guntrip / posts

A successful kiln opening this morning. This proud green(ish) frog survived his firings:

Big forg

This is the largest hollow form I’ve created as of yet. He’s a bit lumpy but a glossy glaze will really show up imperfections like that.

I’m slowly working on a gallery of creations. The code bit is done. I just need to photograph things.

I previously posted that I was making a game. I still am!

screenshot

The first two video updates were really fun to make but each time I think I’m at a point to make a new video, I have another idea that I think it would be cool to include. I think this has been happening for a year now.

The game is now in some form of 3D (the awful way I’ve bodged a 3D engine out of a 2D one is worth a video on its own), the creatures briefly had actual brains but they outsmarted me, the sounds are better, you can have staff and give them jobs, you can make buildings, you can slaughter animals and make recipes and sell the food, there was a safari mini-game but I broke it, some creatures lay eggs now, some get pregnant, the creatures can have names, there is the concept of a “species” and a species-name-generator, you can save/load state, there is a day/night cycle with colour shifting and shadow direction, creatures make friends with other creatures now, a whole new UI, and lots more.

And I gave the creatures the gift of depression!

I feel like I’ve made a pretty good simulation of whatever this is. There needs to be actual gameplay though. A lot of the gameplay will come from generally running your zoo but there’s a few extra ideas I’ve had, some are half-implemented, some are just ideas:

Breeding creatures to order
Other zoos will request creatures with specific attributes, the player will need to breed animals to meet those requirements.
Restaurants
Slaughtering animals, growing crops, and building recipes to sell to guests.
Actual online creature trading (not NFTs!)
Imagine breeding a really good creature and putting it up for sale but it actually becoming available for other players and you getting in-zoo coins every time that happens.
Animal bands
The synth part of the game is often the best part of it. There’s already a little step editor and a global BPM, I’d love to implement some kind of basic DAW.

screenshot

I’m currently working on getting the NPCs to queue up outside a kiosk to buy creature-meat-burgers. I will try and make a new video soon!

I’m slowly working towards being able to sell my odd ceramic creatures via this website. I’ve made a few changes to the site to help with that:

Images are now hosted on a Cloudflare CDN rather than DigitalOcean. The site itself is hosted on Heroku.
There are galleries, both standard image galleries for photography and a special “creation” mode for items that can have multiple images and eventually, prices.
Lots and lots of improvements on the admin side.
A shiny new menu that is entirely CSS based, even the delay!

I’m going to slowly populate the photography and ceramics galleries. And maybe make more use of the blog. Probably not.

I’ll return here again, the pebble-dunes are really fun. This time I remembered a tripod so I could stop my lens down to f/32 and actually get all the layers in focus.