Category: Game Design

In my previous report, I got the spine finished for my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project called Clown Alley Creator, a creativity tool about creating your own fun clowns.

I continued to build upon the work, focused on finishing the Gallery view and adding hair in the Creator mode.

Sprint 2024-6: Clown Faces

Completed:

• Paginate gallery view
• Create Clown Specific View
• Delete clown
• Create Hair & Make-up menu
• Create hair option and submenu
• Create clown preview hair cut-outs
• Create Clown Specific View

As I said last time, I pretty much have everything in place that the player might do.

And yet, there is always something to enhance or improve.

For instance, the Gallery View allowed you to see 12 clowns at a time…but only the first 12 clowns.

So I added pagination in order to see more of them.

You may also notice that I added eyes to the clown faces. It was getting weird not having eyes, and while eventually I’ll let the player select eye options as well, for now it looks less strange.

Since you can add new clowns, you should be able to edit and remove clowns, so I added a close-up clown view with those options.

Eventually you will be able to name your clowns and see that name instead of something like “Clown 6” in the title bar.

Editing just opens up the clown creator mode with the existing clown’s settings instead of a completely new clown. I’m very happy with how easy it was to do. In fact, I feel like this project has been surprisingly smooth sailing in terms of writing just enough code to not be wasting time while also writing good code that is easy to expand and extend.

Anyway, finally I added the hair menu. I had some concerns about how to actually implement hair. Clown hair/wigs can be quite wacky, extending quite a ways from the clown’s head, and I wasn’t sure how to approach it. Do I create separate sprites for the top and sides?

For now, I’ve created larger sprites. Basically, the head shape is one size, and the hair sprite is much larger, which allows for the hair to be fairly big if it has to be while also covering any part of the head that needs to be covered. Here are my mock-ups:

And here they are in the Gallery view:

I ended the week getting started on the make-up menu, but I was also trying to figure out how to allow the player to customize colors for various options.

Clown noses should not just come in red, and I think being able to choose primary and secondary colors for hair would be great, too.

But I feel like choosing colors is getting ahead of myself, so that’s on hold for the moment.

The biggest thing I’m trying to figure out is how to implement make-up. I’ve already decided to allow the player to do so in layers, which means making it clear which layer they are working on as well as the ordering of those layers. I mocked up this tabbed view, with the idea that you are currently selecting options for a given layer, and I think it should be intuitive that the layers are applied in order from top to bottom.

I need to do more work on this menu’s design. I expect it would be nice to move layers up and down, which means I need space for buttons to allow for it. I like buttons because expecting the player to know something like drag & drop is an option is harder to communicate, and I think too many modern UI elements are inexplicably hidden from the player, presumably to keep the interface looking cleaner or something.

It’s been a joy to see this project get more and more finished while at the same time feeling like it is always in a good state to be considered done. Last week you could customize noses for your clowns, and this week you can pick clown noses and hairstyles. Assuming I have time to work on the project as we head into the deepest parts of the holiday season, I expect to make it possible to choose make-up options in layers after this coming week, and after that point I’ll introduce color options. Each week, I’ve managed to make the game richer and fuller.

Of course, there is a difference between something being “technically” releasable and something being “marketable.” It is not unusual for projects to struggle with or even ignore being able to create a release until the very end of the schedule, so I feel really great about the way this project has been going.

I anticipated that December would be a slow month for me so part of my schedule assumes I’ll be working on these mock-ups and figuring out flows into January. Even so, I’m impressed with what I’ve put together in just the last couple of weeks. Soon after I’ll switch my focus to creating lots of options for each submenu, allowing a player to create potentially thousands of unique clowns using the existing menus. Then I’ll be polishing things up, testing things, and getting it ready for an official release.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

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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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In my last report, I finished creating navigation menus, only to rethink the prioritization of my project’s tasks for my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project called Clown Alley Creator, a creativity tool about creating your own fun clowns.

I started this week by focusing on how to work on things differently to make it more likely that I can ship something in the six months I originally wanted to.

Sprint 2024-4: Clown Faces

Planned and incomplete:

• Create Hair & Make-up menu
• Create hair option and submenu
• Create make-up option and submenu
• Create nose option and submenu
• Create Finish modal
• Update Gallery View to show all loaded clowns
• Create clown preview nose cut-outs

I did some rearranging of my backlog and created a subset of tasks much like how I described in my last report. I didn’t expect to actually get all of these things done in a single week, especially not in a week with a major family holiday such as Thanksgiving, but I did like that this list captures what needs to be in place for the spine of the project to be in place, something I can build upon.

Unfortunately, I decided to keep my high level features/tasks as-is rather than rewrite them to more accurately reflect what I was done. It’s not an issue to work within, but it is harder to report here because it looks like I got nothing done.

In reality, what I actively worked on and finished looked more like:

• Create Hair & Make-up menu with only the Nose option
• Create Nose submenu

My thinking was that while the entire subset above makes for a good spine, I can get there pretty quickly if I focus on the simplest thing. Rather than provide a bunch of hairstyles or make-up options, I could create a couple of noses.

