Daily* Devlogs

It will eventually be mappable but the action bar support is added to the new unity input system. For now it defaults to 1 through = on your keyboard, but we'll eventually add in support for things like shoulder buttons on a controller. There is now an event setup that will inform all listening systems that the player has pressed one of these keys. Tomorrow I'll be hooking up a simple UI of some kind to alternate between these. What I haven't determined yet is how we will represent our items on the action bar. I'm not sure if they will have unique 2D art made for them or not. Heck, there is nothing stopping us from making our items in the scene 2D as well, perhaps …

I've added a new data collection to the player data. We've now got 12 slots available for an action bar. These are IDs that would match up with items in our item catalog. So now, lets think about how the interaction will work for the next code pass tomorrow. First I'll just set the keys by hand to match a few of the items we support. Then we'll hook up the input tracking for 1-12. If you press one of these items then we'll print out the item in that slot. I also need to add an integer to the player data that tracks the "current" item. Have it default to 0, but otherwise it'll be whichever number you pressed last. Just added that before I forget. So you press…

Hey Folks, So the next thing I want to setup is holding items. If we want to place items it makes sense that we'd need to be able to hold them. I haven't really thought about how we should do this but I'm going to spitball here and see what captures us. The Player Handler only does a few things currently: Saves and Loads Player Data. This actually also includes WORLD data as well currently, just out of convenience. It tracks the player position and updates that positional data. Contains the various artifacts critical to the game running so that they can be saved and loaded to. That's not much, in fact 1 and 3 are basically …

No matter how hard Manor Lords tried, I did manage to do a small bit of work tonight. Trivially added a new action to the adventure system that lets us reward items to the player. I'm really pleased that it only took a couple of minutes, this suggests to me that I'm on the right path with that design. In the future I think I'll want the actions to be coroutines, just so we can yield on some as needed. If I've mentioned that before already, welcome, I'll be doing that a lot over the next few years. Lots of things to keep stuck in my brain and some of it loops.

I got it! Our action system works great with the adventures and provides us with a ton of flexibility with each new adventure. In this example our kitty goes on the adventure, then after the adventure finishes, they return and their need is satisfied. Tomorrow I'll see about doing an item award to the player. Obviously later these will need updating to include animations, sounds, etc, but the core is there! PARTYCAT_Smol.webm

Today was kind of an awful day physically for me. But regardless, the cats send themselves on adventure, pool themselves, the adventures go through their timer, then complete as expected. So all that remains is to create the adventure reward actions! That's quite exciting, one of those will be unpooling the cat, another to satisfy a need and so on. Looking forward to playing with that tomorrow.

Alright! I took a huge detour tonight to work on an EDH deck of mine, but we've got the kitties able to send themselves on adventures based on their needs. In this case I made my kitty tired and there are no available beds in the scene. So they go to the adventure node to leave on an adventure. They find and add themselves to the right kind of adventure and start it. Tomorrow we'll get the hooks tested for them pooling and unpooling themselves and finally handle the adventure actions which (I hope) will be much easier. So that's nice! Also yeah, I need to name my cats so they stop just showing their guids for their name... Huzzah!

So I've found a flaw in our adventure design but believe I've already got the solution. Much like our adventures should use modules to determine "what" they do when you finish them. We should also use a modular system for determining "who" they are as well. The plan then is as follows. Our Datum Adventure, so called because its a single unit of Adventure Data, will contain an Artifact of a Container Datum Adventure Info. This one gets the name from being a container of a single unit of Adventure Info. We name our assets like this so that you know what they are, generally, just by reading the name. The reason Info doesn't come before Adventure in this example is tha…

Tonight I updated the state machine so that we now have a series of legal vectors across our navmesh. Kitties can choose to wander to any one of them at random when they lack interactable objects to play with. In the future what we might do is just have cats go to sleep if they can't find things to do. Then once their needs are unavoidable they'll go on adventures to solve it. But for now I'm going with this. It might be that once we flesh out the map it becomes physically impossible for cats to have nothing to do. Or perhaps we'll have a "nothing to do" option for cats where they just go on a random adventure on their own to find cool things for the player. Be …

