Development and Dinosaurs
New year, new game! Rex’s Ranch is my latest brainchild that this time will hopefully be both fun, and easier to finish than my other games from the past several years. Time will tell - my money is on “yes”, and “no”, in that order.
The plan this time is to actually write some of the stuff down that I’m doing - because I’ve tried to implement some of the same stuff I’ve implemented before and just forgot. So this form of blogumentation should be good. Maybe. We’ll see!
So this is DevLog 1. I won’t write anything down because they need to have neat titles so I can look them up, but jumping straight into it felt weird too. So here we are.
What I’ve done so far is:
Decide on the theme. It’s Rex as in T-Rex, and Ranch as in farm. So, a dinosuar themed farming game. Heavily and shamelessly inspired by ~Stardew Valley~ Harvest Moon, but with the twist that it’s kind of like an idle game almost maybe. Probably closer to a game called Rusty’s Retirement - which is pretty neat.
Implement some of the core mechanics. I really do mean some. And it’s had a lot of change so far too. There’s a farmer. The farmer is not yet a dinosaur. The farmer can kind of undertake a subset of actions (till the ground), and idle. She could do a lot more before but I replaced the old state machine with a new behaviour tree, which is super cool. That will definitely be a blog post by itself!
Buy a texture pack. I didn’t want to be hampered by my terrible art skills and I lose interest if stuff doesn’t look good, so I’ve bought a whole bunch of themed 16x16 farming sprites from EmanuelleDev which are so cool - like super neat.
Design the game UI. I’ve started to lay out what I think the game UI is going to look like, but we’ll see how long that lasts.
Designed an app icon. Kind of - it’s a sprite from the pack with an orange squircle. The default Godot one was mixing in with all my other projects that I’ve installed on my phone, so this needed to stand out because it’s absolutely a real project that I will finish honest.
After all that, this is what I’ve got to show for it!
That’s kind of a bit cool! I think it is anyway.
But the coolest bits are the ~friends~ knowledge we gain along the way - which I’ll remember this time by writing it down.
See you (me) next time.
