Chef Shelf

Posted on by Nicole

I’m making something and it’s not a game. But it has me excited so I thought I’d share it with you. For work, the frontend team and myself are trying to delve deeper into backend programming land so that we can remove some of the bottlenecks on our very small team. To that end, we’ve been having workshops with our resident guru (shout out to Johanns!) and we’ve been building our own Rails projects to learn on. I used this opportunity to tackle a problem I’ve been thinking about a lot, which is recipe management. 

Some background information first: I love to cook. Cooking is a special kind of magic. The recipes that I use are all over the place. Probably 50% of the YouTube content I watch is cooking videos. I have a ton of cookbooks. Despite not loving the user experience, I use Pinterest which is great for its vision board approach. (I’m definitely a visual learner. And I can’t stand cookbooks without pictures. How do you know if you want to cook it without a picture?) I also have a ton of cooking magazines that I’d really like to scrape for quality recipes and then reclaim my shelf space. And that doesn’t count a barrage of loose handwritten or printed paper recipes and random links that currently I just store in Pocket. I want one source of information. Because everytime I make something bomb and think about making it again I have to remember where the hell it came from. 

So my app is a bit of a recipe catalog, with the ability to group recipes into books for categorization. It’s tentatively called Chef Shelf. (And no, I don’t have the honor of being a trained chef, but who can resist the consonance.) So I’ve been wrangling database tables and trying to get more comfortable with Ruby mainly because I want to be a (more) badass developer, but also because I’ve got this problem that needs solving. My end goal is to put this bad boy on a spare raspberry pi I got for Christmas a couple years back and serve it throughout my apartment, but we’ll see how it goes. Maybe I’ll make it go farther. I haven’t built it for multiple users because I don’t want to put the cart before the horse, and right now I’m having fun! I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m spending entire evenings scratching my head and shaking my fist at Stack Overflow (note to self: write post about the toxicity of Stack Overflow) just to solve some tiny problem but that’s how you learn, right? I’ll share some photos down the line.

Oh, and fear not, I’m still working on Fair Weather and contemplating my next game project (more on that later). So as usual I’m keeping several plates spinning over here. I’d better get back to it!

↑↑ ↓↓ ←→ ←→ B A

Posted on by Nicole

With Fair Weather in the App Store I thought it might be nice to share a few cheats to help along any players who find themselves stuck.

I built a hidden console into the game inspired by the Sims. You can access it by repeatedly tapping on the app version in the settings menu. (Yeah, Android, I took your thing. What you gonna do about it?) Once there you can enter commands to give you a boost in the game!

Running low on fuel, but you gotta go fast? Try fillherup

Got the munchies? Try nomnomnom

Can’t wait for Trader Ruth to show up? Try ruth

Did you kill your crew and now you’re all alone, huddled around a trash fire with nothing but your thoughts to echo off the cold empty hull? Try friend

These are just a few and surely I’ll be adding more in the future, so stay tuned. 😉

The Road to IndieCade

Posted on by Nicole
Trello Board

Look at that Trello board. It’s beautiful. Clean. Sure, it’s not empty. What you don’t see pictured above is about six more lists filled with ideas, bugs, features and enhancements, but don’t kill my vibe. This post is a celebration and we’re living in times very much in need of some good news. I finished all the tasks I planned for IndieCade and submitted an alpha build to the App Store. Go get it! Get it now!

It’s been a long time since I wrote an update of my progress. I’ve been very busy on the game. I did an overhaul of the interior artwork. I added a bunch of quests. I added some animation. I fixed a lot of bugs–and I mean a LOT of bugs. At the end there, I was finding bugs that had me questioning things like: How LONG has this thing been broken? Has it always been broken? How did I not notice? Am I a ghost? I also started testing with a group a friends, but it’s clear that I need more internal and external testing. (And if you’re interested in helping me test, click here.)

IndieCade is a yearly festival celebrating independent game development. How it works is: you submit your game, it gets judged by a panel and if selected, it gets showcased for the festival. No matter how IndieCade turns out this is a big win for me personally. It’s a milestone that I’ve worked very hard to achieve. I’ve spent practically every weekend and countless nights for several years working on this game. It feels scary showing the game to people. I keep saying “oh it’s not finished”, “I’m still working on getting the perfect balance”. It’s hard not to be intimidated by these other amazing solo dev projects that you see popping up all over the place. I don’t have any answers yet on how to get over that. I’m trying to tackle my insecurities. All I can do is try to get a little better every day.

