#NOT a dev diary it's a JOURNAL. for fucking around

[phylaxery]

Some more progress gifs for posterity. Overhauled this character controller for the 18th time and while still working out some kinks, it's a little more easy to handle than physics-based flight. Just put in some dive/climb speed changes and returning to a flat pitch when idle. Still need to figure out how to get the camera to work how I want.

Bonus outtakes from attempting to figure out the camera controls.

[facet-project]

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

[hareefaree]

Thesis Process Journal - 6.20.23 - Intro, Intentions, & the Journey Begins

I’m in Kalyan, Maharashtra and I’m starting a thesis journal I will no doubt lose track of as soon as the grind begins. I’m making this journal because A) I need to be recording information as I work on this project anyway so I can have a good and sexy thesis book at the end of the year and B) to give me some clarity and point of reference as I work on this project. So far I’ve been primarily concepting in my sketchbook, and it's been loose, sketchy, ill defined, and hard to turn into something finalized. I’m creating this docs as an alternative to the plogging method, since this is more in line with how I approached my game dev class this past year and it generally worked. So here I am! Type type type type type.

 PS to me and possible audience, I’ll probs also be copy + pasting these docs into my art blog for the fuck of it as well, but if I do do that this is initially written in G docs for my own ease of reference and just so I have a single place where everything is referenced and located. This is raw work diary for me. These ideas are half baked and probably more than a little trite. Enjoy.

Ok. So I’m in Kalyan, four years since I’ve been here last. My father and my mother’s childhood home are both functionally lost to me now - the Railway Quarters my dad was raised in is set to be demolished, and my grandmother is living with us in the States now, leaving my mother’s Mulund home and all of my grandparent’s effects lost to time. Because of this and the fact of all the changes I’ve been experiencing, the fact that I’m fully an adult now, I’ve been thinking a lot about legacy and expectation. This past year has been the progress of collecting history and trying to make art of it, but that’s been a detached process that ended up in a sort of muddled, over-explained final piece (the Dressmaker). That project had too many ideas contained within it and not enough clarity to carry it though - and I love subtlety and layer and depth but maybe I’m too interested in extricating myself from what I create and then too-late forcing my own vision and understanding into something I’ve tried to remain detached from. My sight is muddled. I don’t know myself.

So legacy, what does it mean? To me, it's complicated by migration and movement, risk and misery. My great grandparents suffered so my grandparents could suffer less so their kids could suffer less and I could ideally, suffer minimally. But we still expect suffering, and the misery clings to us like mold, even with all the privilege and shape we’ve tried to force ourselves into. I’m supposed to suffer so my possible kids won’t. I’m supposed to carry - no, have - a legacy.

What does expectation mean to an immigrant? To a child of immigrants? Who around us can judge us? Who can understand? Can our ancestors, our motherland - who know us filtered through language that we ourselves cannot speak fully, through a wide lens - expect things from us without knowing our contexts? Can our neighbors - who don’t know where or what or who we came from, possibly understand why we push and pull ourselves in the way we do? Can our parents - who transformed themselves into a different type of person, who keep their youths (affixed in an alternate, mythologized selfhood) in glass jars just out of our reach - expect the same from us as they did themselves? Can we understand others in our shoes - who all do different amounts of thinking of the shapes we squeeze ourselves into, who mold ourselves into different things?  Are we, who remember our history with all the problematized emotions of generational trauma and orientalized understandings of our own bodies and lineages and sufferings, even capable of carrying anything into the future but ourselves?

I’ve been trying to separate myself from the things I write about while still writing about me. These palimpsests are functionally incapable of saying things about myself or what I want to comment on, and I wonder why editing and clarity-making is of particular distress to me. I want to make something of substance for my thesis, so I’m taking the effort of writing my thoughts as they come to me to force myself to think on them for longer than I would if I just dove into the making process.

This brings me back to my thesis. In regards to legacy, I was introduced to the idea of the tharavad, or ancestral home in Malayalam. Historically these homes served as the heart of the joint family, the place at which all members of a given family would call their home. It was the place the head of the household would live, would host the various branches of the family tree - a thing of pride. My maternal grandfather’s tharavad is in Chalakudy, Kerala, and it was split between him and his brother soon before he left the state to make his own home in Bombay. He’d been planning on moving back to Kerela in his twilight years and was hoping to build a small home on the portion of the tharavad that he inherited. A few months before the pandemic he, my mother, and I sat and tried to design the floorplan in Photoshop together. Then, soon after I graduated high school, he died. I’d been asking about the tharavad since, and in a conversation with my uncle, my grandfather’s eldest son, he described that Kerala tharavad as being nothing to him. His ancestral homeland - and mine, and my sister’s, and my cousin’s - was the flat in Mulund in which he was raised. That flat in Mulund - now no longer our home - was his legacy.

I think I want my thesis to rest inside a tharavad. To be about an ancestral home that I can no longer fit into. I have a vision of someone to big and too small for their surroundings walking in to the building, and room by room confronting a legacy that they have failed to fit into. I’m stealing my protagonist from a past, trite work about a failed politician trying to attend her sister’s wedding while distractedly falling into a fantastical world of forest goddesses and magically-growing trees-as-metaphor-for language-learning (there is no way I’d be able to fit those ideas into a five minute stop-motion film :P). But I’ve felt an affinity for my girl Elia for a while - she’s stuck with me since my senior year of high school. She - like me - is someone who’s falling and needs to be woken up by looking outside of herself.

This concept is still half baked as hell. But I will stick to the Tharavad and use it to guide me. I’ve the sense that its gonna be a running theme in my art for a while.

PRIORITIES

Story Dev

Early Idea Gen for Puppet Prototypes

“Look” research