but i think it would be fun!! it'll be the first time anyone outside my closest circle has seen most of these characters but p'shaww everyone loves halloween costumes

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i need to use this blog more i've barely put anything on it so far -> feelin some kind of way about how this character reference is shakin out

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hey it's the first devlog on this blog yaaay

unFortunately it's probably also going to be the scarcest devlog. migrating things to the new godot file is taking a while, since i had to get a few specific things set up before i could really start playing in the space again.

was a little bit lethargic getting back into the project after taking a break. making the prototype and getting it reviewed by friends and family took a LOT out of me. it turns out when you put your entire heart into something, you Care about how other people think about it. shocker!!!

also the fact that it FEELS like i'm working from scratch again! it's difficult. even though i'm not, i now have almost a year of experience and knowledge of this game's inner workings. i'm just reordering and re-coding some things that were slapped together. not only does this version have to run, it also has to be robust

so a Lot of the programming side of the project this month was like... dry research about screen resolution, pixel compression, and config save/load (different from game progress save/load, as your config settings SHOULD carry over between different saves. would be really annoying if they didn't ljadsflkasjd). and there's not a lot to Show for that. "ooh cool a screenshot with dummy buttons on it" "oh look i hammered out what the native resolution of the game is" c'mon

there's Not a lot of visual assets to show this time so i apologize for that. next month will be a lot meatier i think!

i actually still have some stuff to do with the config save/load but i at least got it to the point where i can... you know! save and load. i need to figure out how i'm going to store game saves, but. i can worry about that later. all i need to make the game run right now is the initial save/load process. and then as i work through the game i can decide what needs to be saved between play sessions instead of having to decide after months of development what should be in the data file

i started making the UI for this but i need to actually finish it - in the options menu, for colorblind and cultural accessibility, you'll be able to change the colors of the five "temperament" colors in the game - it's very important that someone can look at these colors at a glance and know what it means. there are a few pre-built pallets but in the full game you'll be able to map them all to whatever colors you want. red to me is a very angry color, so it's set to the hotheaded temperament - but if you can't see red very well or you don't associate it with anger, you'll be able to change it to whatever color you want instead! i might make a post about what this system means because it doesn't really come off as interesting in text but it's fun to play around with

i also wrote MUSIC this month! i picked up the violin for the first time in over a decade and was really surprised how easy it came back to me. i might go be brave and ask my dad to help lend some guitar parts for the soundtrack which i think would be very sweet and sentimental for me to have immortalized in a game

i have violin demos for a lot of songs but i'm not posting them. i'm soooo shy. i'm only posting finished music i think and nothing's Finished (i have some time in october to do Finished Polished work, so....)

i think next month i'm going to work on........... character movement. get the pc's character sprite all polished up and get the movement states and walking/running animations up and......running. heh. in the prototype you could only run up/down/left/right there wasn't like. a running speed and a walking speed or transitions between directions.

also i hadn't put in color shift support for the sprites in the last version.... probably need to do that this time around. the player scene is going to be a lot more complicated than it was in the previous version!!

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pre-blog catchup diary

*disclaimer: this is ALL pre-alpha art. these screenshots are BEFORE visual development started. it's ugly. it's supposed to be. i was focused on programming and didn't want aesthetics to get in the way. pretend in your heart that this is all beautiful pixel art

anyway go below the readmore for details!!

i started working on this game in october 2023!! i had been learning gdscript before that, a little bit, but i hadn't fully committed to this project until then. pictured below is. the First build of the game vs the most current build. we've come so far.

the prototype was just a one-week build of the farming sim. so i could test how the time mechanic worked (time only moves when you do an action, you're not on a constant ticking clock)(this makes it much easier to strategize what you'll do in a day and letting the player go at their own pace, making the game feel more relaxed)(you can also... undo actions... which was just me testing out the code in this version but in the full version... will have different Implications)

i am all by my lonesome on this project. mechanically at least. my brother, girlfriend, dad, and my best friends are constantly helping me test things and i bounce ideas off of them all the time. it helps that my brother is a master GM and writer and my girlfriend is a software developer. and i lean very heavily on my dad for music/soundscape assistance. so yes, solodev, but also i am not an island

so the prototype was made when i was still learning gdscript past the phase of "tutorials for babies that produce a single number-go-up game" which is. hard!! since this is a much more complex project. it's easy to make anything in isolation, it's harder to figure out how to make new systems weave into a bigger project! fucking hell i didn't even know about custom resources!!!!

the prototype went off with FLYING COLORS though. girlfriend and brother played it over the weekend i gave it to them and it worked, it made sense, and watching the two of them test out the mechanics gave me some very good ideas for future builds. also nothing crashed and gf couldn't find any crazy exploits! (however pictured below is the incredibly fucked up floating rabbit glitch that i couldn't fix)

i finished it in june and took a break in july. august will be the first proper devlog for this! i'm excited to have a little dev journal around! i probably will only post consistently about once a month, with maybe some little posts here and there about characters or concept art i'm excited for

so what's next?

TIME TO GO BUILD ALPHA, BABY!!!!

which sounds exciting but i'm basically. starting from scratch again. new, fresh godot file. so it feels like i'm not very far in, even though i have an entire working prototype on my desktop.

and.... geez.... gotta actually make the pixel art and implement it into a working file???? so that it doesn't look like dogshit???? that would be nice. i didn't want to do it for prototyping/pre-alpha because i really wanted to make sure i had the capacity to code the game before putting my heart and soul into the art. and now i'm very certain i do?? it's not hard, it just takes time. and the time will pass anyway!!

i have two campaigns planned for the game, one that's smaller and one that's larger. the bigger one is the typical make your own character farming simulator, played straight in the setting. but i'm working on the smaller one first! you play as a specific character for the first year of the story. not all of the game mechanics are turned on for this mode, and it's more story-oriented than the straight Farming Simulator, so i think it's a good place to put development energy into. get it all ironed out. make it make sense before blowing it up on a larger scale. and it's more contained to test in which is a bonus

anyway. i'm going to post build updates on this on the last day of every month. and!! i'm not going to say a Lot about how the game works quite yet but the askbox is open. i don't think anyone will ask anything cause this is still in really early stages but it's there if you want it i guess

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what is facet-project?

it's the farming simulator i'm developing! it's been going strong since october 2023. it's currently being built in godot 3.6.

i started out making it for my girlfriend, who has trouble playing traditional farming sim games. it has turned into a little bit of a love letter to my mom's upbringing in rural kentucky and my love of stories about fucked up time travel.

in the current build i'm making, you play as the granddaughter of a small village's farmer, who is set to inherit the land once he passes - but the more you work the land, the more you realize that the land doesn't want you living here - and is doing all it can to make sure you leave.

but that's fine! you can have as many tries as you want to survive, thanks to a time-traveling pocketwatch your mother sent you off with. it shouldn't take that long, right?

i'm still in the middle of visual development (excuse the visual mess on everything, no art on here is final etc etc), but the mechanical and story development are pretty robust already. it, however, is still early enough in development that i have no idea when this is coming out. i just figured i should make a dev diary so i can look back at this in like five years and remember simpler times

this devblog is still vaguely under construction as i set up exactly how much i'm gonna talk about on here, but it's generally going to be one devlog at the end of the month! maybe some little random stuff around too. we'll see