Welcome to Friday Fun, the blog where I poke my head up from underground, let you all know I’m still alive, and hopefully entertain you with some bits about my project progress and game development experience.
Just a reminder that Preview Demo 1 for Dehoarder 2 is now available for download for Patreon supporters at Beta Cat tier or higher! Sign up as a patron today and be among the first to play this early, pre-release version of the game!
Animated Items
One thing that I wanted to do for Preview Demo 1, but ran out of time for, was to have junk items properly animated when being picked up, transitioned between UI modes, and gathered into containers. I was able to loop back and correct that this week. The results are quite satisfying, as seen in this video.
Further, I was able to create a reusable system for animating arbitrary objects along arbitrary Bezier curves. This reusable component will come in handy in the future. When my wife saw the video of the new item animations, she said, “It’s like a pizza box tornado,” to which I responded, “Funny you should mention that, because I was realizing the system is flexible enough to create an actual junk tornado.”
I hope to fully test these changes and release an update over the next couple of days.
Prepare For Warp Balance Update
Over time, I have been continuing to play Prepare For Warp, both for my own enjoyment and to continue testing late-game elements. I had built up a laundry list of changes, and the period right after a big release of Dehoarder 2 seemed like an ideal time to take a day and apply these changes.
Most of the changes center around balancing achievements. When developing the game, I did my best to estimate and project numbers into the late game. I think I did fairly well given the nature of the game, as most things were within an order of magnitude of where I now see they need to be. Requirements for achievements were changed, and some achievement chains were re-arranged to have more or fewer levels. Overall the achievement count stays the same at 505.
These changes are released into the wild.
I may have one more, much smaller balance update coming in the future as there are a couple of achievements that I still have my eye on.
What’s Happening to the Canaries?
No matter what one thinks of the upheaval at Twitter, the undeniable fact is that the events that transpired in the last week have already been rather disruptive and present a business risk to those (like me) who have been over-relying on Twitter for the majority of social media outreach.
So I am starting to diversify my social media portfolio a bit. As of yesterday, Smiling Cat can also be found in the Mastodon fediverse. I’ll still cross-post to Twitter unless and until it becomes pointless to do so (e.g. engagement approaches zero), but Twitter will not be the only social media focus for me any more.
I’m looking into, but not yet committing to creating a Discord server for Smiling Cat games. If you really want to see a Discord server for Smiling Cat, or can think of somewhere else in the social media universe I need to be, please let me know.
Who knows? Maybe by forcing me out of my social media comfort zone and into new areas of the internet where new people are exposed to my games, this could end up being a good thing.
Another Week Gone Already?
Well, I know I took some time off over last weekend, but it seems like the time has gone especially fast since the last FF post. Hopefully next time I’ll have some information about what Chapter 2 of Dehoarder 2 will entail. Until then, have fun, and be good to each other.