Maybe by the time I’ve finished this blog post, I’ll be able to write the word Twitch first time round without a typo!
First of all, sorry for skipping the odd blog post here and there. Things came up that were more important than writing some rubbish about what gamedev stuff I’ve been doing. But I’m back, for now, with a more Twitch-y update than usual.
The reason we’re leaning more on the Twitch stuff is that I’m going to tell you about a new playlist on our YouTube channel – Twitch Abridged.
With the streams, what I used to do was just upload the full things straight to YouTube. Which for me, was great, minimal effort, videos saved indefinitely, hurrah. But Twitch Abridged is slightly different. I’ll actually be editing my streams now so that the videos that go on YouTube are condensed ‘highlights’ videos – mostly to try and cut out as much of my floundering about as possible. I'm still working on my editing skills, so hopefully, these will improve as time goes on too.
Two of this month's streams are now live on the channel, so do go check those out. The third would have been if I'd uploaded the right video to YouTube... And if you prefer the full-length versions, those are still available as Highlights on the Twitch channel.
Enough about videos, what about your game?
Said nobody.
Well, if you tuned in on Tuesday this week, you’ll have seen me begin a new major job in my RPG project – another refactor of the NPC system. Basically, I looked at putting in the JSON-based dialogue mechanic I’d been working on and realised that due to the way the NPCs were set up, it was going to be quite hard to add the new mechanics in.
So, I’m working on condensing the events, using more families, instance variables etc. To try and clean it all up so that the new dialogue system will slot in nicely. Interestingly, during the stream, I refactored one of the NPC groups and for some reason, having two of them on the screen didn't work correctly. But in the stand-alone project, they work fine! So, I may actually just strip out ALL of the NPC code and replace it with the refactored version when it's finished. YAY!
Talking of the dialogue system, it’s pretty much all done now, including branching options, I’m just looking at pre- and post-battle options now!
Oh, and I've started using Twitch's Channel Points on the streams now, to replace the old Streamlabs loyalty. You can redeem for a couple of rewards including picking the theme for a Make a Thing stream. And for TackerTacker's benefit, I've increased the number of those that can be redeemed in one stream. So it should be more than one redemption before it's listed as out of stock!
Next Tuesday will be the second of our Make a Thing streams for the month, where I’ll be looking at improving and polishing the Clicker Game I made a couple of weeks ago. And that’ll also be our last February stream, so keep an eye out for March’s schedule!
See you next week!