Introducing My Next Game (Video DevLog)

After my last game project was shelved, I started working on prototypes for a new game. Having learned the lessons of not just making prototypes but meshing those prototypes together early I built up the core mechanics of my next game over the span of a few weeks (just a few hours a week).

This was many times faster than my previous project.

I had the basics functioning and even better the prototypes were playing nice together. Seemly the next step was to starting building out content with, of course, lots of iterations of redesigning and refining.

As I made progress I could see that the amount of content that I needed to create could easily get overwhelming and potentially stick me back in a spot I didn’t want to be in. Designing and balancing content with little to no feedback seems like a poor choice and one that I want to avoid it if at all possible.

Learning from past mistakes, I knew that I needed to trim the game down. I needed to focus the game. I needed to get something playable and testable ASAP.

I’m looking at you my ugly ass combat system.

As I worked on the basic combat structures and mechanics I started to see that if the combat was refined it could do a lot for the game as a whole. If the combat is interesting and holds the players attention that would in some ways that take pressure off the other mechanics. Or more optimistically it could keep players engaged and maybe give the rest of the game time to mature as I build out content.

To take this one step further I saw that the combat alone could possibly make an entire game. Or at least a “mini game.” So I decided to take a horizontal slice of the game, just the combat, and do my best to polish and turn it into (potentially) a stand alone game. It seemed like a good idea and several months later it still does.

So enough typing, here’s my first DevLog video introducing the main idea of the game and the (very) rough prototype scenes.

Programming Challenges

Without doubt and maybe not for the better my focus has shifted from working on my game every night to trying to edit a video. Work on the game continues just slower than before… My fledgling YouTube channel continues to grow albeit at a limited pace. I’ve seemly snatched the “Bolt” niche on YouTube for the time being, but that’s a limited population and is likely to stay that way.

It’s time for something new.

With one part “hey this is cool” and one part “maybe this will expand my audience” I’ve launched Programming Challenges that can be completed in any programming environment or language used in Unity. This is something that I did with my students this year to help get over the significant learning curve of Bolt - and by most accounts it really helped. So why not bring it to a larger audience? If nothing else maybe it’ll help me refine my the challenges for my students.

The goal is to give short programming challenges that can be done in an evening or certainly without a huge time commitment over a weekend. The target audience is beginner to intermediate programmers and likely folks who are picking up Unity as a hobby and want to learn more.

But isn’t that what game jams are for?

For sure! But a lot of us can’t devote huge hours to a game jam on any sort of regular basis. And for those at the beginning of their game development journey creating an entire game (even in a month) can be intimidating.

Now I’m quite sure that there will never be the “perfect” challenge. Some will find a challenge far too hard or so easy that it’s not worth the time to fire up Unity. All the same this seems like a niche that is unfilled on the greater interwebs and continues the larger goal of giving back to the community that I learned from.

With that said, this last weekend, I launched the first challenge. The challenge is to create a dynamic grid of objects. It’s not a game and its not intended to be, but the programming used to “solve” this challenge is something that could easily be used in a game.

I’d love to hear feedback on the idea or this particular challenge. If you’ve got a suggestion for a challenge I want to hear that too.

Something New - Asking "What Can I Learn?"

I’ve continued to make progress on my game, but admittedly my YouTube channel is taking up a significant chunk of my time. The channel continues to be a fun and rewarding, but the growth has slowed. I’m not sure why…

Did I do something wrong? Did I change something? Did YT’s algorithm just decide to spread the love to other channels? Or maybe I’ve captured the Bolt niche and it just isn’t that big?

It’s probably a little of all of that.

So I decided to try something new. Something that I’ve had in the back of my head for a good long chunk of time. That being trying my hand at game analysis. Not game reviews. Not creating “Let’s Play” videos. Much more of asking the question, “What can I learn from a particular game?”

For my first attempt, I choose the game Equilinox. A game I found the thanks to YouTube suggesting one of the devlogs. It’s a “small” and “simple” game - and I mean that in a good way. So enough typing, here’s my video…

Did you make it past the video? I’d love to hear feedback and thoughts!

