Shops!

Long-ish time, no see! I am almost done with university, one quarter left! And since the last time I posted, I got a job as a software developer! Busy, busy.

Well, it's my "spring break" right now, and due to COVID-19, I've been inside. So I had some time to work on Ponyland, and shops are functioning in a basic sense!

 

Those piles of coins on the ground are my "shops," heh. The shopkeepers are Sweetberry Medley and Lavender Lilac.

Some goals I have since I've implemented this:

• Have each shop keep a stock of items that varies. Neopets did this; there is a random stock of items in their shop, the quantity of of each item varies, and therefore shops can sell out of items. I think this might be a cool concept because it means that the economy can vary, and indeed on Neopets, there were people who "restocked" items as a way of earning money and getting rare items. I wonder if I could set stock to "-1" for items that want to keep infinitely stocked, like some essentials or something. 
• Make it so when you buy an item, have some coin particles appear near the buy button.
• If you can't afford an item, maybe grey out and disable the buy button (but there's a check in place right now that won't let you buy something you can't afford anyways).  

Hmm, besides that, I'm not sure. I think saving the pony's appearance is still a thing to work on. And creating consumables to modify their appearance.

I could also work on Stella's interior, but that'd involve a lot of artwork.

I could try starting on networking, since I just finished a networking class at university. We made a poker game as our final project, and the class has helped me better understand how network architecture should work. Networking is still a really big topic to tackle, so I keep pushing it off.

It's been a while since I looked at my code, I'm thinking a good thing to do would be some code cleanup, and adding lots of comments, since the code-base is getting big.

Working on Shop UI

Rough WIP. What do I do with that empty space in the top right? Eeeeeeh, who knows.

I'd like to make the items sit on little shelves. I figure a tooltip hover will show the name of the item and its gold price.

Got the shops data into Ponyland in Unity (just involves updating the PonylandData.dll and importing the shops.xml), got the basic code for it in place. I just need to work on implementing them properly. Ugly test UI time, here I come!

Things can be crafted!

Wow. Check it out! I seem to have gotten a rudimentary crafting system working.

"Stella's Cauldron" is a cheat station that lets me "craft" basic items muahahaha.

Haven't gotten the list on the left to actually be scroll-able yet. That would be a thing to work on. Also maybe some sparkly particle effects when you craft something?

Then there's also designing the... UX of it? The plan for the future of crafting is that initially, recipes will only show up when you collect enough items for them to show up. Then, when you craft something once, you "learn" the recipe for it and it'll be saved in that station even if you don't have all the ingredients (it'll be a lower opacity option if you don't have enough to craft an item.) I'll add a "hide unavailable items" checkbox or something as well.

By the way, I don't think I've ever shown Stella Portabella, here is some art of her:

"hey that mushroom on her head isn't a Portabella!" yeah well whatever.

Started to try Crafting

I made the mango tree bigger - it was too tiny.

 I also figured out why the marker is offset - because I made it offset on the y-axis. Haha. Because if it's not it sinks into the floor. I'll try to think of other solutions, but for now I will leave it be.

Here is dragging items around working! You can now drag items to wherever you want and they'll stay there, even to different tabs:

And I have started to work on how I will do crafting. I've tacked an additional menu onto the Item Editor for "Crafting Stations," where I will add all the crafting stations and what items you can craft there. It's pretty rudimentary right now. I'm not a pro at WPF, so I just mess around until I get something good enough to work. And it works. It exports an XML file of crafting stations, their IDs, and what they can craft.

Mangoes!

Made a mango tree. :) Mangoes are delicious.

The target marker is back in business. It's a bit offset. I'll figure that out later.

I've also got the clover to work. I think it is pretty nice. Now that we're in 3D space, the clover is in the same perspective as the ground. Clover mayhem (I was testing all the different patches out.)

View in Unity:

Player Manager has started to blossom, and some UI icons

I got the Player Manager to start working. It will spawn a pony and set up all the references correctly. This is the first step towards having the same pony when you go in between scenes.

