Daily* Devlogs

It is a bit of a cliche with my updates but I am, shocker, very tired. So what I'm about to write not even be very coherent. Today I did manage to create the speech game action, and a very basic sign made out of a thin cube and a cylinder. When you interact with the sign it triggers the speech action which then prints to the console log. The next step is adding in a handler for this object that is raised by the game action. This would contain the text and other details pertaining to this actor, and all others like it in the future. Once I have that done I'll have the interaction medium and the data storage and recovery system. What I am also working on is the po…

Today, our little Bean, of Moose and Bean fame, has a limp. Not sure what she did but clearly her body didn't appreciate it. I know it might sound a little silly but it completely threw out the window any chance of me concentrating at least for today. Hopefully by tomorrow with a bit of rest she'll be back to normal or at least less pronounced in her pain. We've scheduled a vet appointment. I still plan to do dialogue work in the morning tomorrow but I'll be keeping a close eye on our little kiddo. They are both too sweet to be dealing with injuries.

I've got support added for very fun and animated conversation text. So this weekend my goal will simply be to add a sign into the game that has some message. Once we've done that, which I think will be an overhead box above the sign, we'll start thinking about text boxes with cutins for people. I think that's something I want to do and the next part of this whole party. Should be a fun weekend!

Tonight we didn't see any updates but for good reason. Work today encompassed basically the entire day until it was sleepy time. This happens sometimes, that's just how life goes from time to time. The next step of our work, I believe, will be starting on dialogue. It does feel like we've officially hit that point. This will either be fun or frustrating, either way I'm looking forward to it.

Woo boy! The exhaustion from work and just life in general really got to me. I reminded myself multiple times yesterday to not forget to post and yet I forgot! So today we are going to get yesterday's update and today's resolution. I was just not feeling the item and world actions flow when I tried to implement it yesterday. For some reason it was just not really vibing with me, I'm sure you've felt this before. You do something, anything really, and it feels off. There isn't anything morally wrong with it, not even nothing technically wrong, but it unsettles you. Your mind wonders what you are thinking and why you don't do something, anything else. That's where I …

Alright, this is the final night before construction. The entire room is cleared out and I'm mighty tired. I've got to wake up early in the morning which isn't super great. And I've got work which will obviously take the morning and half of the afternoon. BUT once that is done we are back on the horse for getting work done. The next step will be hooking up the logic for using an item you are holding. I believe it should be pretty straight forward. When we pass you through the item we'll want to collect if you aren't holding something, since you I think we'll have you able to either hold something or interact with things. If you ARE holding something then you eat it i…

I didn't do much of anything for Moosecats today. But for good reason. I've had to strip down the office because starting Tuesday its going to be getting remodeled. This is a three week process and that means I'll be doing both my job and Moosecats from either the living room or occasionally the back porch. This should be interesting and I'm looking forward to seeing this room once it is done. The only hope I have is that by the end of it I have no regrets. The contractor we are using is not cheap, but if the result of that is no bumps then it'll be worth every penny. Anywho, tomorrow once I fully strip down this room I'll see if I can get a little something done.

I've got the system setup now such that you can set yourself to "holding" or not. If you are holding and cycle through your action bar we will add your item to the hand, if it is something that can be held. Now unfortunately, I have realized a subtle nuance between interacting with say an apple on the ground, and interacting with that apple in your hand. When the item is on the ground I want you to collect it, but when the apple is in your hand I want you to eat it. I'm going to think about this tonight and figure out the smoothest way to handle this. I'm sure it'll be pretty obvious but for now it isn't striking me. On the bright side we are making some good progres…

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

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.

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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!

So! Sorted the bug that was giving me tons and tons of copies of the items to our inventory. It was actually quite simple and very silly. We might as well cover it really quick. The original code, first adding, and then removing. So the mistake here is very subtle, specifically how does equality work with Datum? For two datum to match they must be the same in ALL ways. Their name, their ID, and their count. But what if, lets say, you are adding a single copy of an item to your inventory and you've got...oh I don't know, 25 of them? Well congratulations you just got another entry in your inventory. Following this we increase the count of the orig…

Alright, I've hooked up the UI slots to be buttons. Now when we click on them they'll inform any listening systems of their unique ID. I did notice we've got a bug where your inventory is kinda "growing" when it shouldn't. I'll need to look into that. The reason will probably be pretty amusing and stupid, that is the way of things most of the time for me. Next steps will be hooking up the action bar to listen for these clicks. The main action bar handler will just be listening for the event and will assign the item to whatever your currently selected slot is. We'll see if we like that, in the end the preferred method might actually be clicking an item in your inven…

Alright! This week we will be touching up some of the UI. None of this will be final but it gives us some feel for where the game can go. I think first we will connect the inventory to the action bar and then we will go from there. No pressure just fun! That's the plan at least 🙂

Today I did a little bit of UI work just to help unwind. It was a long and busy week and I both didn't want to do anything but also didn't want to do nothing. Stuck in some kind of weird middle state, I did a little. What was amusing once I was finished with some of the first pass code for the inventory was it revealing an issue with my character. As you know I had ID issues with my items. What I hadn't noticed was that all the prior iterations of the items have been sitting on my player this entire time. That's pretty amusing, all things considered. Sometime soon I'll clear out my inventory and save my player, just to fix that up.

I find that UI work is both incredibly rewarding once it is finished and incredibly taxing while you work on it. Ever interaction point from people requires a lot more effort than linear systems. There are many intuitive ways that people expect things to work and making all those things work in harmony is quite a chore. I'm not sure how much we will get done tomorrow but I do think once more of the initial developer UI is done that the experience will start to feel more tangible. It is one thing to see an editor window updating but a whole other experience to see it live in game.

Hey Folks, Alrighty, done some updates. They ended up being more world modifications than actual action bar updates. The next steps though are pretty clear once I recover a bit more. We will hook up a simple inventory that reads our current items. When you pick up an item this will inform the game to add the item to your inventory. Upon doing this it'll check your action bars for an empty slot. If there is a slot it will place a reference to that item in that slot. Otherwise nothing happens. Then following that, we'll want to have it so when you are in your inventory. If you left (right?) click on an item, or perhaps some other key we'll see, when you use t…

Hey Folks, So I slightly recovered from the work week. Only a bit. But here we are! It isn't pretty but I've got the start of our action bar setup. The fields update when you press one of the keys, through the magic of events. Next I need to setup it actually showing the items you have in each spot. Probably have item pickups fill in the first open space. That's all I have for tonight though. Take care of yourselves! actiontime.webm

Today I think is an important time to just take a step back. Only for the day, work has been extremely rough these past few days and I'm officially out of steam. But when we come back, tomorrow I'll whip together a simple GUI to test our our action bars and throw up an image or two maybe, if the day is kind. Take care of yourselves and thanks for the random visit, internet strangers.