A Growing Channel and a New Tutorial Series

Work on my current game project continues, but I’ve also been busy creating a new set of videos and tutorials for the game development class that I teach. This year I made the decision to drop Playmaker, the visual scripting tool I’ve used for the last three years, in favor of Bolt. I’m three months into the class and I’m very glad I made the switch.

If your curious why, I put most of my reasoning into a video that looks at the pros and cons of each platform.

I’ve had great fun learning the new platform and creating videos to support my students. Since Bolt is fairly new its a bit short on tutorials, especially compared to Playmaker.

This shortage of tutorials made it pretty easy to push my way into the scene and start to create my own little niche in the larger YouTube community.

Let’s be clear! My channel is tiny. My channel started as a place to host a game trailer and evolved into an attempt to support my class.

When looking at the analytics it’s pretty clear there’s an inflection point in the traffic stats when I released the first few Bolt videos.

I leave out the actual very small numbers…

And again! My channel is tiny. The view count is laughable. I gain fewer subscribers per month than many sites gain in a day or an hour…

But still.

It’s fun to watch. It’s fun to create. And it’s fun to think about how far this trend might go. The question that keeps nagging me is whether the graph is linear? Or could it be curving upwards? Can the channel sustain the recent 25-30% month on month growth? Can the subscriber growth continue at 40% per month? Can I continue to create weekly content that’s engaging?

I’ve seen spikes in the channel stats before, but this time feels a bit different. And this time I’ve started asking a different question.

Two years worth of data. The trend becomes a little more clear.

Could my channel help support my game development?

I don’t mean that next month I quit my job, but if that graph is curving maybe in 2-3 months the channel can cover my Unity subscription? If it continues to curve in 6 months could it pay my monthly internet bill as well? And then…?

And if the graph isn’t curving? If it’s straight as an arrow? Or if starts to curve towards horizontal? What then?

Then I’ve had fun and given back to a community that taught me how to make games.

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So… If you’ve made it this far then why not go one link further? Come check out the channel? Maybe hit that subscribe button? And check out some of the videos and the coolness that is Bolt visual scripting…

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Screenshots from the next handful of tutorial videos.

Procedural Spaceship Generator

I find myself short these days. Short on patience. Short on time. Short on words. Just short… So here’s a short post and a quick video.

All the same I’ve been finding an hour here and 30 minutes there to slowly make more progress on my game. Yes this is the new game. The next game. If you missed it, you can read all about why I had to shelve my last game. This game is strongly influenced and inspired by the class BBS game Trade Wars 2002. I’ve been coding up a procedurally generated universe, fleshing out an inventory system and scripting the backbone of an economy.

With those pieces working, I sat back and looked at what I had. It’s not bad. It’s rough. But doable. The problem is still that to get something “shippable” or at least in the hands of testers and there’s a lot of content to create. So I had an idea…

What if I could produce a mini-game? What if I could take chunk of the big game, polish it, refine it and publish that? This would cut the immediate project size down significantly, result in quicker feedback from players and give me a second published game. So that’s what I’m doing.

The “game loop” will consist of building a ship, battling an AI ship, earn/collecting a reward and then starting the process over again. It’s simple but seems like it has potential.

I had the basics of a combat system already working so the next big piece was to develop a procedural generation script that could produce the AI ships. And that’s what I’ve been working on the last few weeks. I put together a short video showing the work.

Hope you enjoy and I’d love to hear your thoughts. You can play with the ship generator here - it’s an html build nothing to download just run it in your browser.

Implementing SFX in Unity

Every year I have to work and work to convince my students to add SFX them to their games. They resist and see it as a waste of time. They value graphics over audio. But when they finally add the SFX - it's magic! The "plunk" of an object being placed or the "click" of a button adds so much to the game!

Implementing SFX can be a messy process. I'm pretty confident that I DO NOT have the best solution, but it's a better solution that I had a few years ago. So I thought I'd toss out some info out to the winds of the interwebs on my approach to adding SFX within Unity.

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SFX options in the Unity Inspector

I'm not procedurally generating sounds or anything half that interesting. I'm just playing clips but doing so with some variation in the clip, volume, and pitch. I do this with a custom class (not a monobehavior) that allows easy and quick adjustments in the Unity inspector. 

The image of the inspector is from my current project and uses Odin Inspector - which is why the list looks different.

The code for the clip options is pretty sort and sweet. I've added two functions to clean up the implementation for when a clip needs to be played.

