Halfway to 100 days!

I'm officially 50 days into the #100DaysofGameDev challenge and I'm happy to say I've managed to keep up! I admit, progress feels a little slower now, but some real life stuff has kind of gotten in the way! Namely, I ended up in the hospital a little while ago and haven't been feeling great lately. It's been a lot of resting with a sprinkling of gamedev in there and progress is still chugging along! 

I haven't been too active on social media lately because A, I've been tired, and B, I've mostly been fighting with UI stuff, but I have been keeping track of my progress on Discord and, just like last time, I'll break it down by day! 

Day 26: Wrote the devlog for the first 25 days and began working on the Staff system. 

Day 27: Got hiring staff mostly working, with placeholder assets. Mocked up some icons for my game stats as well.  I want to have more detailed stats than this eventually, but gotta' start somewhere. 

Day 28: Implemented the stats menu into the game. 

Day 29: Fixed some little bugs and started actually implementing the staff hiring system. 

Day 30: After a frustrating day, I decided that my staff system was too complicated. 

Day 31: Overhauled everything I was doing with the staff. I'm still not totally happy with it, but you can hire different kinds of staff depending on what buildings are in your park. For example. for each maintenance shed, you can hire 2 maintenance workers.  This might be a silly way to go about it, but I added a list of short names for the staff, so they aren't too long for the notebook.

Day 32: Finished adding all the Janitor hiring stuff. 

Day 33: You can hire scientists now too! 

Day 34: Added in portraits for staff. All the portraits in the game so far are quick kind of placeholders. Cute enough to get the idea across, but I definitely want to change them someday! 

(It's not a nice day for a walk in the park. Staff just have default dialogue for now.)

Day 35: Worked on setting up some purchase tooltips. I already had a few in-game already, but had to add them for all the available items. Super tedious, but it's gotta be done. 

Day 36: Worked on the item menus. All of the items have different information so coming up with a layout that works for everything is a little tough, but I think something like this should do for now!

Day 37: Got sent to the hospital. There wasn't a whole lot I could do from there, but I did organize some of my spreadsheets for the game and jotted down some ideas for future dialogue while I was waiting to see a doctor. More or less a write-off of a day, but organization is important too! 

Day 38: Spent most of the day in hospital, but did come home and fixed a couple collision bugs and started setting up the menus from day 36. I was told to take it easy so I didn't want to spend too long at it, but also didn't want to lose my momentum. I only spent like 15 - 20 minutes at it, but i reckon that's better than nothing.

Day 39: Wasn't feeling too hot, so all I did was make the titles display on the item UI and fixed some teeny tiny things.

Day 40: I started to feel a little better, but needed a break from UI stuff, so I made sure the carry items appear in the picnic area. I'd been putting it off forever because it was basically just setting up positions for 25 things to draw. Not super riveting work. 

Day 41: Did some planning for the research system. Since not all of the items are even in the game yet, and none of the scenarios are set up, it's a little tricky to know what exactly to add to this for now. There's only so much room in the notebook so had to decide how to to divvy up the unlocks while trying to predict how many things I'll eventually need to unlock. I'm mainly aiming to avoid back-tracking and changing things later, but I'm not sure if I avoided any future changes.

Day 42: Began working on the Research Menu setup. I decided no amount of planning is going to stop me from having to change it later, so I've been trying to make a system that's easy to alter. Gotta admit, I've never made a research tree before, so this is all a little overwhelming. 

Day 43: Got completely sidetracked playing around with particles. I'm not even sure if I'll use them, but I made a little fire effect and a light that i might implement someday! 

Day 44: Not a lot of progress. Just continuing with the research stuff. 

Day 45: Made a few icons for the unlockable items. Since they're in the notebook,  I wanted them to be all black/white until they're unlocked. Trying to give those pen vibes. 

Day 46: Was not in the mindset for coding, so I drew a couple little animal burrows. I'm not sure if they'll make it in the game before the 100 days is up, but they will be added eventually! Still need to draw/add animals to live in them, so a bit of work left to do there.

Day 47: Because I haven't had a full day of working on this game in a while, still working on the Research stuff. At this point I'm completely over it and cannot wait to be done with all this. 

Day 48: Although it may not make it into the first version, I've decided to change how the flowers work. I decided to leave it for now, but I eventually want to have flower pots where you can switch out the flowers based on the ones you have unlocked. So instead of unlocking/building a flower pot with daisies in it, you would build/unlock a flowerpot and decide to put whatever flowers you have available in them. Still working on the Research.

Day 49: Wrote a little bit of dialogue for the tutorial that will need to go in eventually. Did a few small polish things to the research menu. 

Day 50: Added a second research page, this time for Recreation and Community items (the first page was Flora and Fauna). Did a little planning for the next 50 days too. I'm hoping to finish the entire research system/UI by the end of this weekend,

The couple weeks have been a little bit of a drag, but since i'm starting to come around, I'm hoping to get a lot more done in the second half of this challenge! Some things left to do: 

• Finish setting up all quests for the first scenario
• Finish writing for the first scenario
• Add community quests which will include a bulletin board and events
• Music/SFX (this is gonna be a couple day's worth of work i bet. Plus I need to find some music still)
• Add animals
• probably 1000000 little bugs
• World map
• title screen
• Polish polish polish. 

I'm sure all this is more than 50 days work, but if I can get all that done I want to:

• Overhaul the flower system
• Rotate items
• Album feature to capture events in the park (I want this to tie in with the end of day sequence but it's a big job)
• Smarter NPCs
• More (events, NPCS, items, everything)

Plus I intend to make a new Itch page (because I think the jam game should live on in its current state, especially since this new project has a brand new name), and I wanna get this puppy up on Steam eventually. 

Lots to do with little time! Wish me luck and thanks for reading! <3