So my big goal is to make it possible for the player to choose a custom nose from among at least two options, see that nose in the clown preview while doing so, save the clown with the chosen nose, and then see that clown in the gallery: a thin slice/spine for a game about creating clowns!

I imagine if I hadn’t traveled to see family and instead had a normal amount of productivity last week, I would have some better screenshots for you today.

Part of the reason for the lack of finished tasks is because I recognized the need for a way to define my menus better than simply hardcoding the buttons into place on each menu.

I originally was writing entire functions to create and setup each menu. It could work, but it is a lot of manual work that risks looking inconsistent from one menu to the next. Instead, I could write an algorithm to lay out the options in a reasonable way, which led to me wanting to make my menus a bit more data-driven.

So two major things came out of this past week’s efforts:

First, I made the menus more data-driven. The menu titles, the submenu titles, and the menu button options and their locations are defined somewhere, and when the menu is created, it is able to grab all of that data and put it together.

It still has some things that are hardcoded, though, but the point is that it does go through this indirection in a way that makes it easy for me to replace those hardcoded values with values that are defined separately.

And second, I think I keep relearning that sometimes the first step to abstracting and generalizing is to get something concrete in the place first. Having a nose submenu with actual nose options hardcoded into place would have informed how to generalize such a menu better than me trying to generalize it upfront.

Doing the generalizing upfront risks creating a tool that I feel stuck with or have to work around rather than one that feels useful and helpful.

Anyway, I will continue to work on the spine of creating a clown with saved options that I can preview and load.

And since we just started the last month of the year, I also need to remember that December is usually one of the least productive months for me (more family holidays, after all) and that I shouldn’t expect to get a full month’s worth of effort out of it. Getting that simple spine in place before the start of the next year will feel like a pretty big win, I think.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

—

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In my last report, I had started work on implementing my next Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project called Clown Alley Creator, a creativity tool.

I continued the initial work of the project.

Sprint 2024-2: Menus

Planned and complete:

• Create a main menu

Unplanned and complete:

• Create an exit menu

Unplanned and incomplete:

• Create Gallery View menu

You know, reading the above, it makes it sound like I had a bunch of “unplanned” work, when really I just mean that at the start of the sprint I had identified only one set of tasks to work on and the rest were expected to be pulled in from my project backlog as I finished work.

I need a better way to report this progress.

Anyway, I finished the main menu work, which involved adding variations on the buttons so that they can be animated.

But I was unhappy with the background, and I ended up redoing it. It is still not great, but it is an improvement, and I like the look of the circus tent more.

The new font for the title looks great, too, and I decided to use it for the buttons as well.

Next up was sticking the landing and creating a background for the quit verification screen:

I liked the idea of the Quit button leading you to the Great Egress, which comes from a potentially apocryphal story about PT Barnum.

As you can see, I need to figure out a single art style. I’m kind of all over the place right now. Expect more iterations in the future.

About halfway through the week I needed to leave town for a family emergency. I was in the middle of working on the first in-game screen. Basically, you press the Play button, and it should take you to the Clown Gallery menu.

Unfortunately, other than creating the menu background, I hadn’t gotten to the actual menu options. So for this coming week I will add a button to return to the Main Menu and another button to Create a New Clown, which will take you to the Create a Clown set of menus.

This entire project is just a series of menus, so expect a lot of talk about menus and options.

I did discover that the code for a ButtonControl had a defect in it.

ButtonControl is some of the oldest code in GBLib, my bespoke collection of code I’ve built up over many years of refusing to use an existing game engine. It is based upon the concept of Immediate Mode GUIs, primarily from Jari Komppa’s imgui tutorials. Since my code was test-driven, it has a suite of unit tests, so I added a new test to capture the bug, which has to do with the button’s state getting reset from “active” to “hot” too fast, which explains why sometimes when you click a button that you don’t see it being pressed down.

I can’t believe I’ve ignored this issue for so long and across so many games, because it is a pretty obvious bug, but I suppose I’m paying a lot more attention to the game’s responsiveness to the player in recent years, and maybe this brand new project has almost nothing else to distract me from noticing it.

So expect that to be fixed, too.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

—

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Last time, I reported that I was still designing and planning my next Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project, which will focus on clowns.

Since last week was the first full week of November, I wanted to get started on actual development while I still figured out the full project plan’s scope.

Sprint 2024-1: Pre-production and Initialization

Planned and complete:

• Get a basic project building/running/quitting

Unplanned and complete:

• Create a title screen

Unplanned and incomplete:

• Create a main menu

As you may know or recall, I write all of my own code. I don’t have a game engine so much as decades of built-up layers of bespoke code that I use as building blocks for my projects.

Unfortunately, it means that each time I start a new project, I need to disentangle the old project to create a new project.

