Faire Hollow Dev Log #8 - Juice

In game development there is the concept of juice. Juice are the little design flourishes that get added to user interactions to make the game feel more fluid and organic. You've experienced juice in any game you've ever played, but you might not have noticed it: it happens when you click a button and the button wobbles a bit, or when a menu fades in gently, or an icon zooms in when you hover over it. It's almost always during a transition of some sort; it's almost always subtle.

You might not notice juice unless you're looking for it, but when you're playing a game you definitely notice when it's not there.

I've added the beginnings of juice -- just a little -- to my menu and UI, more as an experiment about what is possible than anything. And yet, after adding just a few small flourishes to my UI and menus, it's incredible the difference that the addition of juice feels to the polish of the game.

Take for example this settings menu and hotkeys in this quick video:

Faire Hollow Dev Log #7 - The State Machine

Happy New Year! I've been hard at work on the Player state machine, creating new capabilities around the inventory system. You can now pick up items, carry items, and eat items! All that bread on the ground now serves a purpose: when you walk over to it and interact with it, you can pick it up and then eat it, thereby increasing your stamina by one! It's kind of the first real "game loop" that I've made in Faire Hollow!

I continue to refactor the code base as I move through it, and each week I feel like I've turned a major corner in my understanding of object-oriented programming. There's so much to learn, but I'm getting more comfortable with custom classes and overall just writing cleaner code. Reddit has been hugely helpful via the Godot subreddit, and I've been using ChatGPT to ask some questions and get decent answers to point me in the right direction.

I also bought a new stand microphone 😎 , and I made my first YouTube video with sound. In this video I walk through what a "state machine" is, and why it's useful for development. I show some code examples from Godot, and check out those sweet transitions, guys 😆 ... I'm not saying this is the best video in the world, but it did help me learn more about how OBS Studio works, so I can make better videos in the future!