Daily* Devlogs

When we think about a workout plan we've got two different sets of information that are carrying alongside one another at the same time. The first is the immutable data of the plan itself. A plan, as noted prior, will have a series of workouts, those workouts will contain exercises, those exercises will contain sets, and those sets will contain metrics. But here's the thing, for most of these steps we have user configurable data that wouldn't be immutable. A workout plan has a custom name. The workouts consist of exercises yes, but each of those exercises will have metrics saved when the user completes them. We need this because without data tracking we'll s…

Alright! You might not know, I forget if I mentioned it, but I've slightly pivoted for a few weeks. I was using the RP Hypertrophy app and my subscription ran out. To my great surprise I tried to get in to see what my prior workouts had been and I was completely locked out. I was pretty livid and naturally this spurned me on to create my own fitness app. The purposes of this first post, before I create a section for this is to discuss where we sit so far. Base Data laid down for 277 exercises. Exercises are broken up into their primary and secondary muscle groups. You can quickly filter and find the ones you want to do. The IO structure, I believe, is compl…

I've been battling with the dialogue system for a while here. I have repeatedly overthought the problem. So, thinking I need one less headache I bought a dialogue package off the store. I used it for a bit and realized it had way more than I'll ever need or want to use. I'm trying to enjoy myself developing and don't want to spend a bunch of time learning someone else's system. I'm sure it is great, I'm not going to spend this update complaining about it. Instead I want to talk about what I've got setup so far! We now have a dialogue system that can handle branching narratives. It also supports conditions for displaying information with a fallback message. So if you …

I forget if I mentioned this in my last update but I've finally got the project in Unity 6. This is my last planned update for the game engine. At this point I have everything I want and really any further updates are just me looking for excuses to delay work. As of today I've got a few weeks off from work and I want to make the most of it. The biggest challenge with these large delays is that you have to piece together where you were prior. I'm noticing that a past incarnation of me put together a system for finding a "valid" random point for the Moosecats. I don't think it was the best choice as designed. But it will get us to where we need to be. I just needed to …

The Front Today was a pretty slow day to get started. But once I got rolling it felt like a lot of things were coming together. Each new game that I start is saved in a separate slot. I've somewhat arbitrarily only given you 10,000 to work with. This may eventually change to just be however many your PC can manage. Just keep in mind that the UI I'll be designing might not be the most convenient when you've got far too many games running. Realistically I would think most people will only have one given all the collectibles and progress folks will have access to. I've also updated the artifact system so that my serialization updates from yesterday...or two days ag…

I think going forward on these updates I'm going to split them into two sections. Think of it like a mullet, we'll have business in the front, for anyone that only cares about that, and personal in the back where its just the things going on in my life. If you don't care about one side, don't read it, and if you don't care about either side then you've just saved yourself some time! The Front It took a strange amount of heavy thinking but I've managed to update the save system to be a lot cleaner! Now we have the concept of a UtilitySaveData class, utilities are classes that are neither SOs or Monobehaviors and will handle various needs of other classes. This is…

Welp, you can officially click new game, pick a name, a birthday, and then move into the main game proper. This is great but it does raise a few things that I need to overhaul. The first is our saving and loading system. Currently it is using interfaces in a way that should literally be impossible in C#, how I got it to work I'm uncertain. But it is impossible to breakpoint which is very annoying. This week we will update the saving and loading such that it is done properly and can be properly breakpointed. This will be very helpful and part of this will be creating checks for whether or not the loading data exists. You might be saying "Uh...how do you load at the …

So I'm realizing today that I need to make the primary state machine of our system a system that exists outside of the primary scenes. It hit me like a ton of bricks when I was clicking on one of my main menu buttons and...nothing was happening. Well shoot, I thought, that's definitely unexpected! I've been using this system for years, how could it be failing now? Well, when a tree falls in the wood and nobody has registered a listener, does it raise an event? The answer, at least in my system, is no. This isn't an insurmountable problem. What I can do tomorrow is create a class that I add to my fresh scenes, this will check to see if we've instantiated the state m…

