Alright, gang! We were really productive the last week, so we have lotsa things to update you guys on! To summarize, we have the following topics for this devlog:
Character animations
Inventory UI
Plant UI
Camera effects
Unity workflow improvements
Playing games
Character Animations
A lot of this week was dedicated to making the game look and feel "nice," so that it would start feeling like a real game. One of the areas we focused on was character animation for Pumpkin. She already had a walking animation, but to give her a little more life, we added an Idle animation as well as a Running animation, including the appropriate controls. Check it out!
The little dust puffs behind her running animation and the head tilts in her idle animation are details that we think give her life.
Inventory UI
Another area that we focused on this week is player UX/UI. And a big part of it is the inventory system. Last time, the inventory UI looked like this:
Not sketchy at all...
Now:
Did you guys notice? We have buttons to open menus now!
Plant UI
Another big part of player UX/UI is finding ways to let the player know what's going on in the world around them. So last week, Billy expended a lot of design energy into coming up with ways to let the player know what's going on with the plants around them.
For example, there are now indicators letting the player know whether the plant is getting enough sunlight and/or water and whether the plant is sick and the player needs to attend to them:
The apple tree is getting all the sunlight and water it needs so it's healthy!
Oh no! Because the apple tree is not getting the sunlight and water it needs, it's sick and needs Pumpkin's attention!
Also, to let the player know whether a plant is being watered or not:
It's a subtle effect, modelling water splashing underneath the plants.
Camera Effects
A game's aesthetic can say a lot about its story and the world it takes place in, so we spent some time last week playing around with the camera to determine what effects we want. We focused on two parts to the camera - its angle and its depth of field.
The angle of the camera plays a large part in the overall "feel" of the game.
So does its depth of field.
We still haven't figured out exactly what we want, but we're sure having fun! Look at all the pretty pictures! ^_^
Unity Workflow Improvements
This week was all about improving our workflow. We have never done much Unity Editor scripting, so this was our chance!
In our system, we have some databases for plants and items. Each plant's editor script has a "Generate new plant"
Generate a single plant prefab from its ScriptableObject database file.
The database entries dictate what component scripts are added to the Plant prefabs. This works great when updating one plant. Problem is, what if we make changes to the database structure that affects all plants. Going through every plant prefab in our project and re-clicking "generate" is time consuming and not a very good workflow.
So I spent some time diving into Unity's Prefab editing abilities and managed to add a "Regenerate all" button to our game from the editor!
Re-generate ALL Plant prefabs in our Assets folder with a single button click.
This actually scrubs our Unity Assets folder for Plant .prefabs, opens the prefab in script using Unity's PrefabUtility, modifies it, then writes it back.
This is the first time I've worked with Unity's PrefabUtility, and it took a LOT of Googling to figure out what to do (and a lot of Unity Editor crashing!), but I finally got it to work. Apparently forgetting to call UnloadPrefabContent will result in Unity crashes with Version 2019.3.13.f1, which unfortunately took me too long to figure out :sweat drop:
Two resources I found very useful here:
1) An editor script to search for prefab asset files containing a certain component. Great reference for prefab editing in scripts. You can just drag and drop this into your Unity, super useful!
2) This thread on a critique of the Unity Prefab editor functions. Baste has a super useful script on comment #13!
Playing Games
At AGG, we make games, we play games, and we breathe games! So last week, when we got some down time, we decided to play another game dev's game that we thought looked interesting - Deep Forest by Kevin Trepanier.
Reminiscent of games like Undertale, Deep Forest takes you on a "bite-size", artistic adventure to save your forest. It has beautiful pixel art and is very fun and well-designed - it isn't too slow nor too fast and is very intuitive to play. Needless to say, we love it!
We finished! Gotta say - we've never played a game where we've gone "Squeee!" so much. XD
Check out the full free game here: https://small.itch.io/deep-forest!
And that's all, folks! Follow @AngryGoatGames on Twitter for more updates on our upcoming game!
