Tjenixen!

Nu har två veckor till gått och jag har jobbat mer på spelet. Jag har lagt till en victory skärm, utvecklat dialog systemet, städat och omstrukturerat i projektet och börjat jobba på presentationen av ett färdighetsträd. Förutom det har jag börjat knyta ihop säcken för att kunna leverera en någorlunda sammanhängande demo även om det kommer att bli en väldigt tidig sådan. En ALFALFA demo :D.

Det roligaste är dock att min beställda illustration har kommit och att jag äntligen kan få visa upp den för världen! Om ni vill se .gifs från de senaste två veckornas utveckling (eller tidigare veckors) och mer utförliga detaljer så hittar ni dom som vanligt här: https://sinistersiamese.com/2020/09/29/focusing-on-getting-an-early-demo-out/

Ha det bäst! // Luis

Tjo!

Varannan vecka så skriver jag en utvecklingblogg på min site: https://sinistersiamese.com/blog/ och nu är det dags för ett nytt inlägg! Eftersom jag skriver min blogg på engelska så klistrar jag bara in den här för det skulle ta alldeles för lång tid annars :P. Vill ni läsa inlägget och se .gifs gör ni det bäst här: https://sinistersiamese.com/2020/09/14/particle-effects-and-refactoring/ (Gamereactor stödjer inte animerade .gifs).

Här har ni hela inlägget:

Hi friends, fans and family!

These last two weeks have been a bit different since my wife has been away most of the time so I've had that my daughter for myself. I've still managed to maintain a pretty high tempo but my working hours have differed greatly I have not worked as much in the morning and I have worked a bit more during the night. So what have I been up to this time?

Newsletter

I finally have a newsletter up and running where you can keep updated on everything that I'm doing with the game: http://tinyletter.com/sinistersiamese and it's the best place to get a summary of these blogposts and find out stuff that I don't necessarily talk about anywhere else ????

JSON map import

I finally managed to get JSON working to be able to import maps. It took me a little while to get it working since there were some minor weirdness when using the JSON utility in unity. You need to think a bit about where you place your arrays and how you structure them for unity to actually get it, so it works better if you have a simple structure and if you avoid doing to much nested stuff. Now I have a base to iterate from where I can position the enemies or state that they get a random position and I can also lay out my entire map in JSON. Still have to do some things to control dialogue and other stuff but things will be easy now that I have this in place. My next step with this will be to build some sort of level editor that can actually create the JSON. I might actually write this in swift so I can make an app on my phone or iPad and create maps on the go.

Typewriter effect

So I mentioned that I was going to have dialogue from the game right? In order to get that looking right there are a few things that need to be put in place: a few funny character expressions, nice dialogue and also a typewriter effect that makes each letter or word appear one by one so it looks like the character is talking :D. I made a basic implementation that does this and I've also added parameters so I can configure talking speed and put in pauses at the end of a sentences etc.

Particle effects

Man this part was so much fun. I could probably fool around with the particle system for the entirety of the project just to get things looking nice and have cool effects all over the place. It's really easy to use. You basically just place the particle system somewhere the same way you place a game object and then your fiddle around with parameters. Naturally, the challenge does not lie in messing around with stuff, it's actually making it look really good and tweaking things takes quite some time and it's definitely easier if you have some sort of understanding about what it is you're doing. I managed to put in an effect for when the characters are walking and kicking up dust and I also added an effect for hits. I will definitely put in more ????.

Prefab refactorization

My project started as an old unity tutorial and now that I've learned some stuff I've started to realize that the default way of doing some things in unity is not necessarily the best way when it comes to architecture so I've been trying to move more and more from the clicky draggy parts in the editor to code that I can easily control and manipulate. One of the things I'm doing is that I'm greatly reducing the amount of prefabs I have because I started with loads of them. Now I am instead using one prefab for units for example and configuring them in code instead which suits me much better. With that said it was not a problem free approach since a lot of things were built upon that foundation and I broke a lot of stuff before I got it to work.

Other
As usual I've also killed a lot of bugs and I've also been going back-and-forth with my hired illustrator to make sure that the splash screen that we are creating lives up to my vision. Really looking forward to showing you guys that and to revealing the title of the game :D.

Going forward I will be trying to push hard now to actually get a demo working because so far most of the work I've been doing has been to lay the foundation on which I can build upon. The base is getting closer and closer to completion so now it's time for me to actually create content.

See you again in two weeks! // Luis

Tjo!

Den senaste veckan har jag lyckats få tag på en illustratör för att göra header/splashscreen tilll spelet. Det är egentligen den enda delen där jag känt att jag själv inte alls håller måttet. Jag menar inte att Jag är asgrym på pixelart eller nåt liknande men jag kan åtminstone försvara mig på både musik och grafikfronten. Nån tecknare kommer jag dock aldrig bli :P. Har dessutom lyckats övertala en gammal klasspolare att dra fram loggan så det här kommer nog bli suveränt! Bilden kommer användas på steam, webbsidan osv

Till illustratören skickade jag bara en bild på 4 av spelets karaktärer och bad honom att göra en scen med dom i actionposer. Han har bollat skisser med mig i veckan och det kommer bli läckert!

För övrigt har jag äntligen dragit igång nyhetsbrevet där alla detaljer från utvecklingen presenteras tillsammans med insider info om vad mina planer för spelet är. Om du vill signa upp kan du göra det här: http://tinyletter.com/sinistersiamese

Ses! //Luis

Tjo!

