State of our Lives - October 2024
I hope you’re having a wonderful week!
This is the next monthly development update series for Once in a Lifetime, a text-based life simulator I’ve been developing since March of this year!
Once in a Lifetime’s development has progressed at a moderate pace in the prior month, as health based reasons caused a slowdown on what was previously a high rate of development. Nonetheless, I’m here, I’m there, I’m everywhere!
Let’s delve in, shall we?
Development by the Numbers
Once in a Lifetime received a further calculations from August 31, 2024 to October 5, 2024, with calculations as follows:
- August 31, 2024: 66,861 words including command lines. 13,026 words excluding command lines.
- October 5, 2024: 83,685 words including command lines. 14,435 words excluding command lines.
- Total Difference: 16,824 words, of which 1,409 words were direct writing.
It was not nearly as productive a month as August, and my health is to blame. Nonetheless, I am slowly churning things back into gear, and eager to kick things back up again!
What’s Been Done?
- The Friends System has now been implemented. You may now have up to 15 normal friends and 3 besties. This system allows demotion/promotion of friends to/from besties to normies. It additionally allows for removing friendships of your own accord, or falling out with friends.
- Dynamic generation was fully extended to father-in-laws, mother-in-laws, 3 brothers-in-law and 3 sisters-in-law, 6 aunts (3 father, 3 mother side), 6 uncles (same thing), and up to 6 cousins.
- Solving a colossal bottleneck in my pipeline that has removed the loading screen requirement for dynamic generation through a refactor that was looking me dead in the face and I couldn’t see it.
- Report Card system implemented in the backend with dynamic interface calculations.
- Report Card/Grades at a glance implemented to Pre-School Interface.
- Your Teacher is now recognized in the Pre-School interface and their gender is accurately appended with Mr./Mrs.
- Character Creator split into two sections (Personality/Personal Identifying Information is section #1, while Physical/Appearance details is Section #2) for usability/UI/UX.
- Implemented Multi-Replace throughout Character Creation to append options as Not Completed/Completed.
- Began implementing Checkpoint/Save code. (25% done)
- Began work on new feature known as the Timeline. (15% done)
While less foundationally than August, there was still plenty of systems development, and this was while I had COVID-19 for over a week of the month with severe enough symptoms to require PAXLOVID pills. Funnily enough… I solved the bottleneck and implemented the refactor while I was barely able to breathe (workaholism isn’t a joke, kids!)
Step by Step, Once in a Lifetime continues to evolve towards a first playable build from a foundations perspective, which will begin opening the pipelines to content development.
The Timeline
The Timeline will serve as a powerful historical retelling of events within your Lifetime. Through an underlying codebase, I’ve begun crafting the ability for The Timeline to navigate and retell your choices, provide details on the consequences or benefits gained through these actions, and ultimately provide a snapshot of your life as it occurs.
Given the sheer scope of Once in a Lifetime in terms of how many events are made, this system is being optimized to prevent slowdown to the overall game. Older phones may have a brief few second delay when opening the Timeline as it has to dynamically pull all of your event data to provide historical retelling.
I am also working on the interface and breaking things up so it’s not a bombardment of information that’s haphazardly strewn in one place.
What I’m thinking is that I’ll bring things up by sections, such as:
- Education
- Career
- Milestone Events (which is then further broken up by age)
- Relationship Events (same thing)
- Critical Events (which will be detailed and broken down further as development goes on, but is newly built into the roadmap.
- And more.
This is definitely a process, especially given the nature of toying with my text-based engine. Nonetheless, I will be looking for feedback as I iterate on this system in the coming weeks.
Where are we going?
For the end of this month/November, I have plenty more that needs to get done, such as:
- Implement the Timeline’s foundational bedrock code in finished form.
- Work on implementing currency to the game.
- Begin development of the ‘background’ expansion of the Character Creator.
- Continue work on Pre-School Milestone Events.
- Continue work on implementing family interactions.
- Properly implement death within the game alongside a graveyard list/system of sorts. (Was a September goal but… health and COVID lol).
- And more, if I can fit it!
Wrapping Up
There’s so much done, and so much more to do. Nonetheless, I am beyond eager to continue and bring this project to life as I delve deeper into the world of life simulation. I’ve attached some screenshots below!
Pre-School Interface Updates!
Character Creator Split! (2 Images)
Cousin Interface! (Recognizing Parents, too!)
I hope you have a wonderful remainder of the Spooky Season!
~Zach
so I’m resting right now.