It’s not as messy as it sounds. I’ve already separated out some generic code into something called GBLib. And when it comes to the game-specific code, most of that goes into a directory called GameSpecific, so I can pretty much delete everything in there.

But unfortunately there is still a small part of the game-specific code that gets into what should probably be a more generic area, and THAT’s where most of the effort lies.

Which frankly was still pretty smooth, and I made notes to try to improve the situation so that next time it is even easier to start a new project. The main delays came from spending time on other priorities (there was an election to reel from, after all).

Once I got the project building and running, I had a functioning but ugly main menu (much of this code is the same between projects) with an otherwise blank screen, so the next thing was to create a title screen.

So I created a few thumbnails of how the main menu/title screen would look.

I liked the idea of being outside of a circus tent, so that when you hit the Play button, you are indicating that you want to go inside. Having posters and signs for the other buttons, such as Quit taking you to the Giant Egress, seemed more fun than random floating buttons.

Then I spent time on implementing one, and…well, I’m not happy with it.

I know I’m not an artist by trade, but I feel like my programmer art skills are better than this.

BUT! This background image doesn’t have to be the final product. I can always improve it later.

For now, I have a menu, and I have buttons for it, and I’d otherwise be done with the Main Menu task except that the buttons need to have a few variations so that they animate when hovered over or when pressed.

Otherwise, I spent part of Saturday updating my project plan’s backlog with all of the scope I could identify upfront. I periodically had to create more mock-up screens to help me figure out what that scope could be.

Looking at my last two completed projects, I had identified over 100 different backlog items by the end. However, each of those projects took me longer than six months, so while it was helpful to look through those backlogs to see what kinds of things I should document for this project, such as tasks to create app icons and create ports and create ways for the player to toggle audio on and off, I also guessed that maybe around 50 items is likely doable in six months?

I don’t actually know. Some tasks are bigger than others, and I still need to estimate how big some of them are relative to each other. I don’t have some of the more complex features I was hoping for, such as the animation work I was investigating in the last few weeks, and I worry that even without them that it might still be too much for a six month project.

However, I am being mindful to front-load a lot of the core system and coding work in the first few months, with the expectation that later months are all about adding content. I expect this approach means that the project will be considered finished in six months no matter what, and the only unknown is how much or how little variety I can provide, plus how much animation the clowns might have.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

—

Want to learn about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and download the full color Player’s Guides to my existing and future games for free!

In my last report, I said I had started working on my next Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project, which will focus on clowns.

I find myself struggling to strike a balance between trying to capture as much of the design and scope upfront as possible and accepting that I will never get it all upfront and so can make decisions and updates as the project continues and I learn more about it while building it.

I was hoping to have captured enough to get a head start in October, but now that the first full week of November is starting, I think I’ll start working on implementation.

Basically, I feel confident that the start of this project will be the same no matter what: I’ll be creating a title screen menu and get a basic project up and running (and shutting down).

So I can get started coding, but I still need to figure out the schedule in a lot more detail. It will help me identify what needs to be done, what can’t be done, and what might need to be changed.

Perhaps for future projects the design and schedule planning work should go into the project plan as well. Right now, I’m treating them as separate from the game’s actual development even though they are taking up time and are as much game development as any task I would have.

For now, here’s another mock-up:

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

—

Want to learn about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and download the full color Player’s Guides to my existing and future games for free!

If you recall from last time, I put further development on hold for The Dungeon Under My House, my non-violent, first-person role-playing game and what was supposed to be my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project.

Since then? I’ve been working on the design of my next project.

I don’t want to reveal too much yet, as it is still very early and no development has occurred yet. Still, I can say the focus on this next game will be about clowns.

Fun clowns, not the creepy or scary kind.

I love clowns. I loved watching Bozo and Cooky when I was a kid, and I loved seeing the clowns whenever Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus came to town.

I have had a soft spot for clowns ever since reading a newspaper article from many years ago that said that there was a clown shortage in the world. And I think clowns get a bad rap because so many people only see them in horror movies or as creepy villains in games anymore.

But real clowns are entertainers, using laughter to create a real impact on society. There’s a rich history to clowning that I’m still digging into as both a fan and as the developer of a game that will feature clowns.

And I find it strange that there is a real lack of games that feature clowns in a good light. My hope with this next project is to improve that situation.

When I worked on my last project, I think I managed it too loosely. As a result, it was a six month project that I finally decided to stop working on in its 20th month.

For this project, I am going to try to do as much upfront design work as I can, and I will create a project schedule that is as detailed as I can. In both the design and the plan, I expect that things can change over the course of the project. I can’t possibly believe that I would know exactly what will happen over the course of six months.

But I’m hoping that by focusing a lot more work upfront that I can make better prioritization choices and have a much more informed understanding of the impact of a major change.

If I do this work right, I think it is safe to say that you can expect to see this new clown-based game released next summer.

For now, here is a mock-up of a screen:

Wish me luck! And tell me what you think!

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