Alright, I didn't expect to do a bunch of coding today. But sometimes you get inspired and the changes just kind of flow in a beautiful way. I've now got three unique concepts for data storage. The keyed database, this acts like a very fancy serializable dictionary. The keyless database, this acts like a very fancy list with all the bells and whistles. Finally there is the catalog which acts like a read-only combination of the prior two sentences. I was able to remove between 1 and 2 hundred lines of code today. Without actually limiting myself in any appreciable way. As far as refactoring goes, this felt exceptionally productive. But now, my eyes are heavy and I wan…

Switching the adventures over from the old system to catalogs was fast and basically painless. There is still more to be done to make adventures less poor to work with. I've split the adventures out from the auto adventures that kitties can start up. I may even split out the adventure handler to be one for regular adventures and one for Moosecat auto adventures. I figure the UI can just read both to populate things. There was no real reason to put them together. This is a mistake I won't make again, until I do. At any rate, I'm going to reward myself for a long work week of Moosecats and actual work. Time to play some kind of game, not sure what yet.

Alrighty! Spawning is now gangbusters! I really like where it is. So I think the next thing we need to refactor is the needs system for the Moosecats. There is "something" about it that I'm not liking. It is too easy to get a mismatch with data. This might be from my old bugs that caused it but fundamentally I don't like the issue. So tonight I'm going to ruminate on a solution and hopefully tomorrow we can implement it!

Alright, well, that IS less than ideal. I've moved our spawn request logic into a state action. Because it honestly makes more sense for it to live there than it would on a particular gameobject. The plan is pretty simple, anything, anywhere, can request items from the spawn system and then they can choose to position those spawned assets anywhere they need and do anything extra to them after the fact. Unfortunately I need to fix a few things tomorrow. The first is that the positional data is wack, clearly a few problems here: 1) They are all spawning in a thin line. 2) They are all spawning under the nav mesh (woops). Otherwise though, if you ignore thes…

Sneaking in real late tonight! Just finished the Fallout series (season 1) and it was incredible. Absolutely soul crushing at times, anxiety riddling at others, and all around just filled top to bottom with misery. I couldn't do that kind of show all the time but it made me feel things and all around I'm happy that it exists. What an exceptional example of truly talented people pulling off something incredible. As for my own work, the spawner is refactored! It is much more powerful than the prior version and now it isn't limited by a single type of item. Now *any* item can be spawned as long as I have the ID for it. They'll be spawned enabled or disabled as needed, p…

I know for some folks this is the most miserable part of coding. You hit a golden point in your work and realize certain systems are unsustainable. As you get better these become less common but I do think there is merit in trying things then iterating on them to get the perfect outcome for you. We are nearly done with the refactoring of cataloging and spawning. I'm very excited as these are pivotal systems for the future of the game. I'm on a phone at the moment because we watched Fallout late into the evening but tomorrow o don't have a workout. That gives me plenty of time to go over it in more detail and maybe include some visual aids!

An interface is a promise between scripts. In theory these cannot actually implement functionality. I say should not because I've found a gap in C# where you can implement functionality in your interfaces. I actually think this is a bad idea. But it is also a really interesting one. Perhaps we will start a coding guide section and I'll put how I did it in there. I still suggest you don't do it, as you can't breakpoint, but the fact that it works is fascinating!

