It may not seem like much from the thumbnail, but this is a very big step in the development process. Specfically the “Day 2” you can see on on the PDA in the bottom left.
There was a gamedev story I read many years ago about a “black triangle”: originally from one of the Twisted Metal devs, it essentially refers to a part in the development process where most of the underlying systems are now in-place and functioning. After many months of hard work, the devs managed to get a black triangle to display on their PS1 devkits. Soon after that, they had a barebones game running that would soon become Twisted Metal. It’s a bit like building a skyscraper: planning, designing, and building the foundation is the most time-consuming part. After that, it’s comparatively easy going. Nowhere to go but up.
Sure, there’s still some refactoring to be done (built on many many piles of spaghetti code), but now that you can make it through a full day AND night AND not have the game crash, that’s a big milestone. So this is where the fun begins.
And speaking of fun, I now have an artist hired for tilesets. They’ll be replacing the basic programmer art I have in place for the game world with one that actually looks good, so I might be close to an official page on itch.io depending on how many other things I want to tie up in the meantime. My main goal right now is to get a full in-game week of content done before publishing, at least that’s my goal for my October 20 deadline. I think I’ll make it before then. But no promises.
Game of the Week
One game I’ve been wanting to play for a bit is Tomb Raider: Legend. Currently playing the original Xbox version since I don’t care for messing around in Wine on Linux, but it’s pretty fun and straightforward so far. The first puzzle took me longer than it should’ve to complete (which I blame on the apparent weight discrepancy between Lara and some giant steel-and-wood boxes), but other than that I like it. I’ve never played any of the Tomb Raider games before this so I think this is a nice intro to the series.
