Home Pwnership
I bought a house. Like, holy shit this is something that happens to other people not me. Like feeling loved or finding unmelted chocolate in a car, it just seemed completely beyond reach. About three years ago I moved into an apartment which was nice and quiet. I was stretching what I thought I could afford at the time. Something like 70% of my income going to rent and bills. About 3 months later my employer asked if I wanted to work in Project Management and I jumped on it. The pay increase? Double.
I suddenly found myself in "Holyshit-I-can-actually-build-a-life-for-myself-now" money. I realized it made sense to start putting money away every month specifically for a down payment. I was putting away around 1k a month just for that down payment. At the end of my time in that apartment I found a good place to move into that was local, it took about 6 months of searching before I found and jumped at this place. It's kind of insane that the cost of mortgage was only about 600 more in rent. I was again worried about my finances but then I realized that even with a mortgage my net gain was +400 since I wasn't specifically saving for a house anymore.
I figure if I stay here for at least 6 months I'll have started to make money on this just from not burning money on rent. I'm not married to this place, but it's so nice to be able to do whatever I want.
Of course, this old house has some insane work to be done, I've spent the last 3 weeks just working on getting everything out of my apartment and trying to fix some things. The previous tenant was a heavy smoker in the bedroom. So I spent a good week just washing the floors, the ceilings, the window blinds, but not the curtains... I threw those the fuck OUT! There was just no way you could get that out of cloth. After a full odor blocking stain blocking primer, I've finally added the first royal blue coat of paint to the walls. It looks like I'm in a pool though so I'm going to have to make sure I get the lighting in there right.
That's why there's been so little time spent on Mansuit, or really any other projects. It's like having a baby this house is. I haven't even explored the new neighborhood yet. I just know a rooster starts barking (barking right? A rooster barks, yeah?) at around 5am somewhere around here. I don't mind that much because white noise covers it completely.
The Part about Mansuit
No screenies right now but I realize since there's so much to do, creating an alpha just isn't in the cards until more systems are in place. So, if you can't create a public alpha you can do the next best thing... a Trailer!
I watched a few videos like Mark Brown/GameMaker's Toolkit on what makes a good trailer but I think every trailer can be broken up into the same pattern of:
- "Hmm OK. Interesting."
- "OH SHIT!"
- "Hmm OK. Interesting."
- "OH SHIT!"
- "Hmm OK. Interesting."
- "OH SHIT!"
Take the Factorio trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8SBp4SyvLc it perfectly summarizes that I mean.
- OK, some pixel art trees, we're in a forest, music seems pretty good
- OH SHIT! A crashed spaceship!?
- OK, a guy shows up and chops down a tree. Ahh I see, now he can make buildings. We follow the conveyor belt to...
- OH SHIT! Insane factory lines with lots of motion!
- Alright cool, some items went into a thing and now we've got a copper plate. Our ore we followed is now our copper plate
- OH SHIT! The factory is even bigger with different variety of items! Are those upgraded buildings?!
- Alright, we're making red things, I don't know what those are yet, and I see some more factory that I've seen before.
- OH SHIT! A TRAIN?!?! HOLY CRAP! We get to load a TRAIN!?
- OK, more factory. We follow the train, wheee! The train is getting off at a stop.
- OH SHIT! Smog is flowing over some bugs! Yuck! Oh they're stampeding
- Alright, they're moving across the map, we have some defensive turrets so there's going to be a focus on combat I guess...
- OH SHIT! NOPE! Train just came right through and wrecked them all! The factory is the focus!
- Alright back to the fac- wait, what are those flying things? What are those green things?
- OH SHIT! Oil a drillin', bugs a zappin', rocket a launchin', spider-robot a slinkin' and ALL within the same screenshot of a billion moving parts!
It's a good fucking trailer. So yeah, my trailer needs to do the same thing. Moments of interesting but not exciting, then showing excitement. Repeat until done. I'm going for a 30 second trailer so that should be fine with the content I have. I also read somewhere (sorry, I don't have a source) that in some games they made the trailer first which gave them an idea of where to go but also what kind of things they wanted to add in the game. So... Mansuit trailer would go something like the following
- Date Night, we are zoomed in on a woman sits at a fancy restaurant. She says: "It's so nice to finally find a real man who has it all together"
- Zoom out: We see the squirrel, we see complete an utter chaos! All these panels doing all sorts of stuff.
- We show an NPC and we show off the suit, music starts up. A voice says "We didn't really design the suit properly."
- Buttons getting pressed, knobs getting turned, sliders sliding, while we see all these reactions the Mansuit can do.
- "So some of the controls may be a bit jank." Show mouth button being hit and the suit moving (Again zoomed in to not show the bypass wires)
- "OK, very jank." Show off automation loops! And the insane build possibilities as you connect things together.
- "But maybe since you're stuck you can help us out..." Show the player completing an objective and getting a reward.
- "For science..." We see an enemy! In our engine builder game?!? And we're being melted! Music is intensifying!
- Show off the rules like the heat getting higher or fuel going lower.
- Show a quick variety of enemies, the mansuit sweating or vomiting uncontrolably, bombard the player with all sorts of content!
- Show the mansuit exploring the surroundings as the music and chorus swells to it's crescendo!
- Chorus ends with "All Eyes Must Glow!" and we see a massive boss guts lord insane thing.
- Beat. Darkness. Logo.
- Mansuit
- Scientist-Lady talking to the Mansuit: "I don't actually know how we're funded to be honest"
Hopefully, if I can manage it, I'll have a trailer to show off before GodotCon.