Jag har inte tid att översätta mina inlägg också men tycker det är kul att posta här så jag kör en copy pasta helt enkelt :D. Om ni vill se original inlägget med animerade .gifs och allt så hittar ni det här: https://sinistersiamese.com/2020/08/28/ai-is-not-a-complete-idiot-anymore/

Annars kör vi det på engelska här nere :)

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AI is not a complete idiot anymore

Hi friends, fans and family!

The results of the last two weeks have been very productive to say the least in spite of a slump in the middle of the period where I was just not feeling it. Making games is not always fun, there are some tasks that are way more boring than others and tutorials are something I never look forward to. You pretty much always have to write very strange code and architecture to hammer it into place and it's just not close to being my favourite thing to do :P. Anyway, here's how this period went!

AI improvements

The AI in this game is a bit different from other turn based games. I want to show the player what the AI will do before it actually does it and this AI makes decisions as soon as the player has moved one of his units or performed other actions. Other games make the decisions when the player's completely done. There are also games in which the units go 1 by 1 instead of getting to move your entire group. In any case, there are some special considerations to make when you're going to show what the AI does this way. The major thing is that you have to account for where the units WILL stand as well as where they are standing in this particular moment. If a unit decides that it has to move to a forest tile, you have to make sure that the other AI units know about it so they don't move to the same space. This has been my biggest challenge but one that I've ultimately solved. Yeay!

AI is pretty complicated to debug because there's always a trillion things happening and it's usually very hard to pinpoint what exactly is going on so I did a couple of things to make my life easier:

* I made sure to show where enemies are going
* I made sure to show all the tiles that enemies can walk to
* I made improvements in the code that generates levels to make sure that I could place enemies exactly where I wanted them instead of randomising their positions

So after letting the issues in my AI persist for quite some time I decided to finally grab the bull by the horns and eliminate all of them! It was hard, gruelling work but the satisfaction of seeing my last known AI bug (and all others that showed up when I was making fixes :D) was incredibly satisfying ????

UNDO button

An undo button for this game is a must so I had to implement it. It's easy to misclick if you're not paying attention but more importantly, I want to give players a chance to explore different scenarios. What happens if I move my mage here? Will the archer survive? A very important part of the gameplay is to make sure that the AI is consistent and does not do random stuff just for the sake of it. The AI has to make the same move given a certain board state and the reason for this has to do with player understanding and AI "fairness". I don't want the player to go: move, undo, move to the same place, undo again and then get a different outcome. That would just be weird!

4K Graphics XD
I mentioned earlier that I got into a slump in the middle of the week and that was when I started doing the tutorial. I got quite far (not done yet though...) but I was just feeling bored and needed to take my mind off it to get some momentum so I started looking over my graphics in search for things to improve. I've already mentioned before that I'm not 100% satisfied with how the game looks and the tiles in particular could need a makeover so I started experimenting a bit. I ended up changing: forests, mountains, roads, the color of the grass and even the color of the goblins. It feels much better now. What do you think?

Overwatch baby!

I've always loved the overwatch ability in XCOM. You basically postpone your chance to fire and stand on lookout and when the enemy moves into firing range the game goes into this really cool slowmotion sequence and your unit takes the shot. This lets you fire on the enemy turn which is a good way of adding some wrinkles to the players considerations. Is my position good enough for the attack or should I take the shot next turn when the enemy is out in the open?

I really wanted to make my own implementation of this and had made an earlier attempt that failed spectacularly and left my code in a mess. This time would be a bit different since it now works but the code is still a mess XD. Besides being cool it's also a very good skill from the perspective of truly differentiating the units as they now have much different abilities that don't play out the same at all. So how does it work in game? Basically the archer picks an area to guard, and the first unit that tries to pass this area will be fired on and STOP it's movement. I've mentioned before that I don't just want to make damaging abilities so I had to add something more to it to set it apart. Here's the end result:

There are still some things I could do to make it clearer to the players and improve it a bit but overall I'm very pleased with the results :D. Also, notice the hit effect I've added when units are attacked. That wasn't there before ????

In the end, these two weeks have been great and I've started my search for an illustrator to make the game's header image. This image will be used on the web, steam pages etc and is a crucial piece of my marketing plans. As soon as that is in place I will release the name of the game and a short playable demo of the game. That's all for this time!

Thanks for following my project ????

// Luis

Tja!

Det har hänt en del här under sommaren. Spelet har bl a fått ett namn (som jag inte har avslöjat publikt än :P) och jag har putsat till en del smågrejer grafiskt. Jag har bl a lagt till "attack" frames för att tydligt visa spelaren när en karaktär är redo att anfalla men också för att ge karaktärerna lite mer personlighet. Jag har även flyttat runt lite skuggor och börjat polera UI:t så det dels ser bättre ut men också för att göra det lättare att anpassa för eventuella iPads osv.

Jag lägger en länk här till det långa inlägget som går igenom mycket av mekanikerna i spelet i närmare detalj:
https://sinistersiamese.com/2020/07/27/still-working-on-the-game/

Där finns även animerade gifs som visar lite gameplay osv. Pallade inte översätta det från engelska till svenska så därför lägger jag inte upp det här...

Till sist kan ni här se en bild på det nya UIt som jag håller på och tar fram. Inget överdrivet fancy men jag tror det matchar övrig stil rätt bra. Vad tycker ni?

Hörs snart igen!

// Luis