Devlog 1: Gameloop 🔁

Untitled Paint Mix Game has been in development for a good two months now,  so I thought it was a fitting time to make my first devlog. After some preliminary visual development and sweating through a lot of HSV-to-RGB math (much more on that later), the first main task was to get a game loop up and running. 

UPMG is a shop management game, based off of classics like the Papa's ___eria games, Good Pizza Great Pizza, and the like. This genre is 95% food-based shops, but the same loop principles apply to my paint shop. The gameplay is divided into days of fixed length, in which customers file in with an order and then you make the order as quickly and accurately as possible. You hand off the order, get some amount of money, and continue until time runs out for the day.

Currently the loop is fully functional, albeit missing pretty much all the bells and whistles (juice) that I will save for later. I have a small bank of customers to randomly choose from and a slightly less small bank of orders, stored as pairs of hex codes and strings. You'll note that the day length is extremely short (30 seconds) right now just for testing reasons, but will likely be more along the lines of a couple of minutes in the actual game. 

I had few issues establishing the gameloop as it's all pretty cut-and-dry. I desparately want to add juice and more finished art assets because visually it's pretty atrocious at the moment, but I'll maintain focus on getting to a very playable prototype for now. Which means next up is:

• A much longer list of possible orders (currently there are only six or so)
• New customers
• Continued work on paint mixing mechanics
• Game balancing (calibrating accuracy calculations, the amount you get paid after each order, the pacing)