Electron (continued)

This week I continued learning about electron and man. My expectations have been both completely shattered and reaffirmed at the same time. It first started when I realized the steam version of Cookie Clicker is ran through electron. I thought this was a perfect example of what I could create; it had the separated windows like I'm hoping to have set up, it has game content, literally exactly what I'm looking to achieve. But then I kept working through the tutorial on their website and it projected everything in browser as HTML, which is interesting. Now, having a long history with CC, I know the dev is extremely proficient in Java Script. So I'm sure there's something more to do to get an application to actually be an application. There is another thing that is worrying me though, which is the method of saving data. Both Cookie Clicker and Kinky Dungeon have a long string of characters for their save data. You simply copy and paste it whenever necessary. I do not want to use this system for saving data. I worry that because of the layers system having effectively no limit, saving data like this, along with the sheer amount of content in the game that I'm planning on implementing, it'll just be too damn long to be practical. It's what makes me the most worried about using JS and electron for this project at the moment because it could completely change how I need to implement things depending on how exclusive this sort of system is. 

In other development sided topics, I'm going to be moving the posting day for these to Tuesday from now on. The reason is because of my real life work schedule. Basically, I have Monday off every other week and weekends are when I am most productive for TT. Having to worry about these dev logs instead of actually working on making the game is something that unfortunately hampers my ability to focus properly. So pushing it to a work day frees up the mental space for me to care a little more about my productivity. I'll be posting this Tuesday as well since I have the time, but it will probably be on the shorter side.

Game related topic time. The intro: 

So the beginning of the game is as such: An old sorceress summons your soul in hopes that you can be the one to bring an end to the tower's master; an ancient evil witch with the goal of literal world domination. Every living sentient creature sentenced to an endless lifetime of enslavement and bondage simply to satisfy her twisted desires. The sorceress will have a personal connection with the witch, but the details will be saved for another time. The sorceress warns you that it will not be an easy task, and that you will most likely fail and return to the temple many, many times. The sorceress promises to aid you on your quest by fixing up a long abandoned temple in purgatorio. As you can only accept, the sorceress uses most of her remaining power to give your soul a body to inhabit to take on the tower, which you can lightly influence the appearance of before setting off on your first journey into the tower.

I probably gave a more brief explanation of this in a previous log, but I have a more clear idea about what I want this game to feel like now. I'm going to save more of the gameplay and character related things for when I finally start chipping away at a playable demo. But there is one more thing that is bothering me that I do want to bring up. So with my extremely finely detailed character display being a planned feature, it only makes sense to use this as a base for NPCs as well right? Right? Well. Yeah, that would make the most sense but I realized that I don't find this to be an compelling solution to displaying NPCs. There is, ironically, lost expressiveness in using the same highly detailed model for every character in the game. Games like CoC2 and TQ actually cover this perfectly by having many pictures for NPCs that go through transformations. So, what I am planning to do is create a less detailed version for each NPC that shows off their personality with an expressive pose. 

That's going to be all I want to talk about for this week, see you in the next one.

Links to stuff:

Electron

https://www.electronjs.org/

Things to remember:

Failing is learning

Make the best of your situations

Be proud of yourself