zutto - Network

Pets can have buffs now! So far, the only source is from eating prepared foods.

Pets can have buffs now! So far, the only source is from eating prepared foods.

I know I haven't posted in a bit, I've just been busy!Slowly working on buffs, both for pets & site-wide rewards for events.The...

I know I haven't posted in a bit, I've just been busy!

Slowly working on buffs, both for pets & site-wide rewards for events.

The UI is a little more designed, but it still looks pretty placeholder-y.

So that's a little progress on two fronts.

Items can be equipped to pets and show up on the paperdoll now.Pretty okay progress! Gunna need to start making things Pretty soon.

Items can be equipped to pets and show up on the paperdoll now.

Pretty okay progress!

Gunna need to start making things Pretty soon.

Did a little code clean up at lunch time! Mostly some bad generic definitions I'd put in docblocks, but it caught two real bugs with...

Did a little code clean up at lunch time! Mostly some bad generic definitions I'd put in docblocks, but it caught two real bugs with some error handling code.

I'm used to having GitHub Actions to clean up after me, but I don't have a paid org for this project. Instead of relying on that, I should probably fix my IDE so it runs this stuff for me...

Still not really sure about colour palettes or logos and stuff like that.I should probably start looking for some artists to work with....

Still not really sure about colour palettes or logos and stuff like that.

I should probably start looking for some artists to work with.

I'm realizing how many illustrations and icons I'm gunna need. With my budget being "shoe string," I'm gunna need to get a few things at a time month-by-month. So the sooner, the better?

(i will almost certainly not heed my wisdom and will post this again in three months 😔)

Tons of UI stuff that needs to be done to catch up to where the internal game state is at.I think next up is to rough out the inventory...

Tons of UI stuff that needs to be done to catch up to where the internal game state is at.

I think next up is to rough out the inventory & pet paperdoll pages, so you can see your items and change pet equipment.

I have a rough idea of the site layout, so I'll probably start on that soon too. I'll feel a lot better when I can work on "final" (in quotes because I'll end up revising them at least a billion times) screens instead of just throwing junk on the page.

Worked on my game config import tool today, so I could load item data. That was a bit new, since I hadn't done any 1:1 polymorphic...

Worked on my game config import tool today, so I could load item data. That was a bit new, since I hadn't done any 1:1 polymorphic relations yet.

But now I can load different sorts of items, like food or equipment, into the item database, with appropriate data for each of those.

From there, I was able to give the initial pet a toolkit in their main hand tool slot and hooked that into the idle game tick calculator pretty easily.

So now pets can contribute to resource gains through their equipment and by being full 🥳

I hooked up pets to the idle game. They contribute by giving up to +5% when you collect resources, and collecting makes 'em hungry.To...

I hooked up pets to the idle game. They contribute by giving up to +5% when you collect resources, and collecting makes 'em hungry.

To feed them, I just set a static value for the idle game's resources. These are commodities you'll harvest tons of ... 1 of any edible resource restores a fixed amount of hunger.

You'll mostly want to feed pets crafted items which'll restore hunger but *also* give them additional buffs, so feeding them your resources is mostly useful when you're starting a run and can't make the better foods yet.

I am kind of unhappy with the situation though. Using the most basic berry as food is the same as using the rarest, least-plentiful resource. So you can make an objectively Wrong choice by feeding your pet the rarer thing...

Had a lot of thoughts about the General Vibes I want for the story/art today.I don't wanna share much about that yet, so I'll just...

Had a lot of thoughts about the General Vibes I want for the story/art today.

I don't wanna share much about that yet, so I'll just say ☀️

I probably won't use those for the game since they're part of Kitto, but it's nice to have some really lovely creatures plugged...

I probably won't use those for the game since they're part of Kitto, but it's nice to have some really lovely creatures plugged into my shitty UI for now 😁

Anyways, speaking of the placeholder art assets: if you remember Zetapets, you might recall Tigress' work.She made these for me to serve...

Anyways, speaking of the placeholder art assets: if you remember Zetapets, you might recall Tigress' work.

She made these for me to serve as placeholder assets in an ancient, GPL'd pet game app we made called Kitto.

The bunny-cat-thing is a kitto, and the ram-lookin' fella is a zutto.

That's not exactly the origin of Project Zutto's name, but it's close enough.

