April Progress Update

Another month down! When I come to write these blogs, I have to read back and see where I was at the time. It’s always pleasantly surprising how far I’ve come in that time. That may not translate to epic progress updates here but I do think I’m laying a strong foundation to move quickly further down the line.

This month has been largely focused on visuals. I did some work to improve the day/night cycle. I still think there is room to improve there but I image once I start laying out scenes in a more realistic way, I can get a better sense of how good it is and what needs to change.

I said last month I would leave in place the unity UI visuals for a while, but I couldn’t stand looking at them so I’ve completely reworked the inventory and crafting menu and I think they both look pretty nice now. As part of this I also implemented some changes to the flow of some things, for example when you pick up an item, you need to go into your inventory and assign it to a weapon slot, and from there you can press a key for that weapon. This is part of my wider view that equipment changes should be something you can’t easily do on the fly in the middle of a fight. Nothing is set in stone but I like the way it feels right now.

I sourced some more art and built out the character and paperdoll systems. This involved getting to grips with art on a whole other level than before. I built out the animation state machines over several iterations and am pretty happy with the results. I didn’t like some of the animations that came with the character art and was pleased to be able to rework those to my liking. I need to replicate this across more weapons as I build out, but that should be easy. The general idea of a paperdoll is you animate one layer and then coordinate the other layers on top of that, as opposed to individually animating each piece. I’ve got the mechanics in place now, though I’ve implemented only hair and weapon layers. The rest should be easy. Next will be some clothing, but that comes with some new requirements. First I need to be able to craft clothing and armor. Then I need those items to confer some damage resistances against different damage types. I have a base crafting system so that part is easy, but the resistances and damage types will be a focus area of mine in the next month.

I have also been working on my workflow for the world building. I spent time building out rule tiles in unity to build a world but the process was extremely tedious and error prone for me. This led me down a path of research and I’ve ended up with a really nice flow of building out maps in the Tiled map editor and having them automatically import into Unity. The benefit here is that it’s much easier for me to manage things like collision, and a lot of the art I’ve sourced is already configured for Tiled. It took a bit of config to make this all work nicely with the top down engine I’m using, but it wasn’t too difficult. I’ve not really built much out yet, but the process is there and I’m happy I can do it quickly when I have more systems in place.

My focus going forward is still a survival MVP. I seem to shift between work relating to art and building out systems. The last month has been art but I think the next month will be about systems. I want to continue moving towards a very basic survival game and filling in the gaps I have there. That really involves adding some food gathering systems (you can already gather berries but that’s all), and then adding some cooking options. From there I expect I’ll want to layer in some kind of buff/debuff system. For food I may add wildlife soon, but I think I will also look to add fishing.

I think that’s all for me. I am also going to look update this site with discord links just incase anyone is actually reading any of this!

See you soon.