Energy is Everything

Game #2's design is fairly well established in my head and on paper, but I'm still very much in the stage of exploring what I can reasonably do from a technical perspective - not to mention from a time perspective. (Read as: I'm trimming down the scope by figuring out what I can or can't do.) I'm running through the big picture list of features to make sure that each can be implemented in a way that I like and fits the vision for the game. This is an iterative process. As features are implemented other aspects of the game are getting adjusted or redesigned, but that's not exactly news worthy...

Energy

A core feature/game mechanic of Game #2 is going to be energy. Energy is everything. With more energy we become more productive. With more efficient use of energy we can do more with less. The use of energy is what allows for modern society to function and, to hint at a game mechanic, use of more energy allows for a higher standard of living. 

There's of course a dark side to energy consumption.Increases in efficiency allows more to be produced with less. That might be less workers, less energy or less effort. All of which improve the quality of life. While this can drive down prices, increase production and consumption it also has the effect of higher unemployment or underemployment - i.e. the current stat of the rust belt. 

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A rigged and animated steam engine model. This was also the first animation I'd ever rendered in Blender - GIF made with GIMP.

This give and take concept is something I very much want to explore in Game #2. The first step of which means I need to develop an energy mechanic. The mechanic requires the "generation" of energy (the physics teacher in me cringes writing that), the distribution of the energy, and the "consumption" of that energy.

The game is likely to be set in the industrial revolution time period. So... Steam engines!

Steam engines can provide a local source of energy. They can be fed with wood, charcoal or coal - really anything that'll burn. All of which can be found or produced easily with low tech methods. Steam engines can be built on site in a variety of sizes. Seems like a win. So off to Blender I went to see if I could produce something that I liked. 

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A view of the rig in Blender.

Nothing profound in the modeling department, but rigging and animating is still pretty new to me. I didn't want to "fudge" the animation I wanted a rig that with the rotation of a single object could animated the entire model.  I wanted this for ease of animation as well as for a degree of realism. 

A combination of bones and constraints to tie the mechanism together and allow smooth animation. The constraints of copying location, rotation and or scale were all new to me and opened my eyes to a new world of possibilities. I'm excited to play with more mechanical animations...

There are very few tutorials on mechanical rigging - I might put one together in the future. Who knows?

I'd like to work renewable or at least pollution free energy sources into the game as well. At first glance windmills are a pretty obvious choice - so those will be added at some time in the future. At the moment I've avoided rivers (as I have no idea how to make a good looking low poly river) so water power is more or less out for the moment.  

Energy Transfer

Power Lines - Mostly eye candy at the moment

The industrial revolution largely used mechanical energy which (clearly) has limitations. Moving towards electrical power as a way to transfer energy could help in several design areas, but could break the immersion or at least a sense of believably.

While it may not fit with the (current) intended time period I spent a little time playing around with power lines. Being able to generate power in a centralized location could lead to higher efficiency and more contained pollution. This is further specialization would allow workers (and the player) to spend more time doing something besides feeding fuel into a steam engine. 

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Borrowed Code that when passed an Array of Points with Return a larger but smoother array of points - Don't Remember the Source, Oops.

I can see the game going away from a historically accurate time period (ha, as if I'm capable of historical accuracy), but I don't want to delve to far in to fantasy or steampunk styles either... 

The power poles are just to cubes scaled to look like modern poles. The lines are line renderers that start with three points and then are smoothed by some (borrowed) code to add additional points. 

The performance of moving the poles is pretty bad and will need some optimization if the code makes it into a build. I have to redraw all the lines when a pole moves - at the moment EVERY line is redrawn.

To be honest the power lines came out of frustration (lack of creativity) with another idea. They may just be a short lived idea that goes away.

Some form of energy transfer mechanic will need to make it into the game whether that is power lines or not I have decided. At the moment the energy transfer mechanic is simply the player or hired workers stoking the fires of steam engines - I think a step up in sophistication would be good.

Plenty more to iterate on...

Graphing Script - It's not exciting, but it needed to be made

A download link to my graphing asset is at the bottom of the post - if you want to try it out.

Game #2 will likely be centered around economics as well as climate (change). Deciding where to build a farm will likely be best done when looking at some climate data. Does it rain enough? Maybe too much? How hot does it get? Is the ground water polluted? Or looking at historical prices of commodities may help a player decide what type of business to pursue or how much they can afford to pay NPC employees. I don't want the game to be a data crunch fest, but data will be a part of the game. So naturally I'll be needing a way to visualize that data and graphs seem like a good way to do that. Pretty sure players don't want to read a list of float values.

