Freshly Squeezed Progress Report – Starting to Create Floating Numbers

As I reported last week, I settled on the features that would make the sewing specialist unique and implemented them in Toy Factory Fixer. Namely, this worker automatically crafts Good Toys assuming there are parts in your inventory for the type of toy they specialize in.

Related to this new feature, I wanted to continue working on some enhancements to communicate a few things to the player.

Sprint 43: Training levels

Planned and Incomplete:

• Make sewing worker unique
• Create floor training levels/tutorial

For many sprints, I always planned to get more accomplished than I actually could, and it was kind of demoralizing, so I decided to not pretend I was going to work on the tooltips functionality.

My sprint plan was supposed to be very manageable. Now that I have a third worker type, I wanted to create a level that introduces that worker. And to really finish the creation of this third worker, I basically wanted to communicate two things to the player that I didn’t need to communicate before:

• If the worker is idle and can’t craft due to missing parts, I want the player to know this fact instead of wondering why this worker isn’t crafting.
• When the worker starts crafting, I want to make it clear that toy parts disappeared from the inventory, something that wasn’t necessary when the player was manually deciding when toys were being crafted.

That’s it. Two visual indicators of some kind and a new level, and I figured the level would take the most effort to design and play test.

But last week was very unproductive for me. I only did game development for a total of 2 hours, which is very low even for my normally very, very part-time efforts. The last time I did so few hours was the first week of January, and, you know, it was the holidays.

Between the day job and other commitments, I found myself struggling to make time or have the energy to work on this project. It was kind of demoralizing, especially since the previous week was also a low productivity sprint.

So what did I accomplish? Well, nothing I can show yet, but I started working on showing floating numbers to indicate that toy parts are getting removed from the inventory. When the turn starts and a sewing specialist starts crafting, I want to see “-1” float up and then hover above each of the toy parts that make up the new Good Toy being crafted.

I figure these numbers can show up when you manually craft toys as well.

And some feedback I’ve gotten is to have floating numbers appear to indicate how much money you’ve earned when you ship a Good Toy.

I hope this coming week will be more productive.

Thanks for reading!

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