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SFX options code.

The "PlaySFX" function has two parameters, the first is the AudioSource of where the clip will be played and the second is a boolean that prevents or allows the current clip (if any) to end and the new clip to be played. UI sounds interrupting other UI sounds is generally okay but sounds such as explosions getting clipped by another explosion tends to breaks player immersion.

In some cases, I have created or cloned AudioSources to allow as many concurrent SFX as needed - but that's a whole other post. It's actually not too hard either.

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Defining SFX classes

Within the function the volume and pitch are both varied randomly. So no two button clicks (or other SFX) are identical, but if the variation is kept small they also sound similar avoiding possible confusion by the user that a new event has occurred. 

New instances of the SFX can then be created for different actions. I keep mine private and call them via event, but allowing them to be public could work as well.

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Calling the "PlaySFX" function for different actions.

Next, I create a private function for each type of action.  This private function will get called by an event. 

Each of these functions can then subscribe to events that are called on other objects.

While this does require a bit more coding, it makes for a very clean and non-spaghetti like code base.

You can check out my full script on PasteBin.

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Subscribing and Unsubscribing functions

Prototyping Something New

After the demise of my previous project I've taken some time off from active game development. I've been doing a little soul searching, a little research and as much learning as I can squeeze into an already packed schedule. 

Feeling like I had an idea worth exploring, I've spent the last few weeks working to prototype a new game idea. It's an idea that I've had bouncing around for a few years and is heavily inspired by one of the first online games I ever played. And no. This new game will not have multiplayer - I've learned that lesson (I hope).

With my last project I was nearly a year into it and still didn't have a real working prototype - I had built prototypes of systems but that was it. So this time around I was determined to do things differently. I wanted something that I could prototype in a few weeks, maybe a couple months at most (real life can get in the way). 

Despite looking like a folded protein structure, it's a bunch of star systems with mapped out connections.

So... Where is it at now?

In a about ten days, I was able to code the "procedural" generation of the world. It's not perfect, but it works. And that's all a prototype needs.

A few days later I had the player's navigation working along with some ugly but functional and relevant UI. 

The project was checking lots of boxes and doing so quickly.

The game will be a "space" game. You know planets, stars, laser beams and plenty of spaceships flying around.

So the next chunk I wanted to implement was shipbuilding. I want the player to customize their ship and design it around their desired play style.  A few days later while sticking to primitive shapes (programmer art) I had the basic code functioning. Even spent some time working on visual feedback...

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Prototype of the ship building function - the camera auto centers over center of mass.

That was a few hours work that didn't move the prototype forward. Oops.

I'm pretty happy with the results. It's simple and not as smooth and polished as it needs to be, but it works. Again it's everything the prototype needs (and just a few bits more). 

With the ship building complete I had two major features that were going to need work. The game is going to be based on trading and combat (shocking I know). So I needed an inventory and shop system. 

Nothing much to see with the shop system and it's probably the part of the prototype that I'm the least happy with. But! It works. I need to revisit it, to make it "feel" good as it will likely be a central part of many player's experiences. That will come later in the production.

As much as I dreamt of making a "violence free" game with my last project, I can't imagine this game without some lasers, a healthy dose of explosions and maybe a few space pirates. Which means the last piece to build was a combat system.

I know. I know. It's a masterpiece!

The combat will be very stylized. You're won't be piloting your ship dodging asteroids or incoming missiles. Rather you'll be creating a strategy to counter a single opposing ship. You'll be able to pause the game, think, plan, act and then watch it unfold. And yes, the system is pretty heavily inspired by a  popular rogue-like minus the parts that I didn't like and hopefully with at least a few new ideas. 

Even for a prototype, the beginnings were pretty rough.

Once the code was functional I wanted maybe even needed to make this part of the game "feel" good. If I can't make this feel good, then I may need to re-evaluate the design?

I spent a few hours on the UI, a bit on the visuals and a few more on some basic AI. The results? They aren't horrible.

Clearly, there is more work to be done. 

So is this my new game? 

Maybe it is. Maybe it's not. But I'm getting close to committing.  

When to Shelve a Game Project?

