A HUGE New Feature for my 2D RPG... 

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I just realized that the game looks extremely coherent now. It's inspiring to see your progress over the years.

One suggestion for the crafting system: Some indication of how many input resources you already have would be nice, especially when you don't have enough and need to know how much to gather. Lots of games use a #/# sort of display for this-e.g. 5/2 Plastic would indicate that you have five plastic, but only need two, so you have enough plastic to craft two crab armors if you wanted.

Before watching you explain your reasoning, the compelling reason to include crafting that I can think of is to provide an aditional incentive to collect rubbish cleaning the environment, as well as thematic tie ins with recycling/reusing.

some people find pixel text hard to read, even if they can recognize pixel art, so i would add an HD text option. even better if it's not just on or off, but these: • all pixel text • small text in HD • all HD text

feedback: the red numbers when you dont have enougf items really blends in, i would reccomend making the items icon that is missing also black and white so the red text on it stands out more also, you definitely need some sort of notification to the player when they learn a new recepie, an idea i had for this is to display a ui like when you pick up a item but have the icon a green exclamation mark with text next to it "new recepie" or something like that

Great first step of this new feature! Two things I like in other crafting games you might want to consider are the incorporation of time as a crafting ingredient (building a tent timelapses the game time forward more than building a simple piece of armor) and different sized items for the inventory, so a tent takes up more slots than a smaller item.

Nice work Ben! Crafting will definitely add in a ton of variety to the game. The Object Placement system should be a nice little challenge to make. Keep it up!

Just an idea you should add boats where you travel to different islands with biomes with harder enemy’s- and add a recipe book as an item where you can see everything that you could craft

Been quietly following all the dev logs, always a relaxing and enjoyable watch. The introduction of a crafting mechanism is a huge milestone imo, keep it going!

10:58 May I recommend making the disabled craft button even darker, or some means of lowering the contrast? Just a tiny accessibility boost.

Idea: Instead of doing the standard crafting thing, I have two ideas, both of which could be used, or either one: 1. Normally, crafting is done the way you're doing it there. Have items, press craft button. It takes away all tactility from crafting and turns it into basically numbers. Instead, maybe make it where you have the items and you break them into parts. You go to the crafting table and, like a jig-saw puzzle you set the parts onto a "plan" in their correct place and once all the items are placed, the item is created. This would be slower, yes, but it would be more interesting and you can compensate by making crafting more powerful, so it can be done less often. Imagine you want a fishing pole. You find line, a reel, a handle and a shaft, and you drag them onto a grayed-out "recess" and when it's done you have a pole. You can finish it in parts too, so you don't have to do it all at once, and you could keep returning and seeing your grand new pole developing. But in return, the pole you make is VERY good. You don't need to make 25 fishing poles throughout the game. 2. Second idea, which works whether you implement my previous idea or not, is that you could make these items customizable, so instead of having a crab armor, a coconut armor, _et cetera,_ each being more powerful than the last, you could have these armors all be of the same quality, but you can level them up/improve them through more crafting (or just a level up system). This way you can have the coconut armor from the beginning of the game to the end of the game if you like the way it looks, and different armors will ALWAYS be potentially interesting because they can all be used equally, and you can use them to customize the character instead of ignoring a perfectly cool armor because its stats are low. This might also REDUCE creation time because you could make, say, five armor sets and all of them would be useful, _and_ they could all look really cool and you could dedicate time to making them look good if you wanted.

Personally, I enjoy leveling up skills vs. a general "level". I like being rewarded for the things I enjoy or am required to do anyway and be better at that skill. That said, Skyrim's "smithing" skill was too much of a grind and had me making tons of stuff I didnt want or need just to level it up. Its a great system, as long as it rewards the player for doing what they would have done already with an added incentive to do a little bit more. Love these videos and I really look forward to them. Great work!!

About the small text, I personally think that such a small size should be avoided as much as possible... a player could be playing your game in a big TV, be visually impaired, or be me, who would really not be bothered to squint to read the smaller texts. Increase the size as much as you can, that's my suggestion! Great devlog as always.

Your devlogs always inspire me to work on my own projects. I love watching your progress with every new video.

