Daily* Devlogs

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.

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 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!

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.

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

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.

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 …

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…

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 …

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.

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

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…

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.

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.

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 🙂

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…

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…

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…

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