Since I'm still "on break" after defending the diss, I've been spending a lot of time working on idle game stuff. I'm trying to consolidate things right now. I keep trying to make more complicated architectures, and I'm trying to stop and just focus on making fun stuff. This is becoming an issue since I started using these assets to substantiate my idle browser game.
I'm trying to rebuild my codebase so that I have just one codebase and I pull out the front-facing stuff for neocities, and I have stuff placed together for the idle game stuff. It's honeslty kind of a headache because I want to keep things sandboxy and exploratory, but I'm struggling to keep two codebases together and have them use the same stuff. Honestly just typing this out makes me realize I don't need to standardize it right now.
But one issue that I'm also having is that I feel like I'm hitting an expression ceiling with what I'm doing with my site. I like making random characters and putting them in places, but I feel like just having them always accessible robs a lot of worldbuilding. It makes them turn into billboards, and it makes it visually obvoius what the scope of the world is. Rove City is supposed to be a town, but if all the NPCs are always accessible, then it just feels like three NPCs standing in a room.
I'm trying to expand my sandbox to make it possible for greater character authorship. Instead of having characters be billboards that deliver information, I want characters to move in a world.
So I've decided to use javascript to have NPCs show up based on things like time and conditions. And to me that means I have to figure out a data schema to represent this.
One issue right now is that any given character is locked to a map. I've been calling anything on the map as a "sticker", and "stickers" can have "hover popups". But if I want an NPC to, say, be on different maps at different times without overlapping...and if I don't wanna tear my hair out making sure all the numbers align, I should change the representation to "entities" which are visually represented as stickers. So I did that. Maps contain entities and maps and entities are defined in data, and then all the html for them is injected into the div with js.
My brain really finds it easy to think about architecture all day, but I know this isn't helping me build the world. It's just building the framework for building the world. But I'm also legitimately just trying to get the code to a point where I can "just write" and I don't have to figure out how to write the code to get X to appear at Y place/time under Z condition.
My idle game is still in the works, the main thing I'm working on is expanding the depth and breadth of the skill trees. The basic mechanics for farming are established enough now that the real bottleneck is literally content. I just need to draw more materials and shit, and determine levels for things.
As I'm writing this shit, I'm having a lot of fun haha. Some part of me is mentally evaluating myself: is this any good? Is this worth looking at? Could people love this character as much as other characters from the famous indie game devs who I'm envious of?
The other wolf in me doesn't give two shits. I love the longoose and I don't care if no one else does.