Always looking forward to your uploads, Mr. Duck. Your work ethic is genuinely impressive

Very glad to have seen this in my notifications

Hey there! I'm using a pixel font in my upcoming game, so I definitely can understand the struggle. The font family I'm using, the Salmon 9 family created by Phildjii, tends to scale best at font point sizes that are multiples of 9 (So that'd be 9pt, 18pt, 27pt, etc.). I'd check to see the pixel height of the font and try to work out ideal sizes this way so that when you set the font size, it'll look crisp and readable enough.

Love the crafting menu and all! You always make great videos, keep it up!

Dude, so pumped for your progress. I'm totally living vicariously through you right now.

So good to see how the game has developed over time

Working on my own crafting game right now, so very excited to check this out tonight 🎉

I noticed that when you crafted the shell armor, the number of items you had stayed the same

Would be cool if NPCs could let you know about recipes to encourage talking to them - or to find a bottle with a note in whilst fishing or something like that. Then for some recipes you'll be able to see them without having the items required but might encourage you to then look for specific items.

Very nice update. Well done! I would love to see items with penalties as well (slowing you down in water, but giving you very high resistance to corruption). And for the crafting menu I would like to see current items next to the necessary ones. So 2/4 meaning you have 2, but need 4 to craft that item. In your video you have the items on your bar but I imagine you will most likely have actual usable items on your bar instead so tracking your progress is tricky. That’s why I would love to see the craft menu with this addition of information. Yet as always: thanks for the inspirational video. It’s like a meditation session :)

Since your game has an environmental narrative/theme, you may wish to consider/have the players consider how their crafting influences/effects the environment. Just a thought. It might also help with exploring your last area of weather or not you want levelling system for your crafting.

Awesome video! I think in the crafting screen instead of explicitly using the words “increased” or “decreased”, it might be more clear to just use up/down arrows while using green/red to indicate if this modification is good or bad

The progress is looking awesome! I am also currently working towards the ability for players to place items on the map in my 2D RPG. I incorporated player made changes to the tile map with hoeing land and planting plants, but I also want to incorporate the feature of a green or red "silhouette" of a deployable item to indicate if the player is trying to place it in a valid location. Keep up the amazing progress!

I find this update really interesting and cool!!

Great content buddy

It is so cool to see what consistent work can lead to. I've watched since the first devlog and it all seems to be coming together now. Any tips on staying so consistent with a project? It is something I struggle with

Hard to believe the very first devlog was released in February 2020 and actual development started even earlier. Huge congratulations on sticking with it for so long!

This is looking great! Although that intro screen / title definitely needs a touch up 😅 I love your aquarium by the way :)

I'm using milanote too after you recommend I love it

I used to have those exact same vans haha 7:51 great video btw

Awesome progress! I just started following your game dev logs and really enjoy watching them. I am picking up game development as a hobby again (went through a tutorials phase 5y ago) and gonna stick with Godot, so watching you make your game is quite inspiring. I usually play games mostly on PC but lately I've been playing more games on console and I was wondering if you have plans to make the game work with controllers as well. You being a solo game dev I believe it might not make sense to waste effort on supporting controllers but if you plan to do it, I would recommend not doing it as am afterthought and maybe think how things woud be done without a mouse and keyboard as you go, mainly to make code that can be input method agnostic or close to it. I've been playing Forager with my fiancée (she usually just likes watching), which needs a lot of picking up stuff, targeting buildings, and placing stuff on specific tiles and one thing we always complain about is the controls. Anyway, keep on doing your great work! I really want to see that game released!

I love following these devlogs but I can't really recall that you ever explained the core gameplay loop? Would it be possible for you to go a bit in depth on that for a devlog?

Hey! I've been watching your devlogs on and off for some time now and this one stood out for me. I think the way you described how the crafting system will work shows that you have a coherent idea in your head. I especially loved how you justified creating a crafting system and how you kept trying to justify the following systems. I think you're doing a really good job. I subscribed and am curious with how this will turn out :) I guess I just wanted to give this feedback, hopefully it makes your day a little bit better :D

Have you ever considered using a shader for the ocean water? A bit like for the corruption patches. That way, you could add waves. I like the water you have now, though, too!

