Time for another (late) monthly update! Yay!

What has been going on: As I like to do, I wrote two posts after my monthly update trying to set up some intentions and goals to the new month and the new year, as well as an evaluation of the year that has gone. To keep it simple, I will just talk a bit about my goals in 2018 (see the previous post for full information, if you want to, of course).

2018 is the year I will start calling myself “hobbyist gamedev” and focusing on getting things done instead of desiring to learn this or that, it is also the year I decided to focus on art/design stuff.

That being said, my biggest and only goal for the year is to set something free and feel how it is.

I have basically three game projects that I didn’t give up: Pizza Clicker, The Ace Programmer and Midnight Journey – What is in my mind right now is to release Pizza Clicker (shouldn’t take more than a couple months) and then focus on Midnight Journey, so the Ace Programmer would be on an hiatus (or I could work on it when I have blocks on other projects).

A side idea from now on is to also get more into Game AI, because it is something I study and like a lot, also there isn’t too much content about it. I have two projects of mine that, if I have the time, I would like to develop and release it as open source projects – The first project is the Game AI Prototyper – An “engine” that abstract game logic so you can just write your AI algorithms for a game without having to code a game – The second one is the Evolutive Hearthstone Decks, an AI that generates decks for Hearthstone and constantly improves it (using Evolutive Algorithms)

I think these AI projects would be interesting to design, code and make it available on GitHub – Let’s see what the future holds for them.

ANYWAY, The Monthly Update

The Goal: The original plan was to have a playable version of Pizza Clicker and an usable version of the Game AI Prototyper Project.

The Reality: Click Here to play Pizza Clicker – As I had to travel my projects were delayed and I spent more time than I expected on Pizza Clicker, so I couldn’t reach a releasable version of the Game AI Prototyper.

Below you can see an Image of the Backlog of the Game AI Prototyper, as you can see I was pretty much halfway through, which is very far. So next month I will get back to it.

About Pizza Clicker – It’s been some time since I’m thinking on this game, since I’ve been playing a lot of Clicker/Idle games lately (Cookie Clicker, Adventure Capitalist, Communism Simulator, Crank, and a lot of others…) because they are very addictive to me.

As it is right now, it is just a very raw clicker/idle game with basic functionalities – The idea is to have it mixed with management and storytelling features, I have pretty much everything planned, see the backlog for the Version 1 below:

How Pizza Clicker will work? The idea is that you can get “Cursors” and hire employees (Gennaros) and they make pizza for you. You can also buy ovens so that they can do even more pizza, you can also make your own pizzas by clicking. As you progress through the game, you start getting famous and the story will be told through the newspaper as you make to the news, from local to worldwide.

Pizza Clicker Overview: The game progression is simple; At the beggining (V1.0) you have a pizzeria, and then you start hiring more Gennaros, buying Ovens and you will have to open more pizzerias. On V2.0 there will be upgrades available, you can train your Gennaros in Italy, buy Japanese Oven Technology, make more pizzas and be the best Pizzeria in the World. On V3.0 you will have to create your own research and market center to study oven technology and study where to open the next pizzeria. On V4.0 You will be selling your pizzas to other galaxies and eventually other time periods, until you discover the Automatic Oven. The Automatic Oven doesn’t need Gennaros, so you start firing them, this will lead to millions of unemployed Gennaros, and bad things will happen.

The idea of having multiple version is that I would officially release it on V1.0 and keep the development going, but only if at least a few people play and like the game, otherwise I would spare my time and start working on another project.

Aaaanyway, That was a long update I guess. See you on the next one and hope you like Pizzas!

You can always follow me on twitter: @guilhermepo2