While today was slow goings, I can happily say that I've started doing work again. The last few weeks of my life were extremely hectic with occasional workdays literally going from 8 in the morning until midnight. My brain and body were both drained, by the end of it I was just completely exhausted. I knew if I tried to work on the project at the same time that I'd not get anything even close to quality as a result. So I took some time off, focused on getting work caught up and out of my way. With today being my first return back. Unfortunately coming off of going to bed at 1AM did not help for the return. But I've had a few days off from work and I'm feeling a lot…

Getting back on the train, not by a lot, but enough. This week was harder on me mentally than I realized it would be. I think I'm going to move this section from scratch notes to some kind of daily devlog series. Where I'll either talk about the latest updates of the game or what I'm doing and how its influencing me. A big part of this is that those influences impact the design of the game, they have to. The only time that a game is unchanged by the experiences of the creators is when the process of creating is not driven by the creators. When a game is a vector for profit over experience, that's when it will live on regardless of the internal conflicts, the ups an…

Progress ticks on, the sands of time flowing down through the thin neck of inevitability. We've now got a simple object for handling dates, the primary use will be for birthdays. This is because DateTime in the real world and the date and time of this world don't actually line up. We could probably link them up in some way but I think this is the better path. The next thing I need to do is start hooking up the Handler for the Character Creation page. This will hook into a copy of the Datum Player class and once finished, save it to our open slots. But not for tonight, tonight I get some rest and hope I don't burn the entirety of my brain at work.

Alright, names are pending possible changes in the future but we've got the following for the year: Scionur, Ghein, Auroht, Calia, Hidroen, Aten, Gefain, Phoen, Tartarune, Dimine, Chaine, Kalmine, and Thanine. Each month is 30 days long, which means we have a few more days than normal. Like many things with the project this will help make things feel just a little bit off, a little bit wrong. Sorry to say I lost some work from yesterday. But given that we didn't even have an update yesterday I think that was just how it works out.

Obviously not mine, that's for a bit now. But I've started hooking up the player creation section. I know we need to know your name and we'll want to know your Birthday for a yearly gift in the game. This is all saved locally obviously like days of old. If we ever have online support that'll be fully optional and opt-in, not opt-out. I got no desire to know anything about anyone besides what they would like me to know. One fun thing I want to do hearkens back to one of my favorite games of all time, Ogre Battle 64. We are going to convert your real world Birthday into the day and month of the in universe calendar. I don't have that list with me at the moment but in…

Well, I've worked a few 10 to 12 hour days and today I was rebuilding my office now that the remodel is finished. I'm sorry to say that means I haven't gotten to do anything with Moosecats this weekend. The plan tomorrow is to finish some more work in the morning and then spend the afternoon updating the state transitions for the new game flow. Obviously we won't have any animations but the hope is that we can start blocking out the experience so that later we can have animations slotted in nice and easy. The upside to a job is the financial security, can't deny that, the downside is sometimes it asks a lot of you. And the older I get the less of me I feel like I'v…

As is so often the case, today is less exciting than yesterday. But hopefully getting us ready for a couple nice updates tomorrow. I've got a small bug with my loading order. Basically I need No sooner than I was writing this did I realize where my bug was and how to fix it. We've now got the title screen with the buttons disabled until the player data is loaded. If your player has a name (a requirement of playing) then I know you have a game going and the continue button is enabled, otherwise you only have access to the new game button and the settings button. Upon clicking new game, or continue, we enter into the game state. Obviously this isn't how it will always …

Alrighty, so we've got an artifact setup to point to the title screen handler. This will allow us to modify it through the state machine. The plan, which I should finish up tomorrow, is to have the buttons disabled for now until the player loads. If there IS player data, we'll set new game and interactable to clickable, if there is no player data, we'll only set new game to interactable. Settings does a whole lot of nothing for now, don't have settings to worry about. Upon clicking either new game or continue we will transition into the game state. This will not always be the case. Once the Title Screen state is complete we'll move into the new game experience. …

I'll be honest, today was rough. Work has a lot that I need to get done and Venus did not have a good day. Poor girl is either stressed or sick, or both. Hopefully she'll be feeling better tomorrow or at least in a couple of days. I don't handle that sort of problem well at all unfortunately. So once my long long work day was over and it was already edging towards 8PM I had to make an executive decision. Will I try and have any fun today or will I just work? I ended up taking the fun route. I needed that, but it wasn't entirely a wash for progress. We've got our developer quality title screen setup. I've got the events hooked into the buttons and now I just need to…