You inspired me to make my own game in pygame. Few weeks in and I'm really enjoying it and making good progress

Your game's looking really good so far! One suggestion on the pixel art font: keep the size consistent with your art. That goes for all the pixel art, otherwise it can look really out of place and break immersion. That rule can be broken (eg. using hd character portraits or fonts. Celeste for example does this well), however it's a good rule of thumb to keep everything consistent with itself. Keep it up!

just mentioning osrs as an inspiration has brought a whole new level of veneration from me

I love crafting!

Nothing really to say, but I enjoyed this video. Thanks for making and sharing it.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who is suffering from seasonal allergies. Arizona was really bad this year!

Some very nice progress has been made! Think the camp system sounds so cosy and wholesome! I hope to see some of this camp customisation cross over to boats so it can feel like boats are really our own! One thing because you mentioned Animal Crossing, maybe look at some grievances people had with New Horizons and their crafting and building systems to make sure you don't fall into the same trap. One such thing, let people craft multiple at once!

decorating will just be placing like 20 chairs around your camp to get a good rest buff

Ah the NewWorld camp sites concept :)

Ive always loved good crafting systems in games. The ability to craft fast travel points sounds awesome! Your crafting system so far seems fine, but i do think its weird you have to equip an item to access the crafting menu. The player essentially loses a slot on his hotbar with this set up. But then again, valheim's hammer was kind of like this, and there were enough hot bar slots thats it never felt like an issue using one on the hammer for me, so maybe it will work well. Just something to consider Edit: lol i just watched your next dev log. I had a sneaking suspicion that i should watch that before leaving the above comment.

I think the issue you're having with your fonts is that it's mixing "pixel" sizes because you're using a truetype font instead of a bitmap font. Truetype pixel fonts are actually vector graphics made to mimic the look of bitmap fonts. Bitmap fonts are drawn at the exact resolution that they will appear in game, and their size can't be changed. Each size needs to be drawn individually. But even if you use a truetype font, it is converted into pixels eventually when it's drawn on screen, and scaling square images down to sizes that aren't factors of four will deform the squares. Think about it; if you shrink a 8x8 pixel image into a 5x5 pixel space, you can't put every pixel in the right place relative to the others. It happens at any resolution, but the smaller you make the font, the more noticeable the deformation is. So using very small pixel text is something you probably shouldn't do unless your game's resolution is small, and if you do still want to, you need to use bitmap fonts that are designed to be small. If you want different sizes of pixel fonts that look nice together, draw the whole font at each size you want it individually at the resolution it's going to appear in your game. Mostly, the best looking pixel art games that use pixel fonts use only one or two sizes and go to great lengths to keep all their text short enough to fit in the space they have. Or, you can do like many modern games do and just not use pixel fonts for menus and stuff. If you take that route, it usually looks better to just use one font throughout the whole menu. Personally I don't like mixed pixel sizes, but I know a lot of people don't care. I think your solution if you do want to keep things the way they are would be to use a small bitmap font just for your small text. You have to make bitmaps from a spritesheet. You can get spritesheets on open game art, and there's a lot of tutorials on how to use them in godot, and even a couple plugins to help. Here's one: godotengine.org/asset-library/asset/760 But in any case, I would probably opt to bring the size of the smallest font up a bit and just try to make your text shorter, Even if you do decide to go with a non-pixel truetype font. If you feel you're running out of space, make the menus a bit bigger. When you mix a lot of sizes like that it kinda breaks the retro game illusion imo. Consistency is important for pixel art. Also small text in videogames can be hard to read in general, it's bad for accessibility, and it's even worse on handheld devices with smaller screens. Steamdeck will even put a warning on your game if your UI elements are very small. Imagine your game running on mobile and think about whether you'll be able to read the menus. Maybe you don't care about mobile now, but hey stardew and terraria did it :)

Great vid !

