Unicorn Training Collision Map Progress

     I've been placing invisible walls, doors, switches, and chests in dungeons maps this week. I also put up some animated torches in rooms to liven things up.

     I'm still not done with all these yet, but at least I have them all done for the forest, caves, and building interiors. The dungeons are taking a while and this week has been filled with distractions. I keep finding ways to be more efficient with this stuff so it'll be done sometime this weekend, even if I have to skip sleep one night. I'm just sick of looking at this task on my dev list. I really thought it'd take a few days.

(Note: Tomorrow's Status Report will be a little outdated because I'll be out of town this weekend.)

Unicorn Training Walls & Doors

     Today I'm still making all the collision walls for scenes and adding decoration objects to make levels pop. After this is done all the rooms will be complete (minus all the enemies). By following what I sketched exactly this work is being done pretty rapidly. There are so many scenes that I can't believe I was going to have the game be even bigger before! The Unicorn Training Package is definitely worth the buck players will spend. I'll start coding how the shop will work next. Things really are coming together and it's just the grind to the end goal.

Unicorn Training: Tile Maps Done

     All the maps are tiled out now. All that's left is to do some touch ups on the forest scenes and add some colliders. I want to connect every room in proper order using my door system so that the world is finally real and tangible. I'll worry about enemy and object placement once those are coded. I also wrote down which enemies will appear where in the GDD for reference later. There's 17 enemies in the works right now and if I keep up a decent pace I may have the whole game done a month early!

     I really want my first RPG to see the light of day and that day is sooo very close.

Using New Tile Map Skills

     Shortly after starting to place dungeon tiles the old fashioned way I realized that it would take forever. Why not use tile mapping to save the background image as a prefab then place non-tile objects over that? It'll even save total memory in the final executable. So now I'm using the tilemap strategy I learned last week to make all the levels. It should be done by tomorrow. Then placing everything (besides enemies) should take another day.

    I thought using this tile map editor would be amazing and dear lord is it a dream. What once took hours can be done in minutes. Tons of boredom and hand cramps resolved with a simple drag & drop interface. 2D Toolkit is beautiful and it continues to make my job way easier.

Unicorn Training Text Is Set In Stone

     I'm going with a Link to The Past style "cut to the chase" story with this game. Being this far downsized and different from the bigger game to come, I simply have enough text to get the story rolling and let the player's imagination combined with NPC blabber fill up the rest of the world and motivations.

     A lot of the text is urging Clover to explore the forest and complete dungeons to learn spells. Those are the things players will be driven to do anyway so the dramatics are kept short and sweet. So sweet that players interested in the characters will have something to think about as the adventure unfolds. Even if someone skips through all the dialogue the goals are obvious enough that there shouldn't be any "What am I supposed to do?" moments. Especially since nothing is blocked off in this small scale open world.

     I will consider this story a success if I get people demanding Clover's next adventure and more information about her mysterious mentor. And just what is this threat he has you preparing for? Why did he leave without you so suddenly? The player will want Unicorn quest to happen as much as I do.

Unicorn Training Development Video #16

     It's been a while since I made a video update so here's some interesting stuff that hasn't been shown before! A town scene that isn't that one forest room I keep using! A nice change of pace. This also shows text boxes in action as I wander around the hub town of the game: Timber Grove.

    I show off just about everything that's set in code, glitches and all. This is a mark to see the game explode into production afterwards because with this out of the way it's time to draw out literally everything I plan to implement for the game on paper. That means drawing on graph paper for the rest of the week! And I actually love this part because I get to dream and build a world I can actually see (to write it is to know, to sketch is to see, to sprite & code is to feel).

Watch the YouTube video here.

If I Started Over Now... (Unicorn Quest)

     My first Adventures in Equica title isn't even out yet and I can already see some missteps that I would have approached differently. I'm too far in to do much about them now but I will keep these ideas in mind if/when I do a sequel years from now. However, a new idea for the game's structure came to mind and I think I might shrink the game's scope quite a bit to devote more time to polish. I'll need to sleep on it and get some outside opinions (especially yours!) but catch what I have in mind below the break.

Unicorn Quest: Making An RPG Town Scene - From Gimp To Unity

    With my world map charted out it's time to start putting my plans into practice. I'm using the techniques I used to create the battle scene. I start with colored blocks indicating walls, land, and obstacles. Next I do some sprite work to have things to fill space with. After I have blueprints and pieces I line everything up and put it into Unity so I can add collision boxes where they're needed.

    See a more detailed breakdown of making the game's forest town, Timber Grove, from sketch to in-game (along with some pictures) below the break.

Finalized RPG Text Box System

I cannot express how proud I am of this thing.

     Dialogue boxes are officially tested and complete! I even got the little page indicator at the bottom to animate properly. All I have to do is attach a string of any length to an NPC and when you talk with it, the text box will make pages out of the string automatically! This breathes new life into the project and it looks more possible to do than ever! I seriously thought this would be the second hardest thing to make for the game and it took about as long as anything else! Only the hardest part remains, crafting a cutscene maker, but that's still far off.

I just have to make up words to toss at it and the box handles the rest!

     After some test runs I decided that letters appearing one at a time, even if it's fast, looks pretty bad in Unicorn Quest. So I made whole pages appear at once and it looks a lot better. It also makes things easier for fast readers like me who tend to mash through dialogue in Pokemon games. I even chose to use "@" as the page break so I can make better use of timing/spacing for information.