I write this post to help me process as well as to share the journey of the last few months as I have realized I need to put my current project on the shelf and take up a new and simpler project. This is not an easy thing to do. Even as I write this I can hear the doubt whispering in my ear...

Like so many of us, I too had a dream of what my next project could look like. I had learned so much from my first published game and I was excited to start my second project making use of all that experience and knowledge. My coding was better. My design was better. Even my art had improved significantly. 

I was ready and excited to not make the same mistakes that I made on my first project. And so, no surprise, I proceeded to make a whole new set of mistakes...

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Not bad, right?

I approached the design of "Game #2" much smarter this time around. Rather than just jump in and work on the next thing that came to mind. I laid out the design in layers with discrete chunks that could be prototyped. With each completed prototype I became more excited and more hopeful. I was making it happen! 

In early 2018 I started to put the prototypes together. I started to build the game world and  began the process of weaving together my creations along with a few third-party tools (that's a whole other post). I was creating art assets and the world was starting to looked "not bad."

And then it happened...

What "it" is exactly I'm not sure. It wasn't a singular event. It was more of a dawning or realization. I think most simply put, it was the realization that this project was simply too big and too complicated. If I look back on the development process this was no surprise. I knew it was ambitious. I had been fooled by the success of each prototype. Each step forward gave me hope. But when all the prototypes came together I could see that what I had was, frankly, a mess. 

The spaghetti code that haunts Fracture the Flag and led to so many bugs had been replaced by chunks of code that individually were reasonably well put together, but when connected made for a not so tasty pasta dish. I could see the writing on the wall and I was headed towards another bug riddled project. 

Added to that was the knowledge that I'd broken a cardinal rule of game development, especially indie development. I had over scoped the game. I knew it from the beginning but had run headfirst into that all too common trap somehow believing it would be different this time. I had a plan. It was going to work.

Fuck.

How'd this happen? 

Pretty simple really. I'm an idiot and I ignored my own advice let alone every blog post, article or book I've ever read about designing a game.

I know better than to design a large game. I have discussions multiple times a month with students (I'm a teacher) about the scope of games and what a single person or a small team can accomplish. I preach simplicity and then I ignored my own advice. 

What a dumb ass.

Beyond dreaming too big, it was super easy to get lulled into a false sense of confidence by the Unity Asset Store. I learned long ago that most of what is published there is not as good as advertised and especially to stay away from assets that will be in the final build (as opposed to editor extensions).

A slick inventory system saved me weeks of work...

I picked up an exceptionally well-designed (truly!) behavior tree asset to be able to program my AI...

Other assets allowed me to quickly sculpt terrain and procedurally add scenery...

To be clear the assets I was using are in fact very good and they did save me time. That is until I needed to tweak them or until my vision didn't match the traditional vision of the asset developer. To stand out as an indie or even have a few people notice a game there needs to be something special about it. It needs to be different. You need to twist the boundaries of a genre or at least employ a new mechanic. So rolling someone else's tool that is based on past games and established mechanics is not be the best plan and frankly I'm not sure it even qualifies as an "okay" plan.

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This has nothing to do with the article. Just felt like I needed a picture... maybe the confusion of the chickens is a metaphor?

This all helped to create a fiction that I, a solo hobby developer, could greatly expand the scope of my project. Each of the assets could potentially save hundreds or even thousands of hours, but that masks the hundreds of hours required to use those tools to create content.That's no one's fault except my own.

My stupid, overreaching, dumb ass self. 

Aside from my stupidity, part of the realization that I needed to shelve the game came from my day job's seemly unending ramping up of demands. This is usually my easy time of year, but instead I've found that I'm busier than ever before. The chunks of time where I used to be able to stream my game progress are gone. The easy afternoon where I could find 3-4 hours to code, model assets, or just dream about game design have turned into 15 minutes of down time between meetings. Ugh. 

I'm not planning on quitting my day job to go full time indie developer. Given my current game based income, that it would be a particularly bad idea. However, a career change is needed and it needs to happen sooner rather that later. In the next 12-18 months I will likely be looking for something new. I would love to publish one more game before that shift occurs. Not because I think I'll produce the next Stardew Valley, but because maybe I could sell 10,000 copies and maybe that could justify taking a couple years to build a third game and then a fourth... 

