2016 Year in Review

Happy New Year!! :)

Wow, what a crazy ride 2016 was. I don’t subscribe to the whole “2016 is the worst year ever” line of thought, but it was definitely a strange one. For me, it’s been kind of stressful and very, very busy. I learned a lot and stretched and grew, but I’m grateful that most of that is over now. And excited to see what 2017 holds!

As busy and stressful as 2016 was, it was the year where development on The Waking Cloak started in earnest. I have to love it for that, at least. While I already had some art assets and a disproportionate amount of music that I composed for the game from 2015, it wasn’t for SERIOUS until August of 2016. I started drawing and posting to /r/PixelArt on Reddit to get some great feedback. I created this devlog, set up an email list, and got down to business.

After a lot of trouble working out some difficult details like cameras and collision and a few initial gamedev streams on Twitch (which a friend convinced me to do!), I’d made good progress. Unfortunately, around October I had too many things on my plate and not enough time. Since The Waking Cloak is a hobby job, I had to take a hiatus from the development until December! That said, I still sneaked in some work on the game, because I loved it too much…

But now we’re back, and things are rolling along at a fantastic pace. After making the switch from GameMaker: Studio Pro to GameMaker Studio 2, I resolved some pesky camera/collision bugs, started streaming again on Twitch, and started working on combat implementation. Lots of plans are in place, and I’ve been steadily working on design docs and story in the background.

A mostly-full list of everything accomplished in 2016, more or less in order:
- Drew sword attack animations
- Updated the player sprites (based on my wonderful brother’s design)
- Drew mockups which forced me to make TONS of tiles (some of which were also based on my brother’s designs)
- Made the monumental switch from the original GameBoy Color aspect ratio (240x160, or 3:2) to a widescreen aspect ratio (320x180, or 16:9).
- Started making the art more faithful to the GameBoy Color’s limitations, such as 3 or 4 colors per 8x8 sub-tile
- Created a state machine
- hiatus :(
- Started eyeing GameMaker Studio 2
- no more hiatus! :D
- Made the switch to GMS2 manually, script by script
- Resolved a persistent camera bug that would fling you across the room instead of moving to the next room
- Resolved quite a few performance issues that should never have been issues in the first place (my poor laptop now runs the game at an average of 2000 fps, and my desktop at something ridiculous like 6000 fps)
- Started taking advantage of GMS2’s animated tiles instead of my old, clunky code
- Created another draft of the map
- Fixed diagonal movement in a manner faithful to the old GBC Zelda games… without supersampling!
- Added glorious tile collision
- Started working on the inventory system and finalized a few items

So there you have it! Five months of progress. I’d like to think that 2017 will be The Year of The Waking Cloak, even if it doesn’t get finished this year. At least we’ll have more to talk about in 2017’s Year in Review.

What am I up to now? Well, the aforementioned streaming on Twitch will be very consistent for the first quarter of the year. Most likely it’ll be Mondays and Wednesdays from 5:30-7:00ish CST, and Tuesdays from 7:30-9:30ish. And also on some weekends! Be sure to follow me at twitch.tv/mrdaneeyul so you can swing in and watch.

I’m planning on working on combat, enemies, inventory, and map/level design to start off 2017, and more from there. It’s gonna be a blast, and I hope you’ll keep following along. :)