Looking Back

There is little to show this week, but fortunately not due to lack of progress. Most of the work I have done was under the hood or would make boring presentation material. The initial “quest” line for the game start has been expanded with two new steps. I have also added a stockpile building, which serves as a drop-off point for commonly used resources which can be accessed by anyone. The rest of my time has been spent on fixing or improving some minor aspects (some animations, more highlighting, showing proper labels for interactions instead of “activate”, fixing the floor display issues for good, zooming out when selecting targets, etc.).

While writing this, I have also finished a shoddy version of a jump and ledge grab move. No more reloading when you spawn in a pit on a new map! Yay! For reference, and for those who may find this interesting, here is the current animation graph:

Animation Graph

Looking Forward

Since my backlog keeps growing, I will concentrate on whittling that down a little:

• Add game pause functionality
• Make terrain areas available as targets for tasks
• Add food gathering tasks with areas as targets
• Make initial building foundation parts snap to the unit grid
• Fix the abysmally bad jumping animation

Also, here is a little concept shot of a log cabin at night under a full moon:

Cabin at night

As always, thanks for reading and until next week!

Looking Back

The recap is late, but I got everything done which I had planned last week. Building planning creates blueprints, which can be built manually or by tasking settlers with it. The following clip shows a construction-ready blueprint (only ground floor is shown at the beginning) being constructed piece by piece:

As you can see, the navigation is already updated while building and the NPC can find the next part to build (although somewhat insecurely at times…).

Looking Forward

Next week I will concentrate on enhancing the start of the game and parts of the UI. The player’s starting task should include setting up a task to have the initial camp fire tended to and building a first dwelling. I might also wire up some animations to the characters. The current building process is jarringly abrupt. Also, the floor management and display still has some issues which I would like to iron out…

Thank you for reading and until next week!

Looking Back

Although last week was cut a bit short, I made some nice progress. All basic building elements are now working together nicely. The uConstruct component is excellently done, which facilitated all necessary modifications and extensions.

The most important addition to the building system was the concept of floors. The component was originally intended for a first-person perspective (as seen in e.g. Fallout 4 or Rust). From a top-down perspective, visibility of elements becomes an actual concern. Floors (or their elements) are now made transparent if they obstruct visibility for building or navigation. See the following clip for a demo of constructing and navigating a complex building:

Another important addition is the building interface, as seen in the clip, which is still quite raw but exposes the most important functions.

Looking Forward

Next week I will take on the proper building finalization, i.e. saving a plan will create a blueprint. I also intend to implement the construction task for NPCs and player interactions to construct elements themselves. Whenever an element is finished, NPCs should also become aware of them for navigation purposes.

As always, thanks for reading!

Looking Back

Advancing with the building system has been a good decision. Building their own dwellings will be a significant source of satisfaction for future players. Any time spent on this feature will tremendously impact the final quality of the game. During last week, I added some more basic building parts and construction rules. See those in action in the following clip:

Some key features are still missing, such as a proper information display which shows the currently active part. Also, players are supposed to plan the building first and create a world-place blueprint (like tents and camp fires). Afterwards, a construction task will make settlers construct the individual pieces in logical order, i.e. foundation / floor > pillars > walls > stairs > props. Additionally, I will need a way to hide building floors which obstruct visibility. Just showing the player outline is not going to help an awful lot once buildings contain furniture. And to top that off, pathfinding for NPCs must be updated regularly while building.

Looking Forward

I am going to continue straight ahead with the building part. First, I want to re-structure some of the rule-set for building. Some pieces contain multiple slots for other pieces of different sizes, all of which must be expensively checked against when determining correct placements. See a composition of just three pieces below:

Building parts and slots

Each of the black wireframe boxes represents a slot for a fitting building piece. A large wall piece, for example, will check against any of these boxes it overlaps when a player tries to place it. A modest building, like the one from the clip above, can already cause performance problems.

Once this mess is cleaned up, I will create an information panel which displays the currently active part, material, size and variant. It should also contain controls to finish a plan or discard it. If the panel does not take too much time to implement, I will also compile and distribute a new alpha version.

Thanks for reading and until next week!