Dev Blog #4: Doin' Time

Howdy howdy howdy! Time for another exciting developer blog from yours truly! This has been a pretty cool week for Cargo, as I've finally implemented what I knew from the start would be the trickiest core feature: Police chases! That's right, now you can lead the cops on an exciting chase down the highway! And that's not even the only thing I've accomplished this week...

The first batch of screenshots I'm sharing is an overview of the saving and loading screens. Cargo uses a simple save file system. You have three save files to choose from:

The save menu, accessible from the end-of-day menu.

And the load menu, accessible from the main menu.

Incidentally, this is the aforementioned main menu, in
all its huge-titled glory.

The next few shots show some details about police cars and their behavior. It took a lot of fine-tuning to get the cop cars to perform at the level I wanted them to. Probably no other feature in the game took more time to get up and running, hence the punny title of this week's blog.

Here we see a police car, relaxing in its natural habitat. Notice
the "legality" icon at the top-center of the screen.

You'll never take me alive!!!

Or, you know, maybe you will...

I've made a lot more progress as well, but that's about all I want to reveal at the moment. Not much stands in the way of this game being rolled out, aside from some assets (the game still woefully lacks music and sound) and final touches. The next dev blog is due in a week, and I may or may not already have the game released before then!

I'm gonna take an aside here and actually talk about this blog for a moment, since these thoughts have been on my mind and have no doubt influenced my development process (see, I'm still on topic!). I started this blog as part of my New Year's resolution to become a "real" game developer, since I reasoned that if someone out there read about my games and was expecting me to actually complete them, it would give me more incentive and focus. It is still quite early on in the year, but I'm pleased to say that my plan has worked well thus far. I've been a coder for a while, and I've made little (usually unfinished) games for five years now. I can honestly say that I've learned and grown more as a developer in the last two months than I ever have before.

This blog and my other social media outlets have taken me out of my comfort zone. I'm actually a very introverted person, but my ultimate dream is to be a game designer, indie or otherwise, professional or otherwise. I'll probably never become a hotshot developer, but I can at least say now that I'm a "real" developer: I have a game out there that you can play, and another on the way. I'm not in it looking to make a fortune, but I do want to be the best game developer I can be. Making games makes me happy, and part of making games is trying to get people to actually play them. You have to talk and be visible as well as code, draw, and write, no matter who you are, and I've realized that over the last few months.

I also realize that I'm rambling a bit. :) All I'm trying to say is, if you're a potential game developer, don't hide in your shell like I did for half a decade. Make something! Put it out there! Make something else! Talk about it! And do it because you love it!

So long! See you next week, or maybe before!!