Markings; how do they work?

So now that I have an easy and reliable way to import my aseprite animations I can more quickly add the marking layers, to do that I will need to make 3 markings for my current slime base which I made for the template.

I will also need a set of wings and a tail so I can get all the parts set up before moving on to the server and generating them.

Once I get 3 markings, a tail and some wings in I can get back to coding. Gonna be honest right now, I seem to have entered a state of depression for some reason. There's quite a few problems around that could be causing it, I would like to solve them but as usual I lack funds for such things. I suppose I could turn my server off and maybe run everything from a couple of RPis but I would need to get a hard drive and external enclosure, do some firmware flashing and all. The hard drive and enclosure are the main issues and the Pi servers would not run my game servers so...

The depression makes me want to give up on this but I wont, I need to put something out there. I may have chosen a complex and long term game but every time I tried to make a simple game I just hated it. It didn't feel worthwhile, not enough challenge and I don't want to make a game I wouldn't play. I for whatever reason just can't get into simple games, all the games I enjoy are complex like Morrowind, Dwarf Fortress, Tactics games, CRPGs, JRPGs, Immersive Sims, Old MMOs.      

I figured the simplest game I could make is Tamagotchi but I would rather not make just another mobile pet game. I don't even like mobile games, I don't even like using my phone. Hell, I forget I even have the thing most days and leave it in the office or next to my bed until I need a kitchen timer.

I can't really see any other way of making a pet sim other than this. I don't want a short-term high speed pet sim because it feels too mechanical, I want something slow, something that takes time and patience. I want there to be other things to do in the game that keep the player's attention and make it fun whenever they are not interacting with their pets but I want the pets to have personality and a story that is associated with them.

I want to be attached to the slimes I raise, I want to remember things that happened to them or things they did. Maybe I save a slime from the brink as a baby to have it later on be the slime that always saves me in dungeons, stuff like that. Emergent story.

While I could have simply made a pet sim and gave it a mobile interface and charged a dollar for it and put it up on some mobile stores... I would have hated myself and it. It would have taken me a month and I might have made a few dollars, but it's not worth it to me.  

I want to have something that doesn't exist, something I always wanted but never got. Pets in MMOs never felt like more than parts of a toolkit, pet sims never gave me much adventure. I want to go on adventures with my pets that I spent time caring for and raising.  

I want to capture the feeling I had with my Tamagotchi when I was a child, the things my imagination did with it. I also want to capture the way things were in old MMOs where people were far more social... I know the world is different now and people have changed but I have to try, right?

I want to build a world that somehow feels real even though it is very strange and make it more real through interactions with my pets and the community.

I may be suffering delusions of grandeur but I wont know unless I try.

Anyway, my lunch got cold while I spewed all that. Gonna eat and take my dog out, maybe take a shower and come back and make a few markings for my slime.

I need to wire up my marking animation to my body animation, so I think I could just use the body animator to call the marking animator and play the animation for all of the markings.

I think for this I will use a script call at the start of every animation that sets the marking animator to the correct animation and if there is a specific face animation for that body animation, set that too (stuff like eating, drinking and training, etc).

I will have to wire up the Marking 2 and 3 to the animator by hand but it should be trivial. Should.

Things will get more complicated when I have to load all these from the server and display them, especially when they have to be downloaded and stored... but for now I just need to focus on making sure they show and animate correctly.

I could include all the marking animations in the body animator but I have some ideas for later on that involve the markings animating separately.

Well, I have set up my animations and now I need to test them. A slime test scene will be required I think, with buttons to change states and moods.

I seek the animation on the body and marking animator to 0.0 whenever the expression changes to prevent de-sync. It does cause a little skip in the animation, I COULD do it the other way around and make it much smoother, though... and I will.

Alright, now to wire up them other buttons for testing state changes.

There's some drift in animation that I have to account for, but I already solved that problem for other stuff... should be simple enough.

I can show 2 markings but one is mysteriously hiding from me. Hmmm...

Ah, it was the fact I named two layers the same in the aseprite file and when it outputs the file it names it after the layer. Got it fixed.

Looks like I am good to go tomorrow.

On what though? Better figure that out now, eh?

I suppose I should get to the core of the Slime server, connecting it to the Apartment server and accepting client connections. Then I can start on the DBMan for it, generating and pulling slime data.

After that I guess it's time to get to the slime care code and how that all works server-side. The client will just have a state machine that will wander or idle the slime most of the time unless the server says to do otherwise.

But before I handle all the care and state machine stuff I will have to work on some models for the various markings and body types. It's going to be a whole day in itself probably.

So then;

1. Core Connections
2. Model Refactoring (Add Care Log, Body Types, Markings, Wings, Tails, respective colors)
3. DBMan For Slime Server
4. Set up the Tick (Ticks down care stats and a lot of other things, basically fired every in game hour.)
5. Care Logic
6. Care Inventories (Food, Drink, Toys, Etc.)
7. Care and Tick Balancing
8. Slime Life Stage Change 1 - Baby to Child
9. Add a couple more bodies for each life stage
10. Add more furniture and tank decor
11. Public Test?

Or something like that.