DREAM FACTORY NEWS – BUGGY-BUGGY DOO, WHERE ARE YOU?

Hello dear Sleipnir-gang! This week’s dream factory newsis a bit shorter than usual because our priorities are the ongoing beta test for the Hunter of Falkenberg and finishing the fine details of the demo scheduled for release.

Plants are growing – mind blowing

A new website, support for our social media and our community manager Dizzy, and a few other important tasks are in the very capable hands of Nico Kobayashi now. Welcome to the Sleipnir Dreamware team! 

His first task? Creating a new website with a nice layout. Why? You’ll soon get to know.

There is more great news. Our social media manager Dizzy did an outstanding job and brought our twitter follower base up to 1,000 followers in just 5.5 months. Rasak created a beautiful pixel animation for this milestone.

Next step: 10,000!

Groundhog Bug day – Dialogue repeat yourself! 

Our closed beta test is going at a good pace and we were able to fix a lot of small things, such as writing or grammatical errors, but also our beloved layer bug, where you can walk over solid objects or where you are covered by something with no logical reason

It’s especially beautiful when there is a number-hiccup in the programming logic and that causes dialogues to be repeated. This reminds us of the classic movie “Groundhog Day” featuring Bill Murray, where he was trapped within a time loop with day repeating itself.

But there are a few bigger things on our bug fixing list: One of them being our save menu isn’t pretty yet and for some reason it wasn’t possible to revive the female sidekick Lilly during combat when she got defeated. But we were able to solve this in the last two weeks. Let the non-necromantic reviving begin! And we’re on the first point and should be able to solve that soon as well.

If you want to know more about our projects or just want to relax with us, please feel free to join our discord-server. We’re happy about every visitor!

Talk to the Team (Tttt) – Am I a One or rather a Zero to you?

When someone enables or disables switches and talks about different kinds of non-family-related relationships, then our programmer isn’t far. Sleipnir Dreamware, of course, also has its own coder, who has to deal with programming logic from external sources: Mr. Fu! 

Hello Mr. Fu, Guardian of the ones and the zeroes! Master of Google, Regent of the code! We’re glad that you can spare a few minutes of your precious time for us. What can you tell us about yourself? What would you like to share with the world here?

• Hello world! I want to keep the introduction short and simple. My name is Markus, I am in my early 30s, married, have two wonderful children, come from beautiful Upper Bavaria and have been with the German armed forces for over twelve years.

When I was around ten years old, I first started working with the RPG maker. I have been learning “correct” programming since the beginning of 2018 and since August this year, I have been further training in order to be able to call myself a “certified C # programmer” at some point.

You could work on so many projects as a coder. How did you become a part of Sleipnir Dreamware?

• In fact, I have other projects that are currently dormant. Well, the good Boandlkramer was looking for coders for Sleipnir Dreamware in the German RPG Maker MV forum. And I thought, why not? I already had contact with MagicalSpaceWizard and Rasak in relation to game development. I only knew Boandlkramer from his posts on the forum. But it was clear to me that everyone would complement each other with their strengths. And since I am now slowly entering a phase of professional change, it fitted quite well. After all, all of us want to make it their profession.

For the Hunter of Falkenberg and other projects you take over exhausting programming tasks. What has been the biggest challenge so far?

• I think the intensive study of the AlphaABS plugin from KageDesu. The plugin is huge and with intricate details. It not only regulates the combat system but also the graphical user interface on the combat maps, the item system, status and skill windows, and movement in eight directions. In the meantime I have adapted it a lot to our needs. This ranges from adapted windows over to pausing the combat system for opponents up to the point that the group members retreat if Sigurd is too far away from them.

As a coder you need to be able to think logically because computers are only able to interpret logically as well. What fascinates you most about programming? 

• Fascinating is a big word. I don’t think I am fascinated by programming anymore. I sometimes wonder when things that are totally logical to people don’t work. Or the other way round, when things work that are rather illogical to us. But objectively, of course, the computer is always right. Then you have to look for the errors in the code. Before I dealt in depth with programming code, it was quite fascinating to see what is possible with it.

How accurate on a scale from 1 to 10 (10 = absolutely accurate) is the following statement: Fixing a bug is the same as creating three new ones. Give reasons for it please!

• Phew … I would actually say 1. Of course it happens that you add new bugs even though you wanted to fix one. But if that always happens, you can’t get out of the fix. Therefore the statement cannot be generally valid.

Has this happened to you too and how badly were the new bugs?

• Yes … it did. In our project for the GMTK Jam 2021, I fixed a bug at the last minute, but as a result the game crashed in the end and the ranking of the players could not be seen. Just because I forgot a little condition. Unfortunately, these were functions of a plugin that I wrote myself … I think that was the most serious bug that I made worse.

If you could master a game development discipline right away to 100% which would it be? Why?

• I don’t have the choice of disciplines here 😉 Hmm, it’s actually a difficult question, but I would say marketing. Because, no matter what you get up and running, without the right marketing, hardly anyone will know, buy and gamble about it.

Writing code means that you need to understand it and create it without twaddling around. Please describe your favourite meal with just 5 words without naming it!

• Italian, pasta, filled, meat, round

Almost nobody beats Mr. Fu when it comes to logic. Same applies to the pure mathematical logic:

Jesus can walk on water.

I can walk on cucumbers.

Cucumbers consist of 96% of water.

So I’m 96% Jesus.

Think about it! It’s true!

The day after tomorrow?

Two weeks are passing by so fast and even if you thought there wasn’t a lot happening, you’re still writing a whole lot of text.

While our steam-page is in the process of finalising it and the beta test is ongoing, it’s time to think about the aftermath. What are the results? We can tell you about it in two weeks! 😛

Stay safe! 

Your Sleipnir-gang!

This week’s blog roll hoarder shows a few people who might be considered as not-nice guys: Our villains? This Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the Discord server  should you feel like chatting with us and the other community members. We are also live on Twitter and Instagram right here!