Alright, at this point I think we very much have the foundational pieces to make our vertical slice game. So what I'll be doing this week is setting up the initial flow of the game. We'll keep going step by step through the process. You know what, I keep doing the "we" thing so I'm just rolling with it while I type this up. Anytime we hit a wall we'll discuss that wall and how we need to overcome it. Be it a little bit of polish on a system, or a missing system I didn't think of, whatever. Over time we'll get closer and closer to the game. Which is an exciting prospect. Once we get to the point where there is something to play, even a small teeny tiny bit, I'll beg…

Ended up watching the Sonic Movie tonight. It was quite good! I really enjoyed Jim Carrey as Robotnik. Lots of great visual gags and it gave me a good smirk from time to time. Definitely a good time. I don't really do letter or score reviews, but on my "Hated, Disliked, Experienced, Liked, and Loved." It gets a solid liked from me. But, I can only assume that the reason you are on this part of the internet is you are curious if I reached my goal for the weekend. I'm not sure...I wonder if there is any way to know. thesignspart2.webm One thing I am realizing is I need to update the interaction logic. That little blip was me adjusting my position to…

Per usual, today was a me day. I was tempted to do some work but I also recognize that I need to relax sometimes. Liz and I have been playing a good chunk of Pandaria Remix. There is even a checklist that was made by a user that I've been using to see how much of the things I've unlocked during the event. It can be a little hard to invest any kind of time into games like this for me. Especially with the rise of Private Equity gluttony and Public Company implosions. It just feels like every media controlled by a corporation is not long for this world. No real reason for it either, games like this make plenty of money. But they cannot realistically make more money year…

With the construction and work looming ever more on my day to day, I find that I'm not getting as much done as I'd like. But that's ok, I'm making small progress almost daily and that does mean inevitably it'll get done. Tonight I updated a few of the classes, got some of the code comments updated. Cleaned up areas that were rough around the edges. This weekend my goal is to get the sequential conversation hooked up and have the window close in one of two scenarios. You put enough distances between you and the target (or something similar) OR you finish all their dialogue and interact one final time. I think that's a realistic bar to set. Sunday evening me will …

We'll start first by saying that I noticed a way I could optimize my event system today. Not necessarily for performance but for when I need to make new events and listeners. I was able to reduce the parameters necessary from 3 to 2. That might not sound like a lot but that's 33% less work to do every time I have a new event to make! It adds up when you get to be my age lol. Secondly, we've made even more progress tonight! We now have the framework I discussed in the prior post started. The next thing I'll want to do is create the messages to iterate t hrough and to have it close if you walk away. But that's for tomorrow, for tonight I go to bed! talktome.w…

Alrighty, we've got both parts of the relationship hooked up for the conversation. The Handler Conversation on the object, in this case Sign, and then Handler UI Chat Box on the chat box. The initial conditions for connecting the two is also ready. Not that I've made the event or listener yet but that will be trivial. The next step, if I've got the energy (a common comment from me but I am edging towards 40), is to create the first structure for housing conversation. I think it'll be a list of a class that for now only contains a string. Later we might include images and other information so that when you move pages we can update popin art or similar. It is …

Before I head off to bed, lets do a little brain storming. I've got the chat box setup, realizing that I've been an idiot this entire time and trying to take care of the more complicated system before doing the simpler one that'll satisfy most of my needs. This simpler problem is a chat box that will appear when you talk with actors or objects that have things to "say". It will appear, sometimes with menu options, and will close if you walk far enough away from the target. Perhaps even if you just turn I'm not sure, we'll have a menu option for disabling movement during conversation in case people want to use WASD (or similar) to make selections. I can't use a dialog…

Alright. I think I have a plan. We will generate the box on a canvas layer, this will need to be placed just above the speakers "head". We will want this to snap to the edges of the screen as you look around, until a certain "stretch point" causes the object to "snap off" and stop being visible. If it works out I might also make it fade out if you walk away as if you can't hear it anymore. I played a fair bit of Warcraft today because A) I'm really smitten by Pandaria Remix and B) I wanted to see what talking looked like in the game. I really dig how naturally it all just works. These are the kind of things that really impress me with design. Like a good camera contr…