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.

More crafting

Woweee wow wow. I got the placeholder crafting interface to pull data from the crafting.xml, which is pretty cool. I followed the same code design as I did for the inventory; view, controller, and data.

The first crafting station (Stella's Cauldron) is just a test one, so it has items that can't actually be crafted, which is why it has that weird bar in the middle. And the other station has ones that have ingredients but no icons for them yet.

There's a bug when I had on my toggle code to enable/disable the crafting UI (it's been disabled for now) where I have to click on something twice in order to hide/show the interface. Need to figure that out. Or you just can't toggle the crafting menu on/off with the button, can only turn it on with the crafting button and have to close it with the "x" button I'll add later.

Can't actually craft anything yet. I need to figure out how to have the inventory system communicate with the crafting system.

Here's a WIP of the crafting menu design:

I'm going to make the background look like a wooden table from the face down. The list of options on the left will look like a scroll on the table. The potion bottle will also be something that changes based on the crafting station you're at (potion bottle for a generic station, sewing machine for clothing, mixing bowl for cooking, and so on.)

Inventory has evolved beyond the debug logs!

The inventory has evolved past just listing all items that you picked up in the Unity debug logs, into a graphical interface that actually shows you what you picked up!

Tada! Stacks don't work yet, it's very basic. A function runs and updates your inventory's icons every time you click the inventory bag icon. The close button works, and the inventory bag icon reopens it. The ribbons will be for more inventory slots, so you'll have a total of 16 * 5 = 80 inventory slots.

Turns out I need to put all my icons in my Resources folder, I was trying to be clever with my Item Editor and keep them in the same path as my Sprites folder. Unfortunately didn't turn out to work. I think it's a waste of space to have both sprites and icons look the same, so I'm debating creating vector sprites for all items that can go in your inventory. It'd make them match the inventory better.

Inventory specific goals:

• Make stacks work
• Make the tabs work
• Animate the tab ribbons when hovering
• Allow items in inventory to be clicked on for a menu that allows you to remove/use them
• Make the bag better, make it so that when you pick up stuff while the inventory is open, it updates it right away

 Also here are some other interfaces, for the quests and notifications, that aren't in the game yet.

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.