Daily* Devlogs

I've been thinking a lot recently about how I want to handle the concept of Shopkeepers within this game. It is likely that every game you've played where you acquire goods or services from an NPC has involved this fairly standard concept. That game could be a science fiction adventure that takes place a thousand years in the future, or a fantasy game that takes place in another world entirely. No matter where you go the idea of coin carries on. It might have a fancy name but really it is always there. You could argue that what I'm about to describe is just currency with extra steps but a part of me finds that a bit reductive. It is a bit like the joke in Magic that …

I stress in advance that I'm a bit tired so this particular update is probably going to read like garbage. Another productive night. I wanted to accomplish a few things tonight. The first is I wanted to be able to spawn anything. I might not know what those things are yet but I wanted the system for adding new spawners to be convenient. I also didn't want a lot of casting to be involved, so these spawners would at least be dedicated to the object they will be spawning. The next challenge was to make sure that these objects pool. We don't want to just be creating and destroying a lot of assets. So the major first step was adding a pooling system to the spawn…

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…

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…

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 …

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…

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 …

Tonight was VERY productive but it is also very late. So I'm going to just keep this brief. Our state machine has been updated for both the game and the Moosecats. It is considerably better than it used to be. I'm very excited. I also made it so I can just select the kind of action I wish to add, it will find it, create one, place it in the right folder with the state that will be using it, and add it to that state. No more searching through an asset creation menu, in fact I am likely to remove them from the menu altogether. This is just so nice. I'm going to likely do the same with other systems that need some "kind" of thing! bythepowerofgreyskullSmol.webm

Tonight I worked a bit, admittedly not as much as I wanted, on the response system of our state machine. I need to update it for two reasons. The first is so it has the same rad component access that my actions do, but ALSO because I want to standardize how we switch scenes. Why? Well if I do this I can actually write a script to visualize the state machine and how each thing transitions! If I do that then I can even post them here. Start generating something akin to automatic UML diagrams. It'll be fun! So hopefully soon you'll see that. It is critical I fix this now before moving on further for the game because having state transitions all willy nilly will…

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…

Unity doesn't let you serialize Guids without a lot of headache. Odin Inspector makes this easier on serialized monobehaviors and serialized scriptable objects, but guess what? Did you guess? Yep! You can't use the monobehaviors in prefabs. And that's what I'll need them for 99% of the time. So I had to get sneaky, smart, devilish even. Ended up finding a wrapper for Guids and doing some seriously heavy edits on it. The original was fine but it could be finer. I've now got it so the "serialized" part that we see in editor doesn't actually get built at compile time (since it won't matter anymore). I'll test it out on a build this weekend but I'm optimistic. Every…

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!

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…

This morning we took a fairly long walk. I don't know what it is about that activity but sometimes it can genuinely just take everything out of me. However I managed to muscle through the exhaustion and get our menu system upgraded. The current plan is to have our player menu be one large UI element with tabs on the left side. You might think that this is a trivial thing to implement and with enough caffeine all things are possible. When we think about our function paths there are some things that are happening. The first is that you are selecting a page to open. But we need to ask, is there another page open? If the answer is yes we want to hide that page, refresh…

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 had a bit of great fortune today. I spent most of the day playing BG3, only to find out that Minthara bugged on my run and isn't actually available at Moonrise Towers. I'm debating if I want to go back and see if I can get her to actually be there. But I digress, I played for much of the day and realized I still wanted to keep my momentum with my work. So I set out to make the inventory save and load. This initial hit a hurdle because I had included my inventory artifact within the player info class. This is a problem because our serialization strategy does not like when we save a scriptable object. I realized that a simple solution for this was moving the actual…

Alright, we've gotten to the point where I can pretty trivially add a new item and be able to add it to my inventory just by interacting with it. Is the implementation how we'll ultimately do it? I don't know, but it works and I think that's the most critical goal for now. I also like to think the implementation is efficient and easy to edit. But generally most people like the smell of their own toots. Now that I've got saving and loading working for my player, the Moosecats, and my items, that means I can start storing progress for all of these things. But, what it doesn't mean, is that a player could easily interact with this data. Indeed, you can store things in…

I'm sorry to say that it isn't fully working yet. Not for your sake, by the time you read this I'll likely be done with much of the game. But for me this is an unfortunate night. There is something about my adventures that is serializing differently from items, Moosecats, or even the player data. They look to my tired eyes to be exactly the same. But clearly something is unique. I'm curious if the problem is the self contained classes and their location. Tomorrow I'll try splitting out the classes so that they match the same design scheme as everything else I've done. At this point we can select an adventure, add adventurers to that adventure, remove them, a…

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.

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…

Now that we've got Adventures completed it is time for me to start up on the next operation. The first step towards the upcoming journey was to clean up my code. I went through and added precompile flags where I was missing them. I also updated some attributes that weren't doing what I needed them to do. All the while looking for places where I was missing code comments, or where I could improve an operation. These are really nice ways to relax, especially when work is hectic or exhausting. One of the last things I did for the night was I added an editor function to generate a Moosecat near the player. This way I can test our the upcoming state machine work and oth…

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…

Tonight was another one of my workout nights. After a fairly challenging workout I was then greeted by a kitten that really, really wanted some cuddles. I happily acquiesed and just played BG3 until she was done getting her cuddles. With that out of the way we dived into using a few of the working assets that we currently have. My very talented wife made me a Moosecat texture a while back. That's more fun to look at than a cube, sorry cube, and with this introduction I'm able to do some more work. Here we can see a number of texture types. The first is "one color", the second is "two color", and I bet you can figure out what the third one is called. Na…

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.

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…