It's October again and I'm joining the Devtober!
Many people seem to choose the challenge of working on the game every day of October, but it's no challenge for me.

I confess that I'd rather spend 10 hours coming up with my own solution through trial and error rather than watch a 5-minute tutorial.

Would be great if my trial and error gave good results - unfortunately, I often feel like I'm reinventing the wheel AND not doing it well.

So I am going to try to do as many tutorials as I can during October - ideally for something I can quickly implement into Light of the Locked World - my current major project - for visible results.

I hope you will find this useful. Thanks for reading!

Devtober 1

After 7 years of game development, I still don't know how to implement sliders. That's embarrassing! Sliders are so useful - everything I tried really doesn't replace them - and my own trial and error sliders feel awkward to use.

This ends today! Hopefully.

Success! Thanks to HeartBeast's tutorial!

I am liberated from no-slider-hell! So happy!

Devtober 2

I was wandering around YouTube, looking for a useful tutorial and stumbled upon this:

I always wanted to be able to recolor certain words in a string! LET'S GO!

Success!

Oh, and  I have also read this useful article: How to Get People to Read Text in Your Game

Devtober 3

I needed a desaturation shader, so I decided to actually do it myself this time.
So I watched this and several other tutorials from GameMaker shader tutorial series:

And... Success!

I am very happy with today's tutorials - learned a lot, I think I'll be trying to use shaders everywhere I can now.

Devtober 4

It's been a challenging few days so I decided to make it easy for myself and just watch a few videos about level design - building levels is something that I find very fun and I want to be better at it.

Here are the videos that I watched:

Celeste video in particular was very interesting to me.

A lot of things mentioned in the video I have figured out myself, so it was reassuring - but I also got some new insights.

Devtober 5

Rest day, gotta stay productive =]

Devtober 6

Couldn't figure out what to do, so I just watched a GDC talk video.

Pretty sure PVP/maybe even co-op in Light of the Locked World is a cursed problem, but I think it's fine because you can simply play it as two different games.

Technique 5? Sacrifice making a hybrid to have two non-cursed games?

EDIT: This video had an impact on how I think about the game design, I keep thinking about things talked about in it, I'm very glad I watched it.

Devtober 7

Began today's hunt for tutorials by trying to find a visual effects tutorial for pixel art. Soon I have realized that finding something that would work for Light of the Locked World's graphics and animation styles would be very difficult.

I tried to create an animation style that works with the graphics style - very stiff, blocky, no blur, etc. basically a 'bad animation' style. I suppose it's possible to make it less... that... by adding more frames, but the game will take about a year to finish if I'm lucky, so I should minimize the time costs as much as possible.

The problem is similar to the art style problem of Magic of Autumn - yes, it's "unique" but it looks very low-budget. Ah well, back to the tutorial hunt.

I remembered that I have never used enums, so I went to a playlist of GameMaker coding tutorials by SamSpadeGameDev to look for a tutorial on that.

Stopped to watch this video:

Nothing was knew to me in this video - seems like I figured all of this by myself without any learning - trial and error, seeing other people code, and just being in the coder community. But again - reassuring.

And now I know!
I was using macros for the things that could have been done with enums a lot. Not sure if I should start using enums now - probably not a good idea to start doing that in the middle of development, but maybe I'll use it in the future projects.

Just in case watched a macro tutorial:

Devtober 8

I've noticed some more things that don't have much knowledge about in SamSpade's playlist - so I went ahead and learned about queues, priority queues, stacks, GM call stack.

Priority queue might actually make my game better - seems like in one very important script I use grid data sctructure and ds_grid_sort function to do what priority queue does automatically. This might make the game faster, I'll have to try it.

Devtober 9

...

Devtober 10

...

Devtober 11

...

Devtober 12

...

Devtober 13

Still going through SamSpade's playlist - today I watched a video about custom data structures. Can't think of where to apply the custom DS's at the moment, but seems very powerful.

I skipped a few days because I was sick, going to be back to regular schedule soon, I hope.

Oh, and priority stack made my game 0.3 milliseconds faster if the profiler can be trusted, so that's neat.

