Daily* Devlogs

assignToActionBar.webm Aw yeah folks, things are really coming together. Will make this look a bit nicer tomorrow. Gonna need to start hooking up usage and placement soon!

Some days are more productive than others. For tonight we didn't get a whole lot done. The action bar slots are now hooked up to the player's save data. This will mean that your action bar status will persist between sessions. Or at least, it will once I hook up the state actions to initialize the action bar. This will be pretty straight forward, I need to implement the initializable interface, then add our action bar to the initialize state action. That will trigger after the load event and BOOM action bar is populated. Won't be doing that tonight though, too tired. Long work week, lots of challenges. But hopefully the coming weeks will be much more quiet. I'll ac…

Today was interesting. Every Saturday we take a bike ride downtown to have some very good food. One thing we are noticing is that when we DO take these long trips we basically pass out for the entire day after. Which is fine, it is a pleasant way to unwind. But for game development or game playing it isn't the best. I did manage to discover a mistake in the code before I ended up passing out for the day. I have duplicated code in the player info (save data) and the action bar. So tomorrow I'll probably take a moment to remove the duplicate code from the action bar and link it to the player more directly. This was just a matter of one of my past selves doing something…

I've got a bug that I already know exists and will need to clean up this coming week. When you send cats on adventures, if you save while they are gone and reload, the adventure will save at the proper length and finish as expected. But the "return cat from pool" logic I don't believe actually will generate the cat from scratch, rather it'll look for the cat in the pool and try to turn it back on. Once that is validated and repaired I can move onto the next steps of the inventory system. Spent most of today playing Pandaria Remix and doing some yard work. You can't have every day be a nonstop grind, and I've learned this. But I'm very excited that we are entering i…

We had a stormy night last night, and tonight sounds like it will be as well. I can tell I'm getting a smidge older because golly is this just absolutely dunking on me. Not only that but I had a long workday that ran later than usual. So it was little sleep and even less time to get anything done with the project. But do something I did! The action bar needed one final bit of polish before I could move on. Namely if you have an empty field it would try to find data for an undefined asset in the item catalog. This is a no-no and my checks worked as they should. The request was blocked and the error print out I wrote before was clear on the mistake that had happened.…

Boy howdy my eyes burn! Tonight I updated the action bar so now it actually does save and load properly. This includes from a fresh run, so when everything else loads from the player so does that. I've also investigated that adventure bug I mentioned. Funnily enough it DID work but not for the right reason. All cats currently spawn on load, even the ones on adventures or otherwise away. So the cat would spawn in, then immediately go on an adventure. I've added in support now to track the active state of the cat. So if they are "off" when the game saves it'll spawn them off when the game loads the next time. Then when something like the adventure completes it'll fin…

Tonight we've added a few concepts. The first is the save data for a held item. The idea is quite simple, when you select an item on your action bar you can press the hold item button, which I think will be Y on a controller, not sure yet. After you are holding the item you can then press interact, if the item can be interacted with this will trigger the game actions associated with that item. If it cannot be interacted with then nothing will happen with the item. However, if you happen to be interacting with an item in hand that can't be interacted with, AND you happen to also be standing near something interactable, you'll interact with that item instead. So, maybe…

I need to update the name of this forum section. It's more like a daily dev log than anything else. Today we didn't see any meaningful progress. But that's super fine. I've had a hard time with work lately and I'm kinda burned out in general. But, tomorrow is the start of a four day weekend for me. I'm very excited and next week is the remodel! Looking forward to seeing how it goes.

As I've said before. If you can, take a little step as often as you can. Eventually you'll travel a great distance. Today was another one of those small steps. Something that many people won't even notice because it'll feel intuitively like it should just work. The item setting takes care of moving your items around if they were already on the bar. In this way we don't have to worry about someone filling up all 12 slots with a cheese wheel or what have you. Not that I'm judging, sometimes you need a lot of cheese. Anywho, here is a fun little gif of it in action. togglebar.webm

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…

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. …

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 …

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…

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…

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.

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.

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…

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…

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 …

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 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 …

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…