State of our Lives - September 2024
I hope youāre having a wonderful weekend!
This is the first monthly development update series for Once in a Lifetime, a text-based life simulator Iāve been developing since March of this year!
Once in a Lifetimeās development has progressed at a rapid pace in the last month, featuring a significant doubling of my existing codebase, implementation of multiple new features over and under the hood, optimizations to UI/UX, and more!
Letās delve in, shall we?
Development by the Numbers
Once in a Lifetime received a major double-down on the codebase this month, with calculations as follows:
- August 3rd, 2024: 31,436 words including command lines. 7,726 words excluding command lines.
- August 31, 2024: 66,861 words including command lines. 13,026 words excluding command lines.
- Total Difference: 35,425 words, of which 5,300 words were direct writing.
As you can seeā¦ yeah, itās been a productive month, and easily one of the most productive months Iāve had on record.
Whatās Been Done?
- Dynamic generation has been extended to be triggered at will, separate from the game initializer that generated your immediate family.
- Successfully initialized Pre-School with multiple calculating variables to determine an accurate start month of August/September depending on which of the 6 starting cities you are in.
- Dynamic generation successfully produced a Pre-School class of 17 kids and 1 teacher.
- Began development on a public facing Roadmap using CoDecks (still determining if this is the best path).
- Personality traits were developed and implemented into dynamic generation (total of 30 traits!), with each person gaining a total of four traits throughout their lifetime.
- Implemented classmate list interface.
- Began developing a friendship system, allowing for up to fifteen normal friends and three best friends at once. Development completed on the generative process of converting someone into a friend or best friend, as well as the process for ādemotingā a best friend to friend status and swapping their data with that of another friend whoās being āpromotedā. (90% complete)
- Began extending dynamic generation to non-immediate family members. (25% complete)
- Multiple UI passes to increase cohesion and visual understanding.
- Implemented a mini-loading warning tied to first-time dynamic generation events as the game needs to process a monumental load of data at once when generating more than five entities simultaneously.
- Began work on a save system (30% completed).
All in all, Iād say quite a bit of foundation was laid into Once in a Lifetime this month. The Pre-School generative systems are scalable and can easily be applied to Elementary School, High-School, Undergraduate University, Graduate University, and PhD programs.
With the heavy implementation of the friends system, the game is successfully producing friendship data, and this gives me quite an opportunity to easily plug into various systems down the road such as meeting others randomly at the gym, speed-dating, tinder, etc. All in all, quite a ton!
Where are we going?
For September, Iāve got plenty of options on the horizon to pursue, but Iāll have a heavy focus on the following:
- Implementing Pre-School interfaces.
- Finishing up the system that will pull if a classmate is a friend and produce the friend interface rather than the classmate interface.
- UI optimizations to the character creator.
- Begin work on Pre-School dynamic events.
- Continue work on implementing family interactions.
- Begin researching Self-Care activities to implement into the game.
- Finish extending the dynamic generation system to non-immediate family members.
- Properly implement death within the game alongside a graveyard list/system of sorts.
- And more, if I can fit it!
If my pace of development continues at the level it was this past month, itās looking increasingly likely that I may release the first work-in-progress build known as Update Zero: Beginnings by this December! Not a guarantee, but itās been quite a whirlwind this month, and has boded very well for the state of the project.
Wrapping Up
In future months, I plan to provide deep-dives into upcoming features and the like, but in the meantime have provided an updated roadmap that details information on the first 3 planned major updates to the game below.
Update Zero - Roadmap
Update 0.5 - Content Drop #1 Roadmap
Update One - Cap & Gown Roadmap
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See you soon!
~Zach
Happy Birthday to September babies.
Thank you, everyone who continues to participate in these threads ā it helps others when you do participate, sometimes more than you think.
