Blink blink

Don't you blink, you might miss it.

Long time, no post. Sad to not have worked on Ponyland much at all. Was either busy with other things or just tired. But hey, I got the pony to blink! Now her eyes can be properly moisturized.

Out of curiosity, I wanted to see what things that belong on the ground, like ponds and pathways, would look like. Out of laziness, I made a very crude pond drawing with my laptop trackpad and reused the crafting interface's "Craft!" button as a "wooden walkway." Viola!

Hopefully that perspective stuff doesn't look too weird.

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!

Inventory saves and shops being worked on

Inventory items and gold can now be saved!

I also realized when I shuffled back into WPF to work on a Shop Editor, that I had already done so at some point in the past! I also added the Item Editor to my commit history, so it won't be a tragedy in the event of me messing something up bad.

I think I'll be working on shops for now.

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. 

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.