Awesome devlog! I like how the campfires can serve as fast travel points, but I feel being able to save using a campfire as well would be a little annoying considering it’s a craftable item. What is the player doesn’t have the resources to craft it, but they want to stop playing? This only applies if there is no other way of saving the game, of course. Apart from that, I feel like the crafting system looks great

Great devlog. I agree with the decision to introduce crafting, It goes really well together with the rest I have seen from the game. Couldn't help but notice how clean your desk setup is! I have been trying to improve mine I have been looking into getting just one bug monitor instead of multiple ones, I also wonder which keyboard do you use. Did you ever made a video about your development environment? Keep up the great work Edit: just found your office setup video 😁

This is about to become hypixel skyblock with level crafting

FYI Milanote is a great tool and very good for the purpose he shows here, but the free version only lets you use 100 notes, so consider that when using it and if that's enough or if you'll need to pay to get the next plan for unlimited

Have you considered lerping your camera so it trails slightly behind the player as you walk around? It will likely make your movement feel 100x smoother and more professional. camera.position = camera.position.lerp(player.position, alpha), where alpha is some number from 0-1. you can try various values to see how much lerping feels good for your game.

You should add more game progression like in Teraria.

One thing I noticed was the small increment in stats might not suit what this game is. As a programmer it's tempting to just tell the player that this bit of gear gives you +2% swim speed. Why not consider language more like 'an insignificant increase to swim speed' You can abstract the backend from the player and draw attention away from min/maxing incrementally small increases. Imagine the difference between getting a +107% increase and 'a monumental increase to swim speed' (with a glowing, wavy text effect)

Do you use the same color palette for the Ui as you do for the game environment itself? Im working on my own game and am unsure if i should use the same palette for both or use a different one for the Ui?

I think gating crafting by crafting level is poor design that inspires repetitive grinding of resources. Instead, gate crafting by certain resources that require further exploration (of the ocean perhaps). This inspires the player to explore further into the world, which is the goal.

This is a small thing but items you want to craft but dont have enough resources to craft should probably also be greyed out instead of just the numbers being red. I say this not only because its more readable but also you may have people who have some form of colorblindness when it comes to the color red and an additional greyed out icon certainly would help IMO.

WHEN CAN WE PLAY THE GAME IN BETA

that text when you pick up more than one of the same thing is a bit ugly: the times sign should not be the letter x (U+0078) - it should be the times sign × (U+00D7)

What is the application you're using to plan your crafting mechanic (1:20)? Thanks!

Fantastic start on your crafting system. Do you think there will be a lot of items for the player to create?

just a heads up that i came back two months later to click on the the milanote link 👍

the description of "buffs/bonuses" for item crafting should not use words like increase/decrease etc, instead you could say +2 max. corruption or +2% swim speed.. it's faster to read and understand.. and also crafting usually takes some time, so some animation and a bar that fills up would be nice..

You may want to consider greyscaling any ingredients you don't have, the red font is a good indicator, but changing the entire colour in the crafting menu let's you see immediately you don't meet the criterion to craft the item.

Hear me out, as someone who is very into ecology, I like the purpose and conflict the "corrupted" plants and animals provide but they could use some grounding in reality. What if you twist your concept a little and have it so the character clears invasive species and heal sick native ones to restore the habitat; these species could still be harmful to the player in the form of thorns or aggressive animals. It's a simple change but it's much more in line with work going on today in ecosystems along with their study. You could even take it further and work to build habitats to reintroduce biodiversity.

osrs enjoyer

where is the steam page wishlist link? do you hate money?

🦆🦆🦆

What does more "aesthetic" mean?

I think you should get rid of these dirty gray-purple gradients because they disrupt the pixel art style of the entire game. Alternatively, you could consider adding more gradients and incorporating purple colors throughout the game.

Do you plan to release this game

crafting for the sake of crafting is one of my biggest pet peeves. I like systems where you get rewarded for using a mechanic but that would have to be for using it once, not to grind 200 iron daggers. E.g. getting crafting xp for crafting everything the first time would be okay, or making what you can craft depend on player level or on some sort of external upgrade, like needing to craft a new crafting bench for the next level. But please, don't make people grind stupid stuff, that's just increasing playtime for the sake of increasing playtime which has ruined many good games.

People commenting "great vid" on a 14 minut video 5 minutes after upload 😂

FYI this devlog is extremely silent for some reason.

first

If you dont hurry up ai will take over

love how every devlogger does irl stuff too lol