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.

Enhanced object transparency and hair!

Hello! Long time no post. I've been busy. Just booted up the project today, hoping to work on some items XML stuff, when I got distracted by the object transparency. I had originally made it work only halfway. See, if you were behind multiple objects, it would only make one transparent. Not really helpful there. So I changed it today so that being behind multiple objects will make them all transparent.

And I've been quietly modeling some hairstyles. Hair is difficult to model nicely. Trying to make something that's many thin shapes into one giant shape that still flows nicely. Need more practice.

Left hairstyle was based on a pony I made for a Flash dress-up game called Penny the Pony. Translating from 2D to 3D is always a pain. Now you have to make things look good from multiple angles on a 3D surface instead of only one dimension on a 2D surface.

My goals remain the same - work on interiors, (I've got a sketch of Stella's interior done) work on the items XML, work on a nice inventory interface, maybe get these hairstyles in the game so my pony is no longer bald... there's so many things I could possibly work on I don't think I should list all of them. So many!

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.