Limitations Lead to Creativity

It's so easy to get carried away with game design. After all you can make anything that you can imagine. You are LITERALLY writing the rules of the world you are creating. With this comes the danger of not having limitations. One good idea leads to another and another. Take a second to breathe and your scope is stupid big.

Don't believe the lies. It's not the first time this has happened... And yes, it happens to everyone.

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Screenshot - Fracture the Flag

When I was creating Fracture the Flag I had this vision for dealing with player territory. I was going to split the map in to distinct chunks that the players would fight to control. I spent a few days working on several different solutions, but nothing was working or even getting close to working... That was the genesis of the flag mechainc. Why limit the shape of territory? Why presume to know a good way to break up the map into chunks? My limited skill set forced me to be creative and I came up with a simpler and far better solution. My constraints had led me to a creative solution that became the namesake of the game.

By over scoping my game design I have applied almost no constraints. As a result I haven't really forced myself to think creatively. This has put me on a path where I doomed myself to struggle with weaving all the different systems and mechanics together focusing on  the question "can I do it?" rather than "how should I do it?"

As a solo developer I won't be successful by copying or mimicking other designs. If I have a chance to be successful, it will only be possible if the game is fun and not if it's complex. The two are not mutually exclusive, but complexity has been know to stifle fun on more than a couple occasions.

I think this might be the best and most important reason for needing to set aside the game. The game design has become it's own burden. It's weighing me down. It's slowing me down. It's stopping the creative flow.

Sometimes the band-aid just needs to be ripped off.

If you are sitting there saying that I just need to stick with it, I just need to keep going, or others have done it so you can too! Maybe you're right? But this business is tough. Working hard, having a good idea, and executing the design well are not enough to find success.

If you haven't watched this, then you should. 

Sure, there are examples of indies working for years slaving away and then making it big. But for every success story I bet there are ten, a hundred maybe a thousand stories of indies working for years and hearing crickets when they release their work. Go dig into the new releases on Steam if you don't believe me.

Admitting I've gone the wrong direction and restarting is painful and hard to process but it is a far better option than stubbornly staying on the same path. Even if that means a year's work is going to be shelved. That's better than putting in another 1-2 year's worth of work and having a only a steaming pile shit to show for it. Still, as I write this I have a hard time truly saying "it's done," because there was so much good stuff in the game

The Hardest Question

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A GIF of a very early System Prototype

What's next? I love making games. I really do.

I've allowed myself to pause the development of "Game #2" for the last several weeks. I had hoped that I could redesign the game to have something that I could still release. I saw several hurdles in the development process, so if I could design around those then maybe the months of work would still result in a game? While I haven't totally given up on this, the simplified design looks too much like what is already out there. Do we really need another resource management game? It's a popular genre, but isn't it already a bit too crowded? There are systems that I have I built that could probably be reused. If I was more creative I could probably split Game #2 into 3 or 4 smaller games all based on a single mechanic or system. 

During this "pause" I've been playing with a prototype that I've worked with off and on for the last couple of years. It's an idea that I've had and I chip away at from time to time. In a few weeks of (very) part time work, I've managed to cobble together a nearly working prototype. This prototype is just the first layer of the design, but it's taken me more than a year to get that far with "Game #2." From that alone, I know I'm far better off pursuing this new idea.

Hard to take pictures of a game that's about darkness

I also quite liked the results of my Ludum Dare entry. It's not unique, but it was fun to play. It potentially allows for players to create and share levels - always a good thing! (I wrote a script that converts a png file into a playable level.) It was a top down shooter that tried to use light and lighting in new ways. So while the top down shooter genre maybe not be as crowded as the platformer genre I still wouldn't call it an under served genre. 

I feel the danger in wandering through the desert for too long searching for the perfect idea. I can waste just as much time looking for the perfect project as I could trying to keep a bad project moving forwarad. So where to next?

I'm still working on that.

State of the Game - Episode 3

This week I released the third episode of the "State of the Game" devlog. The focus of the past month's work has been to add new art assets and start to build up the world. All with the continued goal of producing a playable Alpha Build.

Check out the latest developments in this months video development log. I show off many new art assets plus new NPC jobs such as farming, mining, logging and a few more.

Got thoughts or comments on the development of the game? Join the conversation on discord. Visit discord.onewheelstudio.com or click the button below.