I got iOS working for IndieCade. I wanted to release Android as well. I got a closed alpha testing track working in the Play Store several months back, but I had to give up on it in the last week or so leading up to the IndieCade deadline. I simply didn’t have enough time to wait on their approval process which was experiencing delays due to COVID-19 whereas the App Store turn around was super fast. But on the positive side, I can do updates for Android while my iOS build is frozen while IndieCade judges look at it.

For more info on Fair Weather, hit up this link right here.

Oh and there’s a Facebook Page now too!

WTF America?

Posted on by Nicole

A lot has happened in the last couple weeks. It’s hard to function. It’s hard to think about anything else. It’s hard to read the news without crying. George Floyd was murdered and I don’t have enough words for how terrible it is–for how terrible it is EVERY SINGLE TIME this shit happens. Seeing the large amount of people unabashedly okay with the cops’ constant unjust persecution of people of color in our country is sickening. It’s all too much–the division, the excuses, the lack of leadership, those who would distract us from the real issues plaguing this country.

Oh and coronavirus is killing us too.

I released my app in the App Store. Which is fucking huge. I’ve been working on Fair Weather for years, but it just doesn’t seem important right now. I’ll write about it later. For now…I don’t know. Breathe in. Breathe out. Stay strong. Fight the good fight. Black Lives Matter.

I love deadlines.

Posted on by Nicole

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams

IGF deadline was yesterday! Did I make it in time? No. Obviously. Come on people, context clues!

So this is the second deadline I missed this year. (The first one was for Indiecade, whose submission window had been moved up.) I don’t feel that bad about it though because I got really far in the submission process. My app is up in the google play store awaiting approval. A few days before the deadline I realized that the chance I’d finish in time was very very low, so I chilled out a bit. I don’t want to stress out for no reason. Additionally I’m going on a trip this week and I’ve done next to zero preparation for it, so I knew I needed to carve out a large chunk of my weekend to devote to that.

Where I went wrong:

  • I didn’t code freeze early enough. I was still making tweaks and bug fixes up until about a week ago.
  • I underestimated how long it would take me to figure out the Play Store’s upload process and decipher error messages.
  • I didn’t think I needed a privacy policy because I don’t track anything. This was wrong. So I had to figure all that out and add one at the last minute.
  • I didn’t think I’d need app approval for an internal release (but I suppose it makes sense).
  • I didn’t plan ahead far enough for my vacation which mean running out at the last minute trying to buy the right clothes and items which if I had done earlier wouldn’t have impacted my pre-release weekend.
  • The IGF deadline wasn’t on my radar until submissions were already open. It was pretty low stakes target. I basically used it to push myself because someone else’s deadline seems so much realer than your own.

Where I went right:

  • I didn’t kill myself trying to do it. This is my hobby and something I’m doing for fun. I’m usually working on it after a full day of work so I’m already 70% exhausted when I come to the table. I kept thinking to myself, am I trying hard enough? I could stay up til the wee hours of the morning and bang this thing out. I’ve done it plenty back in school, and even at work to hit deadlines. But over the years I’ve learned that it takes so much longer to complete any task, even a simple one, when you’re super tired, and the work isn’t your best, AND you’re gonna be super cranky tomorrow at work. So will I ever push myself that hard for Fair Weather? Sure, probably. But it’s not necessary right now. So I’m going to choose the healthy and sane route as long as I can.

I made a thing!

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I made a trailer for Fair Weather!

I used Divinci Resolve for the editing and plain old Quicktime for screen recording.

I LOVE the song I found from the site Nihilore.com. It’s called As Nihilism Gives Way To Existentialism.

I’ll probably do another cut in the future with more details on where and when the game will be available and also hiding some things (like the debug menu up there in the top left corner…oops!), but I’m liking how it turned out. Hooray!

So close and yet so far

Posted on by Nicole

I’m getting the app ready for the Play Store! I heard the Independent Games Festival, or IGF, submissions were open and thought, why not go for it? I missed the IndieCade deadline earlier this year, and while I wasn’t planning on submitting to IGF, I don’t see why I shouldn’t try.

So, what is IGF? IGF is a yearly competition of Indie games for sweet sweet glory (and money if you win big). They also have a huge Indie Megabooth set up at the Game Developer’s Conference which is one of the best booths each year. Submitting the game for others to check out is a big milestone for me.

The game has come really far in the past few months. I added some polish and tuned the tutorial based on the limited play test feedback I’ve conducted.

I do have tons of concerns still:

All the art is my own shitty pixel art (with the exception of a few assets such as the mining minigame’s monsters which I purchased from an itch.io artist). I know my game will be compared to games that are extremely pretty. I’ve tried to keep the aesthetic “minimalist-ish pixel” but there’s tons of room for improvement.

