Website?

I made a little website thing. I'll add more to it later, but this is all I'm going to do for now. When the game gets closer to development, I'll actually invest int he domain and everything.

Here's the site!

Updated in-blog game.

So I updated the prototype in the blog. It super buggy. So buggy, that I'm not really even taking bug reports right now, as I need to fix the biggest ones I already know are there, first. Please let me know if anything bothers you, though. Just keep in mind that this is a prototype. It's pre-development still.

Working on fixing the in-game day-circle first and for-most. Then comes make the animals actually eat each other.

Actually, there are a lot of things that are wrong in the web player version of the game that don't exist in the built versions. I will explore this later. List of things that don't work only in the unity web player:

-Timing on the sun dial
-Rainclouds not appearing
-Rain adding 500+ water to the water pool (It's not actually 500+, it's just a GUI error)
-some GUI not properly placing.
-etc.

Animals, kind of.

An animal system has been implemented, but for some reason every line of code in the GUI after the animals stop showing once they appear. I need to look into this as this is horrible. And game-breaking.

Optimization

Just optimizing the game now, really. Getting ready to hand it in for my class, but don't worry, I'm just getting started. I'll have a lot more time to dedicate to this game once this is done.

Making a website right now to make a quick showcase of the game. Nothing fancy. In fact, quite the opposite.

Fixed a lot of bugs, added a working point system and animals (finally).

Menu and background

So I finished the main Menu, which didn't take too long, really. I wanted to make it as simple as possible and also be a little atmospheric. It's just a simple cube rotating in space with a birch tree on it. It kind of gives an idea of what the game is going to look like while also teaching to player to click on blocks. it looks like this:

As you can see, I also changes some UI and the background.

I changed the background because the blue was starting to get on my nerves. But to be honest, I kind of like the white. It highlights the colors and really brings out the stylized aspects of the game. I'm going to also add a ring round the day/night circle as I want it to be highlighted and more visible.

I fixed some errors with the UI and added a way to exit the game when playing. Point system is next.

Day/Night!

I'm still waiting on a lot of the logos and assets from my artist, but in the meantime I made a neat little day/night cycle and have fixed some timing bugs!

I also changed the font

The skybox needs to be added still, but I am essentially almost done. Some bugs like seeds not spawning when trees are destroyed and saplings not dying are still on the table to be fixed. There was a huge problem when I added the "day circle" that the times for everything happening all messed up and the circle would start and stop at varying speeds. I fixed this though. Turned out that I have too many debug logs.

Also a quick tip: It took me FOREVER to find this, so I thought I would post a little solution, myself. Getting GUI object the rotate is a lot easier than I thought. A lot of people said it was impossible. But the code looks something like this:

It was a bitch to figure out, though.

Basically, you just use this code. Make sure you create a variable for both the pivot point (it's a vector 2) and the rotation angle (rotAngle). When you set the location of the pivot point, make sure that it is as the location of your image + half the width and - half the height of the image itself. That will place the pivot point of the image directly in it's center.

now keep in mind that this method has it's limitations. Basically, you can only rotate one thing per script (as for some reason, only one pivot point can be applied) and ANYTHING that is made in the GUI function below this script WILL ALSO ROTATE. So I had to make sure everything else was created before this line.

I also discovered that the GUI function will start updating twice as fast when a button on the keyboard is pressed (SUPER IMPORTANT) so the circle would spin faster when I did that. But I had to press buttons to make trees spawn. So, what I did was put the rotation angle in the actual update function (I set it at +0.5f every update) and it all seems to work. I also learned not to put more than a few debug logs in code that updates 1000+ times a second. Slows everything down.

This is all C#, by the way.

Everything starting to come together!

Second Post!

So the art for the game is starting to be put in and most of the programming is getting done! Only a few minor game breaking bugs to fix and one system to add. As I said, also, the visuals are slowly being put in. They are still subject to change, of course, but they are there. And they look like this:

We're kinda going for a hand-drawn kind of look.

I'm also starting to work on a small story to give the game some kind of setting. Right now everything just sort of...happens. I also changed some of the systems around. Water is vital to keep your ecosystem alive so I made it harder to come by and changed how it is gained/spent. Now every plant either increases water usage or increases the supply of water, Instead of adding to or detracting from an already existing number.

Rain is being a little buggy (is not starting) even though I got it working earlier. Still figuring out what happened there. After that I need to finish up animals and the point system. Because there is a limited area for the player to build on, it is TOTALLY possible for me to see the highest possible rate of points that you can gain per turn, so I might make a little pop-up saying how well you did with your score (i.e. "great!", "good!", "bad!"). Maybe not though. I'm not entirely sure how atmospheric I want this game to be, yet.

Also I need to find a new set of keys to map the seed (planting) buttons to. Right now all 4 seeds are mapped to the 1-4 buttons, but that will be hard to convey in the UI without mixing the numbers up with the number of seeds the player has. I'll figure it out.