0.4 Progress

Hi. I'm alive. So's DBS! Against both our odds.

The prototype demo has gotten little bits of feedback here and there - including Xanderwood as part of his weekly indie playthroughs on his channel -  enough to reshape it bit by bit as time's gone on. Since it's died down I've been trying to make progress - inch by painful inch - but it's been tough, for reasons I'll get into in the latter half of this update.
I want the next actual build/upload of this game to be the actual demo, the 0.2 release as it were, not so much a mechanical introduction but the actual game's introduction. Plot and everything. Right now I'm planning for the demo to just be the first chapter of the game as it will be in the final version, we'll see how that goes.

But in any case, though it has been a slog, some things have in fact been worked on.

First of all, there are new minigames. The same three would get boring after a while, no matter how diverse the difficulty became. So in addition to Order, Roulette and Track there's also Luck, Pairs and Clockwind.

Luck is simple and cruel - you guess if the coin the game's going to flip is going to land on heads or tails. No skill, no test, no compassion.

Pairs is just pair-matching. I've been fighting off the notion of putting Memory in this thing since I decided on the card-based theme but after watching my housemate play the hacking minigame in Mass Effect I realised I'd feel much better about the decision if it was copying Bioware.
Not that I respect or like Bioware, but somehow it felt right.

Clockwind is... possibly getting cut. I'm not sold on it yet, but I think it's the most unique game I've managed to put together so I want to put the work in to make it something worth keeping.
Presented with a wheel separated into between 12 and 24 portions (like Roulette but bigger), the player and their opponent and take turns playing cards to turn the 'clock hand' an amount equal to their value. Whoever plays the card that turns the hand back around to the top wins.
I really wanted another minigame so I threw together elements of Blackjack and Chronobind in Final Fantasy XIII-2 (from which the name is shamelessly inspired by). The idea is that the player should consider between playing high cards to turn the clock closer to the endpoint - thus risking pushing it close enough that the opponent has a card that could take the win - or lower cards to stall, passing the risk onto the opponent.
I plan on messing around with the rules - a set deck the player can track the patterns of, the opponent's hand being concealed, open or partially open, and possibly adding the choice of making your card increase or decrease the count. More on why I'm putting that off, later.

I've also been hard at work creating new spritesheets for NPCs and story characters alike - by which I mean I haven't been making them at all, I've been working on the most efficient way of doing so! Efficient procrastination, that's how we get by, here.
My initial workflow was to flip layers on and off in Photoshop  and recolor everything with the paint tool, then repeat for every character, building important characters specifically while picking pieces randomly for NPCs.
I don't want to do that.

Instead, I exported every layer I had (every hairstyle, accessory etc.) as a separate file and built a basic but functional character generator that has a 'randomise' button. It even recolors every layer based on a chosen color palette! And builds the piece list from the files in the resource folder so I don't have to manually add the option to the dropdowns! I can just churn out a bunch of random people with little effort and it's beautiful.

The only problem is the palettes I chose look gross so I have to fix them and remake all these characters I made for the screenshot. But once that's done oh man just you wait there's gonna be so much more.
While I was in a creative mood (and after learning a few tricks from the generator project) I also made an automatic color identifier for character sprites that tints their dialogue panel. A little thing that might be cut depending on stylistic choices/evolution but it's nice to have.

Now, the big one. The main aspect of this game I've settled on, and indeed had settled on when I began the project, but one I haven't actually talked about: the intentional impossibility of achieving 100% completion.
The dot point has been on the game's page since day one, and at least one player still made the comment that there was a 'bug' stopping them from checking off all the demo's goals. This isn't a complaint about people not reading the game page - who actually cares lmao if it's not in the game it's not part of the product - but a reminder that it's something that needs addressing. In the prototype, the demo, and the finished product Deadbeat Simulator will hopefully become, the player will not be able to complete every goal in the game.
This isn't a comment on video game completionism or gaming culture or anything like that, it's taking an element of the medium and using it to further express the themes of the project. Which themes, you might ask (rightfully, as there's barely any plot in the current demo to convey them)?
They're why it's taking so long to work on this thing.

I suffer from mental health 'problems'. I have an anxiety disorder, "some" depression according to the GP I recently decided to never see again (don't worry I got a new one), and have had the mountain of evidence of ADHD grow almost consistently since I learned it wasn't actually an "attention deficit". I bring this up not as an excuse for why making this game is taking so long, but as context for what it's meant to mean.
I can't do things in my daily life that, by ostensible accounts, I should be able to. There's a growing pile of dishes in my room. I had one meal today. There's been laundry hanging outside for eight days and it's rained for three of them. I'm not lazy, I'm not petty, but something in my brain won't let me work up the "motivation" to do something as simple as take a plate to the kitchen and put it in the washing machine (that I haven't emptied). I've had to trick myself into being 'able' to do things I'm supposed to do, like deciding standing up and walking to the desk is a task, then since I'm already up I'll probably feel like picking up the plate and maybe when I walk to the kitchen I'll put it down. I schedule bits and pieces of jobs and tasks over several days so I won't feel overwhelmed and just give up on even trying.

But you know what it also limits my ability to do? Things I enjoy. Video games. Watch TV shows. Call my family. Lately I've been scheduling time to play video games just so I can do it and I still skip it most days for no reason at all. I have a comic book I've been meaning to read for months. I've had prop-building projects sitting in my front room for nearly a year. I got up to the last episode of Sex Education season 3 and just didn't watch it. I love that show and I love Adam's plotline and I want nothing more than to see how he ends up but I'm not watching it and I don't have a rational explanation for it! Not being able to get a job is one thing but having all that time and not even spending it on things you like?

It's not much expressed in its current form, but in time that's what this project will be about. The inability to do things - from the necessary and mundane to the luxury and enjoyable - and the frustration of not accomplishing what you - and the world around you - said you should. The list of possible achievements is a meta layer over an entire experience with a video game, the roster of side-quests ever-present just next to the actual plot, and the expectation is that with a bit of hard work and determination you'll be able to finish all of it.
But you won't.
You need to get the groceries, but you got burnt out. You could have taken a different route today but you've exhausted your energy. There is a list of things to do in every chapter of the game and while you may achieve the bare minimum required to survive the plot, you will never do everything you want to do. That's the meta-element I want this game to make use of. I want to take that meta-goal every player has to achieve everything the game tells them to set out to and dangle it just out of reach - not out of cruelty or malice towards the player, but to trigger that same frustration everyone with 'problems' like me feels every day of their lives. Not to be preachy and not to elicit pity, just to create an experience using the medium of a game, hopefully one that can act as a reference point for other people like me and Lewis.

Society told me to get a job, my stomach told me to eat and I told me to work on Deadbeat Simulator.
My brain wouldn't let me. So here I am. 

Also, the story features the impending apocalypse. Next log will probably expand on that.