Daily* Devlogs

Here we are, a late night, I've worked out and even played a bit of games. But still we need to update on what was accomplished with the game. To put it simply, a bit more than I expected and yet I wish I had done more. Tonight we managed to accomplish adding in the Handler class for Moosecat Gameobjects, then we hooked in the Moosecat Datum to that Handler. From here we integrated the interactable interface and told it that, for now, we want that to add the pet kitty to our care. This isn't necessarily how it'll work in the future but we are just trying to prove the function calls will work as intended. collectionExample.webm The first cube is our invento…

No pictures today. But we've still made progress. After a hearty run of Randomized BG3 I started work on the collection system for Moosecats. This database will store all of the Moosecat information for each kitty that joins your care. These systems require creating the single unit object, I call those Datum as you've probably seen. Then it requires a Data object which is a collection of Datum with various helper functions for adding and getting data from the database. Finally we make an artifact that contains the Data Object so that we can easily share our data between any number of in game objects without creating a bunch of duplicates or otherwise doing something else …

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, the next feature we needed to hook up was looking around. This is already squared away for controller but with KBM (Keyboard and Mouse) this was a little less clear. Initially we had the camera always looking whatever direction you were moving the mouse. But as my wife wisely pointed out to me "So I need to let go of the mouse when I want to stay looking in a certain direction?" Well, the moment she asked that I realized I'm an idiot and decided that today I would be fixing that. So now, we have a button mapped to looking. Currently it is the left mouse button, but I think by default I'd rather it be the middle mouse button. Regardless we will allow for bu…

Vector math can be a bit of a pain in the ass sometimes. You do some logic that is probably higher than you ever actually finished in school and the damn raycast is going off in god only knows what direction. So naturally you throw in a gizmo to draw a line to where it is going. You adjust the logic in the gizmo until it is precisely what you want. Ok, fair enough, then you copy and paste that logic into your actual non debug code and...ok...why is it not working? I'm looking at this object and my debug log isn't printing? Then you turn and once you are at an angle that can only be described as "totally wrong" suddenly you see your debugs. Sweet, ok. Well, at this …

The next journey that I'm working on at this moment is the inventory system. I believe I've worked out everything that we'll need going forward. The first thing is that I'll be using a system not unlike Ragnarok Online to track the different items. We will have two kinds of enums to relate to every item. The first is their SuperType, thing of this like food, crafting goods, equipment, etc. This is used for filtering and not much else. The second, and much more important, is the SubType. This is the precise item that we are tracking. An Apple, Rose, Leather Jacket, etc. Unity has an annoying quirk where it will not serialize a dictionary. But we really want to use a…

Outside of naming classes and folders, the next most complicated part of coding for me is the process of saving and loading. This is not because the idea itself is necessarily complicated. You are just saving some information as text (or whatever format you desire) onto your device. The major challenge for me comes in the most convenient way to have data that can be saved and also easily parsed within Unity. There are also some constraints when saving with Unity. Natively you can't save json strings that feature any content that won't naturally display in the editor. This means that things like dictionaries or multi-dimensional arrays are out. You can, however, creat…

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 …