Manes, tails, and colors. Oh my! (And third year retrospect)

Hooray. I got the manes and tails in the game! There was a bit of a nightmare figuring out how to put the manes/tails onto the model correctly. Turns out I need to actually write a script that sets the bones of the hair objects as children of the bones of the pony rig. So weird. You'd think there'd be something to do that automatically, but no. Hmm...

I also made a temporary button that allows me to swap these pre-made ponies in and out to show some different ponies! With hair! And tails!

So, not as much has been done this year as had last year. I was mainly focused on university. University is fun, but it can be fairly stressful.

However, I think I crossed some things off the list, and kind of half-did some things.

I did add in the manes and tails, added the blink, started working on shops (got the Shop Editor working and a basic UI for shops, just need to finish it up in Unity), I got the inventory to save, and I am starting to figure out how to change player colors (but haven't saved them yet).

My next goal will be figuring out an Effects/Consumables type of system that will allow me to have objects that can change your colors. And also save your pony appearance.

Enhanced object transparency and hair!

Hello! Long time no post. I've been busy. Just booted up the project today, hoping to work on some items XML stuff, when I got distracted by the object transparency. I had originally made it work only halfway. See, if you were behind multiple objects, it would only make one transparent. Not really helpful there. So I changed it today so that being behind multiple objects will make them all transparent.

And I've been quietly modeling some hairstyles. Hair is difficult to model nicely. Trying to make something that's many thin shapes into one giant shape that still flows nicely. Need more practice.

Left hairstyle was based on a pony I made for a Flash dress-up game called Penny the Pony. Translating from 2D to 3D is always a pain. Now you have to make things look good from multiple angles on a 3D surface instead of only one dimension on a 2D surface.

My goals remain the same - work on interiors, (I've got a sketch of Stella's interior done) work on the items XML, work on a nice inventory interface, maybe get these hairstyles in the game so my pony is no longer bald... there's so many things I could possibly work on I don't think I should list all of them. So many!

So many things.

I like to do things in spurts. So here's some things that have been done lately:

Animations and particle effects! Also notice that little location marker the pony walks to? It's a small thing that needs a bit more work, but... razzle-dazzle.

And transparency when going behind large objects. And some regular trees! And an iron fence. And Stella' cottage!

I figured transparency would be pretty important with a game with a perspective like this. Everything being flat, and with some objects being tall and big, it would be pretty annoying to have your character hidden behind these things. It'd also result in wider level-design, as without transparency you wouldn't be able to see anything behind large objects, so there'd be no use placing objects behind one another.

Some things I'd like to progress on:

•  Interiors, specifically Stella's, since she has story and character, which would make it more interesting to work on. However, with multiple scenes I would need to work on...
• Scene/game managers. Currently I just have this once messy scene that I test everything in. In order to make new scenes right now, I'd need to copy and paste the player and camera into each scene. I should probably make a script that spawns my character automatically in every scene where I want characters to spawn.
• The town of Merryville, where Stella lives. Town name's semi-undecided. Laying out a whole map of what the town looks like would be a good idea, to properly gauge size and playability. This game isn't going to be fast-paced, it's meant to be a chill, fun, pony-filled land. A Ponyland, you could say. But because the ponies move at a rather leisurely pace, I want to make sure the maps are condensed and interesting no matter where you are. I'd rather avoid vast, empty maps. 
• Inventory system would be a great first piece of interface work. But alas, with inventories come XML files and thinking about how things are going to communicate with servers and bleh. Maybe a cute saddlebag inventory icon could be enough to work on for now.

Ponies! A small text update

No pictures in this one!

It's been a while. That's not to say that things haven't been worked on. They have, a bit, when I have the time. You know how it is, life and stuff.

Something came up while I was drawing the sprites for the pony's walk. It dawned on me just how much work drawing every... single... frame of the 24 frames for the walk cycle would take. And then I'd have to draw every... single frame for all the possible clothes and hair and everything! And then if I want to add more than a walk cycle animation? Omg! Can you imagine how much time it would take to do all that?

So then I decided to model a 3D pony. Yeah, I have one. It's in the game. I'm not going to show it just yet. I'm too tired to take screenshots.

Most of the stuff I've been doing, besides modeling a 3D pony and animating a walk cycle for it, is fixing everything that broke after making the pony 3D while keeping the environment 2D.

Much of the movement broke and sorting the sprites also broke, because 3D models don't have sprites to sort!

Much of it is fixed now, and I even got a chance to look back at some pretty incomprehensible movement/interaction player code and make it much nicer and cleaner.

And the issue I mentioned last time with the "walking via dragging the mouse and dragging on a selectable object selects the object and stops your movement" issue has been fixed!

As more "easy" things get out of the way, the harder things need to be done. And those usually take more time and dedication.

I'm not sure what to work on next, here's a huge list of things on my mind from easiest to hardest:

• Creating a pretty user interface.
  Honestly, though, there wouldn't be much in it because the only button I really have functioning is an inventory button. I might hold off on this until I get more functionality in the game, to make sure I know what the grand picture will be.
• Creating cottage interiors and more art in general.
  Not very hard, but takes creativity. Which doesn't come super easy. Drawing a lot of props like stoves, chairs, tables, isn't super fun to be honest.
• Adding more things to do.
  Crafting things? "Wearing" things? You know, rudimentary systems that aren't pretty, but have a little function.
• Making a nice shader for the pony.
  Oh dear, I'm not very good at this. I might get some help with this, since writing shaders seems more like magic than programming to be right now. The shader I'm currently using isn't mine, but it looks nice enough for now. I'm hoping to create a shader that almost mimics the art style of the environment, but who knows!

Whew. I enjoy working on this project. :)