State of the Game - Episode 2

The current goal is to stitch together the various prototypes into a playable alpha.

This video shows off the new terrain as well as logging, mining, and basic farming. These are the basic economic loops allowing players to generate revenue. NPC behaviors are slowly being built up using Behavior Designer. 

Next up is getting the constrution of buildings up and running as well as the start of basic dialogue with the NPCs. Stay tuned for more.

Want to have input on the development? 

Come join the discord server. It's the best way to make your ideas heard!

The Bump From A "Viral" Post

Getting the word out about a game is tough. Really tough. Try as you might the world is a full of games with "great ideas." The social reach needed for a successful game launch is a huge hurdle for small teams and maybe more so for hobby or solo developers like myself.

Over the last week or so I've posted and shared a GIF and a video of a low poly waterfall. I created the scene to test particle effects for use in my second game. I spent a little extra time making it look nice as I wanted it to be a real prototype - could I actually make a half decent water fall?

Based on the response, the answer is yes, yes I can make a half decent water fall.

The Numbers

I first posted the waterfall on twitter. As of writing this the tweet has been re-tweeted 18 times and been liked 42 times. This seemly earned me 10-20 new followers and maybe a few more over the next several days as the tweet continued to get some attention. Not bad but not viral.

A post on the low poly reddits earned over 500 up votes. One or two people asked questions and I was able to share more info about the game. My website (this site) also saw a bump of about an extra 100 views. Not bad, but still not viral.

Then 10 days or so later I posted on Imgur, a site I mostly use to share images with online friends. I posted the GIF and saw 60-70 up votes before heading to bed. Nothing too exciting. When I woke up the image had over 1000 votes and was featured somewhere on the front page. Imgur classified it as a "most viral" image - at least for a few minutes. 

As I type this post the image has almost 1200 up votes and 290,000 views! Wow. 

So what?

Those votes and views trigger a dopamine rush, but what did they really do for me? How did they move my game forward?

I'll be honest I wasn't prepared. My game's landing page is pretty basic. I was updating a few bits as all the views and up votes were rolling in. I didn't link the game right away, and probably only the last third of the views had access to more info about my game.

Oops. Maybe a big oops!

So the best that I can tell here's my gains from the imgur post:

• Twitter followers - nothing significant.
• YouTube - 7 or 8 followers
• Newsletter - 28 at last count
• Discord - 8 or 9 
• Website - 480 visits and 700 page views

These numbers are small... The Newsletter and Discord were the most exciting as both were essentially at zero before. I had "launched" the Discord server just a few days earlier with zero publicity and the newsletter gets almost no push from me.

While this activity felt good it's not the 1k, 10k or 100k people that I might need to launch a game "successfully," whatever that might mean. 

My Take Aways

I'm writing this post as much to share my experience as to organize my thoughts and what I learned in the process. For me this was a break through in the PR department, even if it's small. It helped me understand and get a feel for what success could look like. 

The value of a good image is worth so much. Sharing works in progress have their place, but maybe not with the general public. People say share and share often and don't wait until the game is finished to share your work. I think this is largely true, but I also think there is something to be said for taking a little extra time to polish what you are going to share. Just because you're excited doesn't mean that very many other people will be too.

Where's the balance? I'm not sure, but I have a better feel for it now after this experience.

Motion adds so much. I've read this over and over, but I'm not sure I really understood. I also shared an image of my river at the same time as the waterfall. The river has motion but it's much more subtle - it got almost no response! At this point I question sharing much of anything unless there is some form of motion. All of our social feeds are full of static images - some are amazing, but the images that have motion are so much more engaging.

Somehow I need to reproduce this "viral" post over and over! It's scary to think what it would take to get to the social reach needed for a "successful" game....

NPC Job System

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I needed a picture at the BEGINNING... At least it's a place of work?

My day job is at full speed with my weekends being controlled by bike races (head coach) so development is coming in spurts. It's disappointing to watch the slow crawl of progress, but at least the bike team is placing first in the conference! 

Ok, that's not why you came here... But while your distracted, if you didn't notice I've added a discord channel. It's quiet atm but feel free to stop by if you have questions or comments.

