Daily* Devlogs

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!

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…

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…

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 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…

Alright, we've shifted away from needing response objects. I believe this will be fine. One thing I need to sort is having our kitties enable and disable their listeners as their states change. This will help reduce the number of objects listening for certain event calls. I can't imagine this will have a HUGE impact but its one less variable when testing out new systems. That'll come tomorrow. But for now? I need to go get some sleep, it is mighty late.

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…

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…

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 …

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

Alrighty! We now have our standardized transition system for the state machine. Conveniently this helped me discover an error with prefabs and adding components. That is now fixed so we are golden. Additionally I found a bug in the unique ID system (again? Yeah, I know) and that is now patched up! It is such a good time looking through your code, patching up holes, and adding new systems. If you can ever find the energy I really recommend it. More gifs are incoming probably next week, but for now have a lovely night!

Alright. Another productive day. So we've moved into building up our skinning toolset. We use color replacement in order to take a few simple designs and give them a great deal of potential variety. Obviously for this vertical slice work these are all just variations on the original, a 1 color, a 2 color, and the original three color design. We've updated the generation and skinning process so that it can randomly pick a particular pattern for the cat and then it will choose colors from our color library to texture it. This texturing process actually stores the data inside the saveable data of the cat. So when we go to save the cats that information will be stored.…

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! 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…

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…

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…

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, 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.

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 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…

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 …