March Development Log: Improving the UI & What Even Is An Ultra Plus Anyways

Hello everyone!

Last month I announced that I'm officially working on a proper port/remake/whatever of A Tiny Furry In A Huge World. Right now it's tentatively called A Tiny Furry In A Huge World Super Mega Ultra Plus. This title almost certainly isn't going to stick because I'm getting tired of typing it out, which means that the gag will probably wear thin and I'll come up with a better title somehow.

Oh! There's also a poll in that announcement post that you should vote in if you didn't already! I said I'd do a reminder or two before the poll closes at the end of the month, so...

Anyway, following up on that announcement, here's a development log for the announced game. This month I'm going to be talking a bit about my plans for the game as well as showing off some very work in progress stuff of how the game will look, kinda.

Before I get into the UI shit though I want to go over why I am doing this. I've said it before but never succinctly and my feelings have changed over time a bit and plus it was all said a while ago so anyone who has joined after I've said all that might not know what I'm talking about. Boy, that was the biggest run on sentence of all time, wasn't it?

Why Remake?

Okay, enough fooling around. Okay, so I want to remake the game in Game Maker. Why? Because Quest is antiquated and clunky. This isn't a knock against the software, because Quest is deliberately antiquated and clunky. It's all old-fashioned and designed to replicate one of the oldest video game genres of all time, that being the text adventure. So it has a lot of old features, like the text parser or the compass directions.

As someone who spent some time in their youth playing said text adventures I find it all very charming, but it also makes playing the game a bit of a headache. When I test the game I constantly get tripped up by the text parser or get lost in the sea of compass directions everywhere.

On top of that, there's also a lot of other things that are much less charming, like the fact that you're forced to play on Windows in a fairly ugly client that's plagued by all sorts of visual bugs when you play it on a higher or a lower screen resolution or whatever. I want to the game to be able to play as a standalone .exe - or an .apk in the case of Android or what have you - and I want to have more control over the games back end so that I can fine tune various aspects of the game that I wasn't able to do in Quest.

On top of that on top of that - and this is most important, at least to me - I want to polish up the games writing and add various different scenes to every character, some of which are ones that have been requested over the years while some of them are my own ideas. It's no secret that I basically made A Tiny Furry In A Huge World up as I went along. For this reason there's a lot of narrative inconsistencies throughout. I think there are three or four entirely different people who are maybe probably responsible for shrinking you throughout the course of the game and they're all wildly different...

Don't get me wrong, I don't really plan on fixing any of this. Or at least, not fixing it hard. I'm not going to turn the game into a super serious narrative about the Humbergamblian War of 2341 or something, but it would be nice to tune up the overall meta narrative a bit so that all of the games various plot pieces slot together better. There's also the fact that none of the various characters slot together because they were developed and wrote independently of each other over a course of... well, years. There have been various efforts by myself to alleviate this over the years and give them all interactions with each other, but never a full and all encompassing effort like the one that I am planning.

The other reason I am doing this is for the sake of utility. When v1.3 is done I'll be stepping into developing and writing A Tiny Furry On A Huge Quest pretty hard, and since I don't want to stop releasing monthly updates (or drip feed the release of A Huge Quest) I decided to go ahead and work on the port since it'll be something that I can put out once a month going forward.

I touched on this already, but making it in Game Maker also means that I can expand to other platforms like PC, Mac, Android, etc etc. I could also look into releasing the game on Steam, which is a weird thought and I'm not sure if it's something I want to or even should do, but it would be an option.

In other words, Game Maker is more versatile, there are bells and whistles that I want to add, there are certain aspects of the story that I want to hit, and, working on this is better than not releasing any kind of game content for about six months while I work on getting the first chapter of A Tiny Furry On A Huge Quest ready and playable.

If you're tired of hearing this stuff then don't worry: now that dev log exists I can just link back to this whenever it feels appropriate rather than repeating myself a bunch. If you've never read this before, then I hope the justifications make sense!

The shortest way of saying this is that I am very proud of what I have made over the past six or so years and I'd like for it to be displayed and preserved in the best way possible, instead of, you know, being stuck on a stone age engine that's designed to replicate games from the 80s.

Now Time For UI Stuff

So, before I go any further, let me press: all of this stuff is very work in progress. It is a rough representation of how the game will look. There are a lot of things missing and basically everything bar the rough positions and vibes of things are very up in the air. I'm using a default font, even, so...

... oh. And there aren't any backgrounds. Right now I am not sure what to do with the backgrounds, as in... do I just use the old ones, or do I go ahead and make new ones? I've gotten a lot of experience in Blender since making the old ones, after all, so I could probably make a better effort, but at the same time, the old ones are pretty alright. Right now I'm not sure which direction to head in. Given that I'll be developing either Emily and Oscar - both of which who have no backgrounds in game currently - I'll have to be making new ones for whoever wins the poll between those two anyway. By the time I've done that I'll know better.

Anyway, here's what the game looks like currently.

That's looking a little sparse, though, so let's throw in some sample text for a better idea of how things might look with more text on the screen.

Much better!

But where's the UI? Well, when you move the cursor over to the right side of the screen...

Like in The Hungry House, a menu pops out from the right side of the screen! The more perceptive amongst you will have noticed that the text kinda 'squishes' in when it comes out as well, which is a pretty neat and cool thing that I did if nothing else.

It has a quite a few differences to The Hungry House besides the squishing text thing, though. There's the list of objects and then there's four icons to the right of it. The four icons on the right are a look button, a 'use' button, and an inventory button. The look button does the obvious thing... which is looking at any of the objects that are available in the list. The inventory button is also obvious... it opens the inventory. The use button is also probably obvious, but it's also cool and kinda new, so...

It opens a context sensitive menu. If I clicked on vent then I would get another three options, like so...

This is designed around the same sorta thing that Quest does where when you click a word in the object list it expands a list of verbs that you can use on it. It's just a bit smoother I guess? Fancier?

You may have also noticed that the compass is gone and replaced by a list of possible destinations instead. I don't think anyone will complain about this - it really just makes life easier - but if people say that they like the compass then it would be easy enough to add one in as an option, and I might just do it for the fun of it at some point.

I have more of the game knocked up - I've gotten some good progress in on starting on Emily's areas old and new, as well as putting together some new features that I think everyone will find fun and exciting, hopefully - but this is the stuff that I want to show for now. I'll be doing a dev log next month... and every month going forward, probably... so there will be ample time to talk about that other stuff then.

For now, though, I think I've logged enough. Back to work on this month's A Tiny Furry In A Huge World update... or, well, off to sleep before waking up to do that.

I'll see you all in a few days with a story! Until then!