I'm still thinking different kinds of pets will have different combat stats, but that'll be for dungeons.Just gotta make sure to...

I'm still thinking different kinds of pets will have different combat stats, but that'll be for dungeons.

Just gotta make sure to design a variety of dungeons with similar drops, so people who pick all dex-focused pets don't end up with a more-or-less impossible challenge.

But figuring that out will come later!

Now I'm working on some design docs for how pets contribute to the idle game.My initial vague goal would have been to tie harvesting...

Now I'm working on some design docs for how pets contribute to the idle game.

My initial vague goal would have been to tie harvesting bonuses to different kinds of pets, but that feels like it would lead to "wrong" choices for newbies.

So I landed on a couple things that feel right.

Firstly: your pets have a few equipment slots, and the equipment determines their bonuses. So a basic axe is +5 wood, and maybe an offhand berry basket increases berry gains by 200%.

Feeding your pets gives a global 5% increase to gains. As you get more pets from prestiging, you get more of a flat global bonus.

But: feeding your pets special foods gives them buffs. These'll be applicable to either the idle game, or fighting in dungeons. More pets = more buffs, but you need to get the ingredients for those foods.

Slapped together a schema for a YAML file to track licensing for images and stuff, loaded up some old CC-BY-SA-3.0 stuff from Kitto, and...

Slapped together a schema for a YAML file to track licensing for images and stuff, loaded up some old CC-BY-SA-3.0 stuff from Kitto, and fiddled with my UI a little so it shows your actual pets instead of a placeholder.

Which is still pretty place-holder-y since all the stats are just some crap I wrote. But it's a smol step forward.

An item of increasing urgency is my UI. It's quite grim. I pretty much just went with the Laravel stock dashboard to just get going...

An item of increasing urgency is my UI. It's quite grim. I pretty much just went with the Laravel stock dashboard to just get going really quick.

But once I finish setting pets up, before I figure out how to do story scenes for the intro, I need to, uh, actually make the UI.

Picking colours is a real struggle for me and that is why I just slammed everything into the page the framework came with :V

My game setup is all managed from a YAML file that gets loaded into appropriate DB tables.I spent a bunch of time writing a nice loader for...

My game setup is all managed from a YAML file that gets loaded into appropriate DB tables.

I spent a bunch of time writing a nice loader for the YAML file. It paid off tonight when I added a whole buncha new sections for pets and items and things.

hoorah for tools.

Nothing too exciting today: figured out some DB schema for pets and started figuring out how to tie them into the idle game component.Big...

Nothing too exciting today: figured out some DB schema for pets and started figuring out how to tie them into the idle game component.

Big open question is how I want feeding the pet to interact with bonuses to harvesting. This will be important, since pet bonuses are where I'm expecting a lot of the prestige bonuses to come from.

I did part of the inventory system too, since pets will have equipment. I've gotta think about what slots to have, but to start, a tool slot so you can adjust what idle resources you're getting from 'em.

I do have a really great loader for pulling the config (buildings, costs, scaling factors, etc) out of a YAML file and shoving it into my...

I do have a really great loader for pulling the config (buildings, costs, scaling factors, etc) out of a YAML file and shoving it into my config DB though!

So, game progress so far: I wrote some design documents, since that's helpful for organizing all the ideas into something intelligible....

So, game progress so far: I wrote some design documents, since that's helpful for organizing all the ideas into something intelligible.

There's a web app with accounts, 2fa, and all the usual website stuff.

I've got part of an engine for the idling aspect of the game. You can progress through a tech tree of buildings & resources, but I want some core resources to be harvested by your companions.

The UI is a trainwreck, but I've been pretty careful about ensuring all the actions expose a ton of detail to the UI layer. So once I want to think about making it look nice, it should be straightforward.

Around 2010, I had a neat idea for a web game: mixing virtual pets and Cybernations. It's probably easier to describe as "virtual...

Around 2010, I had a neat idea for a web game: mixing virtual pets and Cybernations.

It's probably easier to describe as "virtual pet game plus cookie clicker" now.

I had written some rough design notes over the years, but I didn't start working on it until a couple weeks ago.

In the hope that it motivates me to continue working on it, I want to announce the game: Project Zutto exists!

There's a website with a little information: https://project-zutto.org

This account will serve as a dev log. I guess you can follow it to see if I ever release the game?

#gamedev #introduction