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.

Two-year retrospect and planning

Long time no post! I got admitted to university for computer science and I started classes this past September. It's a lot of work, but I am enjoying learning and growing as a person.

I'd like to do a two-year retrospect on Ponyland, which should have been done in early September, but the second-best time is now! Since last year, I think a lot of great strides have been made, both programmatically and visually. Ponyland has a logo, and even a barren Twitter account; the starting seed of social media presence when maybe this dream project of mine gets further along.

Some hairstyles and a blink animation were created, they've yet to be implemented, but when they are, it's the little things that make things more fun and pretty.

Getting the XML from WPF into Unity was a great accomplishment. It'll be fun figuring all that out again when I pick this project back up.

The user interfaces got super-prettied-up. The inventory is pretty spiffy. The crafting as well, just needs a bit more work.

We even went from flat 2D to more super cool 2.5D! That was a big thing. I created a separate branch on my repository for that. Merging that back was nerve-racking.

When I pick this project back up, here's a few things I want to work on:

• Adding in the two hairstyles
• Adding in the blink animation
• Creating shops
• ability to sell  items
• ability to buy items
• Having items have effects
• change hair/body/eye color when a food is consumed
• Figuring out overarching game and player manager systems (bleh)
• Having inventory/gold/player appearance be saved
• on local computer for now, just in Unity's player prefs
• Adding an NPC, doesn't have to do anything yet

Yeah. I think that's enough things to keep me busy for a while.