I am pretty sure I skipped a day lol... Anyways, I've come to the conclusion that I need to change up my development schedule. I'm noticing that on the weekends I'm usually pretty burned out. Between work and working out, I just don't have much left in the tank. This actually isn't the fault of this project, I really enjoy working on it. But I need the energy to do so. We are still going to have daily updates. Perhaps I'll take some time on Weekends to update documentation. Or if I'm feeling energetic get some coding done. But I don't want to stress or strain myself and ultimately get little to nothing done. This all said, today while we did take a very long bik…

Today was one part updating Unity because of a bug with the specific version I had, and another part UML documentation! It is nowhere near done but I'm writing up docs on the adventure system so that I can more easily integrate new features into them. As you can see we don't have a lot, but this is the beginnings of it. Adding commentary to every function and attribute so that I can better keep things in line. Cause I'll tell you, this brain of mine struggles sometimes. Especially when we haven't touched something in a bit. And in the case of Adventures we made it a bit ago and then came back to it with a needed overhaul. I should have all this finished tomorrow th…

I believe we will need to clean up the Adventure system in the future but for now it is in a pretty good place. What we do for cats added by themselves is as follows. Has any cat run this kind of adventure yet? If no, add this kind of adventure to our unlocked collection. We do this so it can be saved and loaded. Next we ask if there is an empty team slot on the adventure. If yes, we add this cat to it and start it, huzzah. If no, we create a new slot and add it. Then we raise the send cat on adventure. This allows us to effectively cache slots for these adventures. Which does make me realize I should probably standardize this logic and add dedic…

Alright, we are partway through the cats adding their own adventures. I'm taking notes as I move along. Our main challenge is that Unity doesn't serialize dictionaries and they don't serialize Guids. I need both of these things. I'm currently just building these on awake. But I think what we could use are some simple container objects that we can add to behaviors. Scriptable objects that act a bit like a dictionary. In fact...thinking on this, Odin can serialize our SOs so we can literally do this. We'll have the adventure containers be the keys and the need satisfying adventures be the values. This is stupidly simple, I'm a little annoyed it didn't cross my min…

We have now reached the point where none of the work is throwing errors. That's always lovely, this means that we can now move into having our Moosecats add themselves to adventures. Today was a long workday so I didn't have as much time as I wanted but did manage to hit a good point with this work. It feels like by around Thursday or Friday we should have the setup complete for our Moosecats to go on adventures when they can't satisfy a need and then return a bit later. Can also experiment with them bringing back items and dropping them near the player, that could be very cute if it works reasonable well. As always, feeling good about progress!

Ok! Progress is moving along on adventures. I feel it'll probably take most of this week given how exhausted I am in general. Not with coding, this is always a treat, but just combining it into days with working out and a literal job. The adventures now track how many teams an unlocked adventure supports by default, and how many slots each team has by default. It generates each team slot, then populates their fields for adventurers, and saves all of that to the unlocked adventure data that we store to the drive. I believe with this change, tomorrow we should notice that we can add an adventure trivially and have any number of team slots running actively at the s…

So this has actually been a bit more of an update than I was expecting. But I think we can discuss the high level of it. I'll do a more in depth document soon for my own sanity as much as yours. First I suppose we should figure out what the problem statements are. The first is that we want our adventures to trigger a series of actions when they complete. What these actions will be are undefined but we'll just add them in the sequence we want them to happen. The second is that we want our Moosecats to be able to trigger an adventure on their own. This is to satisfy their needs and it needs to be infinitely scaling. Now that we've got our two problems, i…

Welp! I intended to do adventures first but it turned out we needed to do items! The good news is that I can use the same system for the adventures once I get to that tomorrow. There is no bad news. We can now create action lists to happen in response to something. Currently I only have one action list, but later we can have one for collecting, one for consuming, and so on. These action lists look something like the following: A keen eye might wonder how you can "collect" something and "consume" it (thus satisfying your need), but there is a reason this works for now. Players do not have needs that are satisfied, but they do have inventories. Moosecats hav…

This weekend we'll be finishing up the adventure work I highlighted in the previous post. Then after that I've got a solid idea I think for items. We won't have "Collectible" Items and "Interactable" items etc, we'll just have "Items" and use interfaces to determine what cool functionality they provide. This will simplify the maintenance and really make it so we can add functionality at any time without needing to overhaul TONS of items, or create class after class. Obviously each item will have unique functionality (to some degree) but we won't be enforcing much at the base level. I forget the terminology but basically we'll code them through promised functionality …