Devlog #5: Let's try that again

On Thursday, I had something personal come up that took me away from the computer, and this break from coding gave me a chance to reflect on what I pitched in the last update. In the end, I realized that in my attempt to come up with a minimal game concept that I thought I could get done in the time of the jam, I made a fascinating simulation to write. Still, I had very little confidence that anyone would want to play with it.

More importantly, the audience that might want to play with it wasn’t the type of player I was hoping to appeal to. You see, when I decided to enter this, my goal was to try to create a game that would be a subset of my larger concept. I was hoping to be able to find some potential players or even maybe turn Cosmic Cantina into my full vision someday in the future by iterating on top of it.

What I wrote in my last update just wasn’t at all going in the right direction, and so instead of returning to coding on Thursday night, I started trying to figure out where to steer this project. Friday, I toyed around with the existing simulation code. Yet, I just couldn’t see myself working on it, so I started trying to think how I could morph the assets and general ideas we had going on into something more interactive and fun without losing sight of the game jam.

Well, over this weekend, I tore out my old simulation code, wrote networking for moving characters around on the screen, and built up the database code to have a persistent world. I’m not quite at the gif-ready stage, but after coding almost non-stop except for small breaks to talk to family, I’m ready to relax for the evening, and I didn’t want to go another night without an update.

So in lieu of a gif, here’s the pitch of Cosmic Cantina now: After logging in with your itch.io account, you pick a character, and enter Cosmic Cantina, the galaxy’s premiere refreshment spaceport located conveniently in Galactic Speedway 50 just past the Trinity Nebula. We are excited to tickle your tastebuds in our retro diner, and we’ve recently opened a competitive sporting event where you compete for daily and weekly leaderboards. Visit us alone or with friends.

Cosmic Cantina will support basic emotes to interact with other players, and inside of a specific building, you will be able to compete in a game of chance and psychology… Rock, Paper, Scissors! Silly, but I am hoping that it will be fun to try your hand at getting a place on the leaderboard, or at least trying to best your friends in a few games. In addition to those interactions, we will be adding other interactions within the world that will hopefully make it enjoyable to explore the surroundings when you first try out the game.

Thank you to anyone who is taking the time to read these updates. Tomorrow I should have something visual to show off again, as I know @Whitevault has been working on an awesome spaceship interior to explore, and I am pretty close to reaching some good milestones in my code.