Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: The Spine of the Game Is Done

Last time, I reported that I was focusing on getting a thin slice of work to create, load, and view the clown faces in my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project called Clown Alley Creator, a creativity tool about creating your own fun clowns.

I focused on creating the infrastructure to support this work.

Sprint 2024-5: Clown Faces

Completed:

• Create nose option and submenu
• Create Finish modal
• Update Gallery View to show all loaded clowns
• Create clown preview nose cut-outs

I had a fairly productive week, and I am very, very pleased to say that I finished making the game already.

Or at least the spine of the game.

What I mean is that the work I did this week cut across almost all aspects of the project.

As of today, you can start creating a new clown, choose from among a few customization options, then save the clown with those options, then view your creations in the clown alley gallery.

That’s pretty much the scope of this project. Anything else after is content and polish, with perhaps some extra features if I decide I have time for it.

Here’s a video that shows pretty much everything you can do in this game so far:

Now, you might think, “That’s it? You can’t say you are finished making the game yet!”

And you’d be right in that all you can do at the moment is pick from among four nose options. Clowns are more than red noses, obviously. While I could technically publish this, it would definitely feel unfinished and wrong to do so.

But what else do I have to do? Adding more nose options is just adding more options to the existing menu. Adding color variations is just a different menu and a different variable to save and load. Creating better art is just replacing the existing art. And everything else from hair styles, skin colors, and make-up options are just variations of the same kind of work I’ve already solved.

Basically, instead of adding features and hoping it all comes together in the end like in many projects, I’m in a position of confidence that this project is always shippable from here on out. It just becomes a matter of how much I want to keep investing in it before I actually publish the game.

Now I still anticipate some challenges. Choosing mutually exclusive options such as clown noses is different from picking options that can layer on top of each other such as clown make-up. My code easily handles the former but would need to be changed to accommodate the latter. And I haven’t even touched on the UI problem of communicating to the player that these interfaces would behave differently.

But it is still early in the project’s schedule, and I have time to solve these problems.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

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