I've started working on some prettier UI stuff, starting with some icons for the GUI. Inventory, notifications, quests, and settings icons. Here's a picture of my UI workspace in Illustrator. The dialogue/chat bubbles have been done for a while, I just haven't had a reason to use them yet. NPC dialogue and chat functionality is far into the future.

The final placement of the inventory, notification, quest, and settings buttons will probably be to the bottom right. I just liked having them to the left while working on them.

I think next I should work on a nice looking inventory interface, or at least make a placeholder one. And then start seeing if I can make it generate the icons for the items you have in there. Right now if you hit inventory it lists all the items in your inventory, or that your inventory is empty if there's nothing in there. So it works, it's just all in the debug logs.

Ponyland Logo

I made a logo for Ponyland.

Also made a square one for social media, if I ever get far enough to have some.

Like all things in this project, they're subject to change and improve.

I also updated the blog's theme a bit. Added a polka dot background and did some other minor CSS changes.

Gem Glitz update and one-year retrospect

I renamed Gemswap to Gem Glitz, sounds cuter. Also it'll probably not be in Stella's cottage in its final location. Too fancy. But it'll be in there for now.

Tada! Added in a user interface and made everything look much nicer. It's almost done. Dropping down new gems works, adding points works, mechanically speaking everything works.

I just need to add buttons for "Send score" and "Exit," add a twinkling gem hint if the user hasn't made a selection in a while, add some audio effects, and some sparkly particle effects when a match it made. Basically just make it more exciting to play. I'm also lazy and decided it'll be like the classic untimed Bejeweled and just have a game over when there's no more matches.

It's been one year and one day since I made my first post on this blog. That first post was just three drawings of fruit trees. Since then, so much has been done — a 3D pony that walks around, interactable objects like fruit trees that have their fruits fall and bounce, basically an entire mini-game, the manifestation of a quirky NPC and her cottage, the beginnings of a town called Merryville, a bit of a user interface, an item editor that reads and exports XML, particle effects, the start of an inventory system, and so on.

I'm pretty proud of what I've accomplished. It's been fun. I hope someday I can make a game that others can enjoy playing as much as I enjoy working on it.

Gemswap mini-game

I decided to work on a mini-game. It'll be a match-3, currently called Gemswap. I was trying to think of something that would fit in Stella's cottage, as it will be the first interior I do, but I was coming up blank. I decided match-3 games are decently fun.

A game within a game... but at least this game is much more do-able.

So far what I got working:

• Generates a random board
• The board generated does not have any matches right off the bat
• You can swap the gems around properly

What I'll need to work on:

• Removing matches and adding them to your score
• When a match is removed, the board is filled up again

I'm not sure if I want to do a game where the game is over when a timer runs out, or if I want to do one that ends when there is no more moves. 

After I determine that, I'd need to work on those specific tasks. And once that is complete, I can work on prettier gems, particle effects, a graphical interface, and other fancy stuff.

Trees!

Hehehe, trees!

Inspired by maples, downy birch, and silver birch.

Future tree types: oak, elm, magnolia, and dogwood

Stella Portabella's Cottage

Done for now. :)

Gotta put it in the game, but I want to design some modular iron fencing to go with it first.

Messing with particles, clovers, and characters.

Alright, so I know I said the shader wasn't made (I'm currently borrowing one my friend made) and I didn't want to show the pony yet, but I made my first particle effect - some falling leaves when you knock on a tree! Seriously, the tree shakes look better in game than in these GIFs.

Check out that clover. :) There's pink clovers, white clovers, three-leafed clovers, and four-leafed clovers.

Some work needs to be done to the particle effect - mainly I need to figure out how to apply them to each individual tree in a nice matter. Right now it's just on this tree, and messes up otherwise.

