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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Updated fruit drops and a mouse cursor.

Lookie here!

Do you see it? The fruits now bounce! I think it's so fun.

The tree also jiggles when you hit it. It's better in the game than in the GIF.

Also see the fancy new mouse cursor? Yes, it turns golden when you can interact with something, and is otherwise purple. The mouse draws a bit of inspiration from "My Little Pony: Friendship Gardens," which was a game I spent much of my childhood playing.

The 3D model is hidden in this GIF, it isn't ready to show just yet.

I'm also in the process of adding clover patches. :-)

To do list:

• Work on the inventory.
  I actually made a bit of progress with this. The inventory has a certain amount of slots, and now it doesn't let you pick up more items than your inventory can hold. And items don't get destroyed even if you don't have the space, hahahaha. Yeah, that was a thing...
• Work on adding the walk animation.
  I do have a walk animation, I just need to put it in and make it work. That'd be very nice to see. Animation is life. But I'd need to fix some things about the pony model, namely the eyes and adding some blink controllers. 
• Shader, seriously.
  Seriously, shader. But that's very hard to me, so I'm scared of it.
• More art. If all else fails, art is my backup. I'm thinking of adding more trees - birch, oak, maple. And also some pathways, like dirt and cobblestone.