So I ended up skipping making a blog post for the last CUPdate, so this is counting as 10 and 11. I've been taking a break from working on this game for the past month or so, so still not a whole lot to show, but I've got a few updates.
I started out by working on the Mission menu. You can access the Missions screen from the main menu, and I used events to create a menu screen to store all of the quests. You can view different lists of active, complete, or failed lists of missions, and the information about the mission will appear on the right side of the screen. Because all of the mission data is stored in arrays, the order that the missions appear is based on when you accept them in the story, starting with the oldest missions at the top. I learned a lot while doing this and used a lot of arrays, and even some loops. Definitely one of the more coding-intensive eventing that I've done!
Then I made some colored/more finished sprites for some characters from the Prologue. I'm aiming to slightly clean up the rough sprites I made without a ton of extra work to save on time and keep the life in them. Here's Firebreath, Larry, and Capillstation.
Then I made some more sprites, focusing more on creating poses that fit with the characters' personalities. My goal is going to be to turn these into idle animations at the very least, since I know full walk/turnaround animations would take a lot more time. This is Haru, Izumi, Rocko, Celia, Jaboo, Shaw, and JrTr.
And then a few more sprites! These are the orphans: Pigger, Chila, and Frank.
Side Track: Posting Games
And then I strayed off the path of working on Compass Nays a bit as I mentioned above. I've been slowly uploading all of my previous Global Game Jam projects to various websites to get my games out there so more people can play them. They're all playable on itch.io, but we weren't getting any feedback on there and not many people were finding the games. So I made a Game Jolt account a few months ago and have been uploading a game a week on there, and have been getting some people to play my games. I've also been uploading web versions of the games that can be played in the browser, so people that don't want to dedicate time to downloading my games can quickly preview them in their browser. For example, try the Play link for I Wanna Go Home here!
In addition to that, I decided to revamp some of the itch.io pages to include links to play it online or point out the download link. These are through header images, since I think those really help. I'm starting to think that I should spend some more time really fleshing out these pages to look more attractive with imagery and potentially gifs, but that's a project for the future potentially. I also added favicons and further customized some of the backend information on these pages. Check out the Complex.net page here for an example!
I've also been uploading games on RPGMaker.net, and I received my first game review on SOS.WAV! They gave a lot of valuable feedback that I look forward to applying to future games and gave it a 3.5, which is fair for how short it was and all things considered. I've been receiving ~700 page views and 3-5 downloads per game, which is a really high volume in comparison to what I'm used to, so I'm really happy with this site.
Then I decided to search for other popular sites for uploading games. I found out that some people were saying Newgrounds actually has pretty good traffic for games, which makes sense since they only host browser games. I was a bit hesitant to dig up my Newgrounds account because I had some really bad experiences with the site 10 years ago, because the community was really toxic. Back then, I was posting my first Flash animations and early digital art, so I was getting a lot of negative attention to the point where I almost quit art entirely. But I've removed all of that content or unpublished it so that it's all in the past now, and I'm thinking maybe my games will attract less negativity, but I'm not holding my breath. So far I haven't received any feedback, but I did upload SOS.WAV on there.
So while a lot of this isn't directly related to Compass Nays, it is preparing me for whenever I finish the game in many years from now, so that I'll have a better idea which platforms work best, how to apply feedback from previous games, and just practicing uploading to game pages and customizing those in general. So it's all good practice and I'm having fun doing it! I'm planning to have more updates next time though!
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