It was just a couple days ago, wasn’t it, that I was lamenting the slog of working through the spit-polishing of code at the end of a development phase, and yet now here I am letting you know that Paranormal Pickle, my v0.3.x phase of design and development, is complete.

For firsts, huzzah!  Onto shinier things again.

For seconds, it has been over a month since I made my first commit to the code repository and just a few days shy of a month since I formally kicked whole thing off as a project from the curious proof of concepts that I had cobbled together over the holiday season.

What has been accomplished in 0.3.x?

A lot. Really. 

From back in those early days (a whole nineteen days ago!) of marching a little sprite image of a character around a grid on the screen I have incrementally coded a whole world populated with multidimensional spaces, nearly fifty distinct game areas, autonomous npcs that walk through those rooms following paths, a clock that marches forward the passage of time, and a smal but mighty database that keeps track of everything from the game state to a progressing story full of lore, dialog, and supplementary help. All the while, I have been fine-tuning my art and locking in a quasi-8-bit style with a colour-scheme that supports the user interface and the game experience.

Really, what else could I have to do?

Oh, right. There is still the whole gameplay part.

In my next phase of design and development, which as per the title of this post I am calling Subatomic Tomato, it is time to go a little deeper into the details and start creating this all important thing called an “object” … 

What is an object? 

Well, an object is pretty much anything that it needs to be. There already are a handful of background objects, things like shelves and doors, and all those passive world-filling things that helps to start bringing the game to life in the last phase, but what I’m talking about here are objects that are much more interactive and much more important to the game itself. Objects, simply, are things that the player can pick up. The player can pick objects up and keep them in an inventory, pick them up and put them on a shelf, pick them up and give them to another character. A player can buy objects, sell objects, or discard objects. Objects have value, but they also exist throughout the game as, in many ways, are the whole point of the game. The whole point, in that general hand-wavy sense, is to get objects and put them somewhere in the game where they will have an effect or do something that changes the state of the game itself. That, after all, is what game is: strategically organizing things in a way that progresses one towards victory. In the case of Pleck’s Mart, this is strategically placing the right objects in the right place in any of those nearly fifty game rooms with the hope that doing so advances your progress.

I’m writing very abstractly here on purpose.

Side note? I have been thinking about my candidness here and even though I know that any copycat game dev could never really replicate exactly what I’m trying to accomplish, letting you in on everything not only spoils some of the story and game itself, but makes it that much easier for some oversees gamer sweatshop to crank out a low-budget faux clone of my game before I can. This, my friends, is about playing a few of my cards closer to my chest.

Still. 

I can write about my progress in building things like complex collision systems that enable npcs to follow paths and yet avoid walking through each other like ghosts. I did that.

I can write about adding a complex invisible grid layer to every game space that tracks its own occupancy so that no two objects, people, animals, or walls can break these laws of physics one assumes should exist. I did that.

I can write about the complicated nature of this thing we call time and an effort to impose not just a day/night cycle into a pixel dance on my screen, but to enforce a player to go to bed at a reasonable time. I did that, too.

I am moving into a new phase of creating interesting and awesome virtual things now and I will be equally vague about their nature while telling you as much as I can about their design and development.

Like, what does this classic thing called a “player inventory” actually look like in code? One isn’t really creating pockets on the little sprite on the screen now are they? Rather, I have been thinking about it like a virtual “container” —basically an invisible slip of digital paper in the game that essentially holds a list of those aforementioned objects. Things can be in one place at any given time, so the can be in the world list or they can be in a player’s inventory list or they can can even be in an npc’s inventory list. Need to add more objects into the game? The in-game “buy more stuff” system is just another inventory with an invisible digital pencil dangling from it that creates objects from air and  adds them to that same list, and from which those newly created objects can be moved into the player’s inventory list and then from there out into the world list onward an around and over and over.

I am sitting here writing about it because, as you may have noticed reading this blog, as much as the code is important I truly, deeply believe that thinking about, reflecting on, and writing through one’s process is a close second. So here I sit. Not coding. But planning, plodding, and preparing to slice into a Subatomic Tomato.

Stay tuned.