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:

A lot of bugs squashed in parallax mode.

Good news! Almost everything is back to normal in 2.5D mode! I got fruits to bounce, all the fruit trees are functioning, all the flowering shrubs are working, background transparencies are working, and so on. A lot of things I had broken before seem to be working just fine.

The movement marker is kind of working too. It's just being a little weird because it's rotated onto the floor and I can't un-rotate it, but it's not the biggest issue right now.  So I just need to fix that. And I need to figure out what to do with items like clover patches where part of it belongs to the ground and part of it acts like normal objects.

Chaos

First things first, I got a menu to pop up when you click on an item and the ribbons animate when you hover over them. Haven't done anything to make the selected ribbon more noticeable yet.

And then... chaos. You see, a friend had recently played Don't Starve over the weekend, and I was very interested in how the game's camera works. It's like 2.5D. It has a parallax effect. In all my previous versions, Ponyland is stationary; nothing moves because it's all done with an orthographic camera. I really wanted to try this parallax effect and... everything is a mess now!

The pony has been sentenced to the warped dimension:

Good-bye, cruel world...

So, what has to be done in order to achieve a 2D parallax effect is to change the camera from orthographic to perspective. But alas... this creates a lot of problems. Things are no longer just 2D. Life is no longer simple. They must now be 3D. My sprites and artwork are fine, but all the components and tricks I used to sort and order my sprites had to be changed or modified. Now instead of using 2D colliders for things like clicking on interactive objects and sprite transparencies, I must use 3D colliders. Every asset needs to be updated. That's not all though, now my raycasts need to be converted and done in a different way.

My fancy golden crosshair marker is being wonky. My dropped fruits are now stuck halfway through the ground... I need to figure that one out. Oh, and the way the parallax is done is by rotating all the sprites 45 degrees, and the camera 45 degrees as well. It's very strange to work with the 3D colliders when everything is rotated 45 degrees. It's not a thing I can eyeball, I need to test out the position of every collider in order to make sure it's working well. See Stella's cottage with 3D colliders:

I've made a branch in my version control for this parallax effect stuff, so nothing is horribly mutated from my last post to the point where I can't get it back. This 2.5D/3D work would open the door to a lot of cool things. Like... uh... this ball:

And then I made it into an eyeball. Get it?! Ahahahahaha.

But seriously, I would be able to use all three axes now. In 2D mode, I used only X and Y. In 2.5D mode, I use X as my X, but Z as my "Y" which is a little strange, but now my Y can actually be used for things like height. Woah, I wonder if I can have clouds and floating platforms? The possibilities... I haven't thought of all of them yet. But I'd be able to have towers and bridges and other cool things! Gravity actually works now too. The pony can fall off colliders.

Here's a final shot of the parallax effect.

Minor tweaks for various things

I did a bunch of fairly uneventful things. They're actually pretty cool... to me. But nothing worth a screenshot.

I fixed the movement target reticle so that if you drag your mouse it'll drag with it. And it used to pop up an additional time after you'd already have reached your desired location. It doesn't do that anymore.

The I had a bit of script in the player movement that determined if your player was stuck behind something and so you can't get to your desired location and it would stop moving. But it worked off of how long it had taken you to get to a place. So you could be walking for a very far distance and it would consider you stuck because you hadn't reached your destination yet. It was a fairly easy fix, I just added a velocity check. Now it works well regardless of how far you're walking.

Last but not least, I did get the items XML in the game! This is very exciting. It was weird, since you have to work with the Item Editor and some .dll file in conjunction with Unity. But I got it in, and then changed all the items in Unity to reference the item XML item ID and it's working well! I also harnessed the power of enums for the wearable items slots, which makes it so much better than using an array of booleans for each wearable item slot, when I get to wearable items eventually.

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. :)