Notices by Cheeseness (cheeseness@mastodon.social), page 5

#Bonesweeper is now #FossilSweeper! Here's a quick post about the name change https://www.patreon.com/posts/77254470
#gamedev #indiedev #fossil

Made my own colour picker so that I could have something a bit more compact/focused than Godot's built in colour picker

Here's a little concept I scribbled last night while waiting for a rough cut of the most recent progress update video to render.

I'm a little embarrassed to share it because it's not even remotely accurate, but a) it's important to overcome that (with a disclaimer, of course), and b) concept pieces are about communicating ideas/intent rather than being perfect ^_^

None of the Spatial's children (direct or indirect) are physics objects. "Idle time" is pretty inscrutable in Godot's profiler and I'm at a loss to explain why the same action (modifying the Spatial's transform) seems to account for 14ms or so less when done in _physics_process()

Spent some of today's stream wrestling with perf overheads. Moving a Spatial to match the mouse cursor's position was impacting frame time, *if* the Spatial had children. Updating the Spatial's transform in _physics_process() rather than _process() made a huge difference o.0

One new thing that's going to be in the assembly phase is an optional less stressful "puzzle mode." Got a first pass on the controls in this evening, and I think it's going to be fun for people who struggled with the default Tetris-inspired "action mode" in the prototype.

First pass on making gameplay automatically scale to fit the current skeleton (gotta handle both itty bitty theropods and huge sauropods). There'll be some extra camera behaviours to help make things more interesting/fun for really biggosaurs, but this is good for now

I'm also looking forward to the museum, which I hope will be a space for players to reflect on the cool stuff they've discovered, and maybe bump into` some educational content (like #HiveTime's "Beepedia" but more interactive) #fossilfriday

I'm really excited for the new dig selection screen, which will have a slider for controlling geologic time to give some extra context for where fossils came from (and will probably have more than just Australia).

The map, dig and assembly gameplay loops are now implemented (along with saving/loading) enough that if I had more than one test skeleton, Bonesweeper would pretty much have feature parity with the prototype. I'm expecting the pace of development to ramp up a bit from here on out

Big dig sites aren't always a good fit for one play session. Need a break, but don't want to give up? No probs. Got the last fossil you need for a skeleton and want to go do that? Sure thing. Want to interleave progress on multiple dig sites one dig at a time? Um sure, I guess.

There's nothing new there, but it feels very nice to have it all hooked up together (looking forward to working on expanded functionality and content that that allows). I also tidied up the icon a little more ^_^

Behold, a game loop \o/

Made some nicer shelves today #screenshotsaturday

Dig phase is getting closer to being functional in the new codebase

Playing around with avatar scale during the dig phase #screenshotsaturday #gamedev #indiedev

Experimenting with using shape keys to get seamless dirt tile variants. Not sure if I'll stick with it, but it's an interesting way of getting a bunch of variation from a single model #screenshotsaturday #gamedev #indiedev

There we go

Sometimes forward progress doesn't look like forward progress

Looking slightly better