Zone Sweet Zone: Progress Report 5/2-5/8

hey!!! so, week one of zone sweet zone in the public eye has come to a close. it was also week one of me being able to pour a ton of time every day into working on it without stressing my poor head about how im gonna eat and pay bills!!! AND IT'S, PAID OFF TREMENDOUSLY, 

i've been tweeting about stuff as it gets done, but that stuff gets buried under retweets and shitposts pretty quickly. so, i'm gonna start doin' these lil progress reports every sunday to keep folks up to date on where the game's at!  Let's Watch A Grow.

anyway! this has definitely been my most productive week of work spent on this thing so far, lmao. both in terms of time spent working and Importance of things worked on. so let's dig into what i did!

FIRST OFF I DID NOTHING FOR THREE DAYS STRAIGHT

SETTING THE BAR HIGH!!! i'll be honest. looking at my notes, i apparently didn't do anything until 5/4, lmfao. i was kinda in shock from the reveal push doing so well, and i'd also been cramming in the days leading up to it so i guess i just!! frickin veged out for a few days after!! SORRY EVERYBODY

SAVING ZONE SETTINGS - THE JOURNEY!!

so! this was my big task this week. arguably the game's most important feature - everyone gets their own room, and they mess with it, and it saves so you and other people can look at it. i was budgeting a huge chunk of this month toward working this part out - i haven't really experimented much w/save data before, let alone uploading/downloading to the web. it SOUNDS like the most complicated part of the game's design, so i was like, surely this is gonna take me forever...

well, before long i had a system for saving and loading floor tile positions! they didn't persist between sessions, but it was a start. luckily getting them to save/load to a file after this was pretty simple, and soon after i had furniture and their positions saving and loading as well. last i was left with what i assumed to be The Big One: uploading and downloading this data on the world wide web!!!! so i asked around for a good hosting solution for testing (i went with nosupportlinuxhosting, which is $1 a month - perfect for what i needed!!) and braced myself...

turns out it was actually way less troublesome than i'd assumed and i got it working! this gif is me swapping between a "session" save, a file saved locally, and a file on the web. most of what i needed out of my save system was now in place! things are uploaded to a mysqlserver and use a player's username as reference, so everybody's stuff stays separate. HOWEVER... i was setting all this stuff up in a cluttered general purpose debug area. so, it was time to move all this stuff to a different scene, one a little closer in form to the eventual final product. it was time to build a hallway!!!

almost, anyway. i was gonna need to set up transitions between rooms, and i had an idea for one, so i spent some time learning about cameras. i had some fun with multiple cameras with different culling settings...

... and eventually got the effect i was goin for!!! NOW it was time to move to a new scene and build a hallway.

SO, HALLWAYS

hallways are important in zsz. you start the game in the building's lobby (or in your zone, if you so choose) and you can either hop in the elevator and choose a floor or hoof it up the stairs through each floor sequentially. everybody's zones are static - you're assigned a number when you first pledge, and that's your zone number for life. folks who have already pledged get numbers based on pledge seniority - so people who've been pledging longer get the lower floors etc! 

each floor has four zones on it. outside of each zone door is a lil plaque that displays your name, tenant level, and a small message set by the player which is pieced together like a dark souls floor message. everyone also has a mailbox which others can leave messages in, which are also pieced together like a dark souls floor message. things are just more fun this way, i promise.

oh yeah! player name is separate from your login username and can be changed any time. i don't want anyone to be stuck with anything they dislike, and i trust folks not to be rude with this feature!! your zone number will always be the same anyway, so people can identify you by that if they get confused i guess.

OK UHHHH ANYWAY i cobbled together a placeholder hallway and after Some Minor Goofemups,

... i got it working!!!

each lil doorway has a loading zone that points to a player's username in the player database and loads up their zone. so, that part of the game is like... pretty much... done!!!!

SO, BASICALLY, WHAT I GOT DONE IS...

the framework for the meat of the game!!! all assets are still temporary but the main draw of the game - get your own room, design it, put furniture in it, upload it for others to see, and then check out other people's rooms - that's all in there now. i'm pretty freakin happy with this week!!!

SO WHAT'S NEXT

i need to do a LITTLE more work on the hallway - i gotta put in stairs and elevator functionality, which will probably be my Next Tasks. once those are in, i want to bring zone and hallway geometry closer to a final design! i also need to work on upload/download of player info to the server - stuff like avatar customization and player name etc. if i somehow finish all this up before the week is through (and if my pace keeps up, i very well might), i wanna work on some more char customization options!!! i need to do a color slider for stuff like skin/hair/accessory color especially... and tidy up the faces!

HEY, SPEAKING OF FACES

so! i mentioned on twitter that i had some ideas for future ~user participation~... and here it comes!!

i'm pretty sure i want to have monthly free submission of avatar faces and textures!!!

SO, i think custom modeled things will still be something that costs a lil extra, since they'll require time for me to make and/or implement, but textures for stuff like faces and clothing are pretty low-effort to put in! and they're fairly low-res, so they don't require a WHOLE ton of work to make... face stuff is just 64x64, for instance.

what i actually wanna do is release the avatar maker as a standalone thing - maybe even something that runs in a browser? - and allow for application of your own custom textures in each of the slots. that way you can create textures and test em on the actual model to see how they look, as well as test em against all the already implemented assets. then, once you're done, you can submit em to me - and then, each month when i update, i'll try and put a bunch in the game! then they'll be there for everyone to pick from and enjoy.

now, i'm sure you'll ask - why not just allow users to upload their own textures freely? the answer is twofold...

1) i wanna maintain a fairly consistent look & level of quality across the game. this might come off as a lil control-freaky, but ~aesthetic cohesiveness~ is pretty important to me in a game! my process is definitely not gonna be "NAH NOT GOOD ENOUGH, IGNORED" though... id really like to work with people to make their ideas fit in if im not sure about em at first!!! we'll see how this goes.

2) i doOoOOon't want to get into allowing people to upload their own files to my server lmao. that's a whole barrel of complicated fish im very uninterested in dealing with...

UMMM SO ANYWAY! that's an idea i had. it's kinda reminiscent of the user-submitted head system that graal had, if any of y'all have played that ol' game. i have another idea for user content, but i think i'll talk about that one once i'm a lil closer to getting the system for it implemented....

SO, there's nothin for y'all to do just yet - but whenever i get around to focusing on avatar creation in the coming weeks, i'll see about putting together some templates n tools so folks can submit things before the game launches!! just get those braingears crankin for now, i guess.

ok uhhh i guess thats what i did this week.

thanks for checkin in, and thank you for your support!!!

sorry this post is so wordy and reads like a weird, autobiography???? i dont really know how to format these posts yet ILL FIGURE IT OUT

here's a fun behind-the-scenes gif of what's actually happening when loading a zone!!! i didnt know where else to put it in this post but its fun i think!!!

BYe