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Visualization - Basic line (scatter) graph

Graph Maker

I'd seen Graph Maker on the Unity Asset store and bookmarked it many months back. The reviews are pretty decent and it is definitely capable of a lot of heavy lifting. I'm aware of at least one reasonably successful game that has made use of it. So it seemed worth the risk of a few bucks. Graph maker clearly has had hundreds of hours poured into it. It's polished and feature rich.

All those features have also caused it to be fairly complicated. Each graph has several nested prefab elements each with scripts attached. The documentation is also a bit rough. As a new user the number one thing I want to know how to do is send the graph a list or array of my data and have it graph it.That's it. One simple function. So where is it?

I spent a while clicking around trying to figure out where the data was stored (turns out to be in the series prefab/script). I opened the documentation and couldn't find clear directions of how to send my data to the graph via script. I opened the scripts in search of the list or function that would import my data... Couldn't find what I was looking for.

There is a neat reflection script that can be attached to gameObjects and looks like it could do some handy stuff, but I couldn't get it to do what I wanted. All in all the asset looked way bigger than what I needed. Do I need radial graphs? I don't think so... 

The second thing I want to do is modify the appearance of the graph. The shear number of (nested) prefabs not to mention the number of settings in the main script it seemed like it was going to be a long battle to customize the looks of a graph.

So as I so often do, when I can't figure out an asset I start down the path of rolling my own asset. If you have more patience than I do, I know that Graph Maker is a good asset and will make pretty graphs for you. 

Rolling My Own

The goal of rolling my own graphing asset was to make something simple, lightweight and easy to use. As of writing this post my graphing asset has 6 prefabs and three scripts (one of which is a custom inspector to allow graph updates in edit mode - another detects mouse hovering). The prefabs largely consist of gameObjects with just an image component. A few such as "tick marks" or "axis labels" have children with Text components, but nothing gets more complex than that. Sending data to the graph is done with 1 of 3 functions. Pretty simple. 

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Just send the data and let the graph do the rest.

In the end it's taken me way longer to roll my own graphing script then it would have taken to figure out Graph Maker. Is mine as pretty? No. Does mine do nice tweening animations? No. But I know how mine works and I know how to modify mine if I need to.

The feature list is short. It can switch between line (scatter) and bar graphs. The axes, points, connecting lines, and tick marks can all be tweaked in size and color. 

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Bar graph of the same data as at the top of the post

Fonts, font size and font colors are all of course adjustable as well. Modification of the images was left out of the inspector/script and can be done with the prefabs. This was done for simplicity and the simple fact that changing images is less of a "tweak" than font size might be. 

I still have one feature to figure out and that's auto-scaling. Currently the axes will auto scale and adjust to fit the data, but the values displayed on the axes does not. I'd like to figure out some basic auto scaling to keep things simple - sure I can manually adjust the values in the inspector (or by script if I expose the variables or add a new function), but that's hard to do when the game is published... I like to be involved the community, but manually adjusting each player's graphs is a bit much. I'll keep the linked package up to date if anyone has ideas of how to auto scale I'd love to hear them.

Edit: The auto scaling is now working. 

Download (Free)

I may polish the asset a bit more and put it on the Unity Asset store, but that's a lot of work for not much of a return. Until then I'll happily handout a free download (box via goo.gl). Feel free to use it or modify it. Just don't flip it and sell it - don't steal my $12 in potential sales! If you do use it I'd love to hear about bugs or ways to improve it (but not bloat it). 

Not until writing this post did I realize I named my asset the same as the one I'd purchased. Oops.

Tutorials: Low Poly Snow Shader

My last post was about adding snow visualizations into Game #2. In the end I came up with a custom shader that ran faster than an asset I found on the Unity Asset Store. In my (quick) research I didn't find a tutorial showing what I needed, so I thought I'd do a quick series and show my project. The tutorial series covers the full creation of the shader (in Shader Forge) as well as a simple script to control the snow effect scene wide. 

If you want to see more details about the creation of the shader or if you'd like to try it out (download link in the video description) then check out my tutorials series. The first video is just an intro and explanation of what's to come. If you want to get to the meat then click here to skip to Video #1.

Intro video showing what will be created in the rest of the tutorial. Shader Forge: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#!/content/14147?aid=1100lHSw Tutorial Assets: https://app.box.com/s/npupei7px4tjavkkg4gtbz3y3mj6b73b