Actually Coding The Text Box System

     After figuring out how to do highlighting and new lines, all that's left is to start coding. I quickly scribbled and drafted ways to make it work on paper and now I'm going to implement it in C# and see how big the mess will be. If I'm lucky, then I'm just about done with this thing...

Treasure Chest Animations In Equica

     You know what I'm talking about. When you go up to a chest in A Link to the Past and hold up an item while fanfare plays. I want that in Unicorn Quest. It just feels good! I had the chest sprites made and I even got the spinning white action bubble from my Feed The Plant trophy screen to emphasize the item being held up. Clover will open a chest with a chest icon over the action button, then face the camera and hold up the prize for all to see! Trust me, it'll be adorable.

     I got all the code and art for this done and just need to finish the textbox system to have a way of telling players what the item is and making the prompt disappear.

Colored, Bold, Etc. Text Made Easy!

     Did you know about this? Well I didn't! Apparently Unity isn't done surprising me with it's ease of use! I finally learned what the Rich Text check box does and boy does it make my life easier. Here I was about to code up a system similar to HTML's text modifiers and as I'm googling to see if someone else has already invented that wheel I stumble across this! Unity had that stuff in it all along! Just add "<b>words here</b>" or something similar for fantastic results!

     Now I can highlight words mid-sentence with no trouble! I'm not even limited to certain colors or sizes either. It basically works like HTML. I can probably do varied word sizes too which would allow me to fill the text box with screams of "NOOO!!!" if I want to. All this stuff is really great and further proves to me that I still have a world's worth of knowledge to learn.

Choosing A Pixel RPG Font

Here's how the textbox looks so far.

      I'm searching for just the right font for this game's pixel art style. I chose Myraid Web Pro Bold first because it looked best from my options in MS Paint. After looking at other RPGs and this game's style as a whole I'm thinking about changing all the fonts to a pixelated one of some kind. I'm considering the font on the 4th row in the picture above, 8BitOperator. It comes with lowercase letters, it squeezes characters together for more space, and its punctuation marks are equal in size to capital letters.

New OBS Video Recording Software

     After putting out a call for help on the development video side of things my buddy Cybermagus showed me Open Broadcaster Software. It's an open source tool made for livestreams and Let's Plays and it works like a dream! It records just the computer audio and ignores the mic input just like I wanted and comes with an adjustable screen resolution and window size adjuster. In addition there' tons of customizable options that will let me do much nicer development videos and even game trailers in the future!

    See a Recording Test Video I made for it on YouTube!

E3 2014 is Over... Back To Work!

     E3 was a rejuvenating experience. I feel proud to be a game developer and want to push myself to reach a point where something I made can stand tall next to other games at the convention. With it behind me, it's time to get back to work and there's plenty to do. This week will be all about making stuff I need to be ready for making a text box system through next week. I need an NPC, a treasure chest you can interact with (don't worry about saving it's state just yet), and writing down exactly how the speech system will work on paper before coding anything. Let's see what I can accomplish by tomorrow...

Equip Items Menu in Equica

     The menus are looking sharp and I came up with description for each equippable item that fits on the two lines of text. Staring at this makes me wish I stuck with a uniform sprite scale the whole way through. The way it's setup now, I need every single bit of space available and there is meant to be a variety of scaled pixel art to give the action a smoothly animated look. I'll keep a gameboy advance style pixel resolution in mind for my next game.

Making Item Sprites

    I've been chipping away at these things all day. I still have a bunch more to go (pendants & horseshoes) so fun's not over yet. Cupcakes heal health and status effects while tonics restore or boost magic. There's also some Zelda style chests for players to plunder. Each sprite does something different and match an item in the design document. With these all ready, I'll start coding the item system next.

Clearing Rooms in Equica

     Yesterday I finally finished off spell upgrades and status effects. Now each spell has 4 tiers and enemies (as well as the player) can succumb to burn damage, paralysis immobility, wet electricity weakness, and so on. The next thing I jumped onto was managing how enemies respawn in the overworld.

     To keep it as simple as possible I made an ArrayList, a dynamic list with each scene's enemy names. Enemies are placed onto the room prefab and positioned by hand and labeled "E_(name here)#", then when the player wins a battle against it that enemy's name is added to the "Kill Off These Guys" list that is ran when the overworld starts up. They will only respawn when the map loads if you came from another overworld scene and not a battle or menu. This way is pretty efficient and allows me to dynamically add baddies to scenes when I need to.

Making Upgraded Spells

     I'm still working on all the kinks for the upgraded spells. Some are complex, others are just bigger sprites & collision boxes. So I'm going to jump back to work on all those. I want to finish them all today! This is one of my bigger milestones on my list. Having it crossed off will do wonders for my morale. It'll also look really cool in the next video.

Unicorn Quest Progress Video #12

     It's time for another progress video full of too many small details to post about! I tried to keep this video as up to the minute as possible because so many things change every passing hour. Here is what the game looks like as of 11:43pm on the 22nd.

      A lot of graphical improvements were made for the interface and a few menu functions are operational now. I also fixed up a bunch of bugs, polished the shield spell a bit, finished the death screen, and make health pickups. Pink hearts dropped by enemies give you a quarter heart and purple ones they drop take away a quarter heart.

This is the YouTube Video

     I feel like I'm on fire!! Everyday so much progress is made! I can't wait to see how things look a month from now. I want to get to a point where I'm just adding rooms and enemies to flesh things out.