Harmless Demons | DevLog #5: Main Scene & Observation Pop Up Rework, Observation Eyes, PC Crash news

I seriously planned to write this DevLog way sooner but John Lennon said Life is What Happens To You While You’re Busy Making Other Plans and he was right.
It was supposed to go like this: an extended week-end with friends, a whole week of making a little bit of money and back to my game.
What here could be called "Life" as John elegantly puts it was a very welcomed Windows update that completely messed up my computer, making me unable to access it...

twitter-tweet" wrote: <p>Thanks Microsoft for teaching us this surprising yet precious lesson: "Be more wary of your OS updates than actual viruses"

#TuesdayMotivation #Microsoft #UPDATE #Viruses

Amer Jongleur (@AmerJonJon) 24 mai 2018

As i can be very stupid sometimes, i didn't have a solid backup. I had my game on BitBucket, but two weeks behind, and that's about it. I'd loose anything else (songs i spent hours working on, mostly).
So i took my computer to the repair shop and went through very low and exhausting days of waiting as you can guess (i made progress on some Game Design flaws tho, couldn't really do anything else, i had flames in my stomach the whole time).

Fortunately, few days and hundreds of euros later, i had everything back with no data loss and even a boosted computer, so i could finally attend to

The Original Program:

1. Main Scene Rework
   1. \_BOOM_/
   2. Top Door
   3. Tool Spot
2. Observation Pop Up Rework
3. Observation Eyes
4. Conclusion

I originally just wanted to rework the background to make it more interesting and also have everything in way higher-res textures. I was aware that my scene had some layout and readability problems but redditors brought up some very on point ones, so i decided to rework it bottom-up.

It's not the first time that it happens, and i don't really know how it does, but it seems like I always end up raising the quality of the game up, somehow. Several times I started working on a new and unexplored aspect of the game (meaning I didn’t really knew how I would achieve what I wanted to achieve, may it be visual, code or game design) and the first “final” version would end up being of mediocre quality, which logically saddened me and put me in a “this is beyond my current skills” state of mind. But I kept working on it, changed little things, tried to upgrade it, tried to get feedback… And at some point, where I wasn't even feeling more skilled or in control of what I was doing, the overall quality had reached a whole new, finally satisfying/decent level. It went like this several times already since I started developing this game. It starts as struggle, a drudge, and then turns into a very gratifying feeling at some point, through perseverance. This scene rework went through that exact process. Maybe it's just typical leveling up...

Now, zooming on:

The previous version is so ugly i will not even make a comparison montage for this one, but for the morbidly curious, you can click here ;)

Plus this one comes out of the bottom interface, it feels so clevaaaaaaaa :D

What a charming idea to have in order to emphasize the fact that the demon is constantly observed... Plus it adds a little bit of scenery and makes the whole thing more living and interesting to look at. And it works very well with the new obersvation pop up.

Few... this scene rework plus the scary computer crash... It's been an ordeal. I'm upset because it took me so much time but it kinda delivers, i'm happy with the results nonetheless. Now i have this kinda "game changer" design that i came up with during my offline days. It's for the research system and it's probably the very next thing i will attend to, so it goes like this:

• New research system
• Demon escaping/cooperative/rebellious processes
• Tools, moar of them
• Discoveries, moar of them

See YAAA ;)
Amer Jongleur.

Feel free to follow me on twitter if you want to keep up with my progression
@AmerJonJon

PS: No new track this time, but it's on the way, meanwhile feel free to enjoy my latest ;)