I am concerned that I haven’t tested it with a wide enough audience. One of my playtesters throughly broke the tutorial within the first two minutes. I think I’ve patched up those holes but I know there’s more. There are always more.

I’m scared by all the horror stories I’ve heard of people’s apps being plagiarized off the Google Play Store. This might be a premature concern, but the idea that someone could take what I’ve spent years working on and pimp it out makes me sick.

There’s a million things I want to add that I’ve had to delegate to future updates. Oh and there’s also..Am I a huge idiot for thinking anyone would want to play this? Could I have spent the last few years becoming fluent in Spanish or working through my bookshelf’s backlog instead? Have I done everything wrong? I’ve done everything wrong! I waited too long to release it! They’re all gonna laugh at me! You know, all the usual self doubt suspects.

So that’s where I’m at. But I’m still going. I gotta put those fears behind me and soldier onward. To Valhalla!

Dev Update #2

Posted on by Nicole

#GameGoals

A lot of time has passed since my last update. The IndieCade submission deadline has come and gone. I decided about a month before that happened that I wasn’t in a great position to show the game and while I still used that date as a personal milestone, I just didn’t want to kill myself getting a demo done that wasn’t going to stand up to the competition and that I wouldn’t even get any feedback on (as indicated by the IndieCade documentation). I still had a lot of temporary art that needed to be replaced, barely any sound integrated and I haven’t had a chance to throughly playtest. So my current goal is to get playtest ready. I’ve done a few quick tests with friends from work, but I’ve got a ways to go.

So where does that leave me?

Feature wise the game is in a good position. I’m tweaking things now for playability, but trying not to give in to the feature creep demons. There are currently two minigames in the game which correspond to the mining signals and the ambush signals. I have plans for a third minigame for the rescue signal but I’m thinking it would be integrated as a later update so that I can stay on track. I may start slowly building it in my free time (my what?) in isolation of the rest of the game, but my main goal is polishing and playtesting what I already have now and getting it in the Google Play store.

Process Updates

I’ve started using Trello for task management! Wunderlist was working alright, but it wasn’t good for tracking tasks that were in progress. Tasks were either done or not done, and since I sometimes dabble in one task then dabble in another, that wasn’t working out for me. I still use lists for things like keeping track of what actions I need sounds for, or high level goals but I’m really liking Trello.

I promise I’ll update more often. But, you know, don’t hold me to that.

I’m not dead yet!

Posted on by Nicole

Holy Hiatus Batman!

Ok I haven’t updated the blog in a while, but rest assured, dear reader things have been moving along at, I dunno…let’s call it lilting speed.

Let’s see what’s happened:

new laptop
What’s a Computer?

I got a new computer back in August and it is sooooo much better than my old Sony Viao. I mean that thing was Bad with a capital B.

halloween costume
We are made o-of
l-o-o-o-ove.

I took off some of October to deal with Halloween costume preparations (It’s my favorite holiday, and it’s kind of a big deal) and most of November to participate in Nanowrimo.

I’ve started incorporating audio into the game. I haven’t quite pinned down a musical style. I thought of having jazzy rifts play, after finding a baritone sax sound pack that I liked, but I don’t want to be accused of trying to be a Cowboy Bebop rip off. I’m not sure if this is a valid concern, but I have it none the less.

Unbeknownst to me, IndieCade moved up their submission this year to March 15/April 15 (late submission date) rather than the summer so I’ve advanced to full on panic mode, cutting features and trying to figure out art.

I did a reworking of the Mining minigame just to make it a bit more complex. Perhaps I’ll make a separate post about that.

Speaking of art, I’ve been experimenting with pixel art a bit more because I need to start replacing all the temp art in the game with assets I can actually use.  And while pixel art in games is, if not already, quickly becoming played out, it’s an art style I, as a programmer, can create on my own. My pixel art is pretty basic, but I can improve on it as I go.

pixel gun
Pew Pew

And that’s pretty much it…well, it’s not…but I gotta get back in the game.

Dev Update #1

Posted on by Nicole

I upgraded Unity recently. I guess time got away from me because I was seeeeveral versions behind.

The reason for my upgrade was stupid. I’ll admit that. I ran into a problem. A stupid problem. I accidentally hit the close program button instead of the stop running in editor button (because I was distracted) and it borked my project so horribly that I couldn’t recover. I tried throwing away my changes in source control and restarting. That didn’t work. I googled the errors I was getting and tried all the suggestions there but that didn’t work either. Then I decided to reinstall unity. And while I was at it I was like, yeah, let’s go ahead and upgrade.

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