The big focus for the past month or two has been the job system. It is designed to the allow the player to hire NPCs to do basic jobs. These jobs are created from tasks which contain specific actions. These jobs are then "posted" and the NPC uses a simple  value system to determine what job they want to accept. The goal is that these jobs are superimposed on top of the NPC's other needs or desires and that jobs provide money for the NPC to provide for itself. The jobs also intended to speed up the progress of the player - rather spend time to chop wood they can pay an NPC to do it allowing the player to become more efficient and do more. 

The job system has developed in three major chunks. Code backbone. User interface. Creation of actions. 

Code Backbone

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The base Actions class

The job system needed a generic framework that could be expanded and extended upon. To do this I broke the design into three main classes; jobs, tasks and actions. 

The job class is the boss of the whole deal. It controls the flow of tasks that the NPC will do and is also the communication link between the rest of the game and the job as a whole.

Task scripts are pretty similar to jobs in that they control the flow of what actions the NPC will do. Having a second container with no real effect made sense in that a task can fail and if the job contains more than one task the NPC would still be able to accomplish something... There is also the option (not fully implemented) that each task can have a time limit. The thought is that a NPC shouldn't spend 3 days looking for kindling if they could also be mining for coal. I'm not 100% sold on the need for tasks, but will likely leave them in for now. 

Actions are where, well, all the action happens. Actions are pretty specific and an individual job or task will likely have several actions. New actions can be added fairly easily due to the base class that is easily extended. Actions will include searching for items, dropping them off for processing or selling them to a vendor and whatever else seems useful.

The three classes largely communicate and interact by checking the status of their "subordinate." That is the job checks and reacts to the status of each task contained in the job and each task checks and reacts to the status of each action contained in the task. When all the actions in a task are complete the task is complete. When all tasks in a job are complete the job is complete and checks to see if it should repeat. Jobs can be done once, daily, continuously or a set number of times. For simplicity the status of jobs, tasks and actions all use the same enum - not started, running, complete, failed or paused. 

User Interface

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The ugly current state of the Job Menu

There's a lot going on in the creation and the assignment of a job to an NPC. So the UI is probably the most complex I've made so far in my short dev career. Can I really call it that? I hesitate to even show it as it's so damn ugly, but it's easier to post a picture than describe it all. 

Essentially the left panel is where the job is constructed while the right panel contains posted jobs, saved jobs and inventory items that plug into actions. Not the most refined, but it's working (mostly). 

The job menu has already been through several iterations. With many more to come. I'm trying to hold off on the fancier bits until the full design is complete or at least closer to complete. Each new action makes me rethink the design of the UI or at least the action interface. Once the set of actions are more complete the design of the UI should come together.

Creation of Actions

The first action created was a rather useless one in that it was a random wander. Not something you'd likely want to pay some one to do, but served as a good testing grounds for the system as a whole. 

I would like to keep the number of actions fairly small, but still allow a wide range of jobs for the NPC to complete. Hunting for the system that allows emergent behavior! Currently actions are focused on the collection and delivery of resources. I hacked Inventory Pro to use the item database for the job actions. This greatly simplifies what I have to create and also helps keep a common interface and database.

At the moment I have one UI prefab for all actions and I am simply toggling on/off the needed parts. I'm not sure this is the best solution, but seems to be working fairly well. The toggling is controlled by a series of booleans in the actions themselves - the info in this communicated when the action UI element is created. 

So far the available options are an item, location, range from location, and a number of times to repeat the action. These options are holding up well with the exception of needing to show or indicate the location. At the moment the location is a vector3 which is pretty useless to the player... 

The Results?

The results of this work is a functional prototype of a job system. It's not complete, it's not ready to be added, but it was a proof of concept. The job system is likely to be left out of the first alpha build, but should make it's way in once the first couple rounds of bug fixing and balancing.

What's Next?

The job system was the last major piece of coding that needed to be completed in the prototype phase. So now the working goal is a fully playable alpha build. 

This leaves me focused on the visuals. In particular I begun the process of modeling buildings and working to refine my terrain creation process. I want to include rivers and waterfalls both as eye candy buy also as potential energy sources (hyrdo), but getting a low poly waterfall to look decent is tricky... but more on that in my next post.

I'll leave you with a WIP render of some market stalls.

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A WIP render of market stalls - yes I know the lighting isn't awesome