Here's an upcoming work-in-progress house for a special character, Stella Portabella. She's a bewitchingly sweet pony who is always happy to help those in need:

And while you're here, it might be interesting to see some of the old pony concepts:

My very original plan was to have sprites for walking forwards, sideways, and diagonally. Then I realized that would be a lot of work, coding and art-wise... So I decided that three-quarters view looks the best and I'll just use that for all movements. 

I tried to make a pony that's sweet and chubby, but doesn't stray too far from a real pony. Turns out that's a bit hard to do. Cute things don't usually have long, big noses.

I was heavily inspired by Nicole Gauss's original character designs for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Her art is whimsical. 

The next things I feel like working on are finishing up Stella Portabella's cottage, and maybe adding some pathways and more trees. After that, I think I should get an inventory interface up and running - one where you can see item icons and descriptions, and items can be dropped from the inventory.

A cottage appears!

A cottage has appeared! With a white picket fence! And a grass texture!

Here are some sketches of cottage concepts:

This one I have now might go through a few more modifications.

Since last time, the following has happened:

• I made a repository! Which is a very good thing. It keeps a history of all my changes.
• The pony doesn't move if you're pressing on a trigger.
• You'll get a message if you try clicking on something that's too far away.
• The camera is locked to the pony! Now we can move around and explore the land instead of testing everything in one tiny area.

Some things I hope to work on next:

• A rudimentary inventory system. Still very important.
• Interiors! That'd be fun. And an excuse to not work on the inventory system.
• There's a bug with interacting with triggers and moving. If you drag to move and drag onto a trigger, it'll interact with the trigger and stop your movement at the trigger hit location.
• More cottages, better cottages. Something doesn't feel right about this cottage.

Dropping fruits and shrubbery!

Exciting changes.

Trees now drop their fruits! And you can pick up the fruits!

The yellow and green pears have formed a powerful alliance in the form of the yellow-green pear.

Some bushes have been made! These include the Hydrangea and Rose of Sharon bushes. And you can pick up the flowers too. :-)

Eventually, I'd like it so that you can only pick flowers if you have pruning shears. Or maybe pruning shears give you a better flower. Something like that.

More for the to-do list:

• Don't move the pony if you're clicking on a trigger
• Don't activate triggers unless you're close to them
• Storing data, like fruits and flowers collected, for an inventory system
• Lock the camera to the pony
• Terrain! More bushes, more flowers, grass, and more

Fruit trees

I love fruits and fruit trees.

They're the first things I wanted to work on. Who doesn't love fruits?

So far there are apple, pear, and pomegranate trees. Pomegranates are my favorite fruit, possibly food, ever.

I've made it so that fruits randomly generate, based on some predefined spots. There's twenty possible spots for a fruit on each tree, and a 25% chance that they'll spawn in a spot.

I've gotten triggers for the trunks to work, so hopefully the next thing will be getting fruits to drop so you can pick them up.

This blog came a bit late, there was lots of stuff that had been done (well, lots to me, at least) that were pretty breakthrough-ish (well, breakthrough to me, at least.) I'm not an advanced programmer, so I'm getting quite a bit of help. But it's always a eureka moment when sometimes finally starts to work properly.

Those eureka moments included:

• Getting the pony to move to a clicked point
• Getting the pony to move while you're holding and dragging the mouse
• Getting the pony to switch directions depending on which way you're going
• Getting things to layer properly behind and in front of each other
• Watching the pony walk behind and in front of trees
• Getting the fruits to spawn randomly, and in front of the trees
• Having the tree trunks respond to being clicked on

 There will definitely be many more eureka moments.

Here are some things I hope to get working soon:

• Trees drop fruit when hit, and later on their specific tree fruit
• You can pick up fruits
• Don't move the pony if you're hitting a trigger
• Don't activate a trigger unless you're close to it
• Possibly start working on storing data, like fruits picked up, for an inventory system
• Locking the camera to the pony (right now it's stationary)
• Terrain! Bushes, flowers, grass, and more