Devtober 14

Today's video was about AI:

It got me thinking about AI in LOTLW:

1)

I could probably spawn random rogue/demon groups who would sometimes attack towns.  Town guards could patrol outside the town as well. The "Good AI have goals". If I could pull it off, which really isn't that hard thanks to all those AI systems I have already implemented, it would create some interesting moments.

2)

When it will be possible to use consumables in battle, NPCs should bark something like "I need healing" before using a healing consumable so the player could react to that. "Good AI barks".

I'm also thinking about letting NPCs level up and showing a game message whenever that happens. E.g.: "Guard captain Aden has become a level 25 Warrior."

Another idea is to show kill messages that are common in multiplayer shooter games - e.g.: "Player A > weapon icon > Player B" - so the player would know that NPCs are fighting somewhere in the area.

This should make the game's world feel much more alive.

Devtober 15

Today I watched:

Quite early in the video realized that it won't work for LOTLW because its goal is to be 100% hidden mechanic free.

I did find the part about Firewatch useful.

Devtober 16

Today I was reading articles about making good cities in video games by Konstantinos Dimopoulos - click here to view archive.

Out of all the tutorials and other resources here, I think these articles are the most important - I highly recommend reading at least a few, it'll make your game cities better!

It surely helped LOTLW's towns.

Devtober 17

Read a few more Konstantinos' and now my head is full of ideas.
Going to do farmer village and after that comes the first large city of the game: Luma.

The Rebel/Coastal/Abyst/Free City, Capital of the World.

That's what I'm preparing for =]

Devtober 18

Today I have read half of "Level Design - In Pursuit of Better Levels" write-up - you can get it from Twitter user @TychoBolt.

I got some valuable information from it, even though it's all about 3D levels.

Going to read the other half tomorrow. EDIT: I didn't, didn't feel like the first half was useful enough.

Devtober 19

Rest day.

Devtober 20

Not-rest-day-but-I-was-lazy day.

Devtober 21

Watched another video by Game Maker's Toolkit. Seems like I don't do anything obviously wrong with my combat system, so that's good.

I'm very busy right now, so I guess I'll be watching short videos - just not enough time.

Devtober 22

Was fixing PC.

Devtober 23

This video was awesome, highly recommend. Just look at this monster of a sheet:

Don't really need to fix my game's structure, I think - which makes me proud.

Devtober 24

Another inspiring talk by Mata Haggis!

Will have to think a lot about this before starting to write the game's story.

Devtober 25

Watched two videos about common mistakes new writers make, just in case. Again, I want to prepare for LOTLW's story.

Not sure if I learned something new, but feels good to get that out of the way.

Devtober 26

Rest day.

Devtober 27

I want LOTLW to have decent NPCs so I watched this GDC talk.

There are very interesting points in it and the game I am making is based on similar ideas.

Devtober 28

Another GDC talk about NPCs. I'm already using a personality system for my NPCs, the only thing that I don't do is making NPCs talk to each other. Might do that one day - I already have a system that assigns NPCs to teams, so they could exchange a few lines.

It was another interesting talk and I'm glad I watched it. Though I should do something besides watching GDC talks, they are a bit light - I should probably more use of the videos similar to "Common writing mistakes" ones. 

Devtober 29

Today I was very busy, so I've just read "Writing Efficient Code: Reusability and Extensibility" article about in coding in GameMaker - all of this it is true. Also, woah, GMS 2.3 >.>

Devtober 30

Updated the demo today, was too busy to watch videos.

Devtober 31

It's the last day of October, so I guess it's time to evaluate this experiment.

The most important thing I learned: I shouldn't worry about learning until I encounter a particular problem. "Oh, I'm going to dedicate an hour per day learning!" just doesn't work.

While I had specific tasks I needed to accomplish, it was going really fast, but as soon as I ran out of problems, everything slowed down significantly.

I did stumble upon useful videos and articles, but it isn't efficient.

So I guess the second lesson is: I should more actively look for things I might be doing wrong. Because knowing what is the problem is like 50% of solution.

Kind of sounds dumb and obvious, but yeah. Lesson three: If something isn't obvious, doesn't mean you don't have to learn it?

Or something.

Anyway, I think I made some progress towards overcoming my fear of learning, and that's just great!