Coding & Spellcasting

    Not much to report today. I'm just putting the sprites to work. I have the animation files ready to go and I'm just making it so everything blends nicely with my current system. I'm trying to put something in place that more closely follows Clovers behavior tree. When she's not doing anything, she idles. If she's doing something, she can't do anything else. This way, when she is playing the SpellCast animation she can't do any other animation until SpellCast is done.

Status Report #32

     It's been good getting back  to Unicorn Quest this week. I've been working on sprites all week and I'll be coding spell casting this weekend. I'm itching closer to having working combat and I'm filling in small design document details over time. Admittedly some details for the project coming after this crept up, but I just wrote them down one day and got it out of my system. Now is the time to get Unicorn Quest in a playable state!

See some interesting numbers and graphs below.

Unicorn Quest Progress: Sprites for Spells

     This week has been about chipping away at Unicorn Quest's spell sprites so that I can see them with my eyes instead of my imagination. I want to make a post showing off each one along with descriptions when they get done. The way each spell works has changed a lot (as expected) while making the sprites and the new ideas greatly outdo the old. I'm really excited to see these things in the game so I can play around with how they feel.

     I've gotten many of the sprites done for 4 of the 10 spells done. I can't say for sure how many extras I'll need until I see how each one looks in action and make adjustments. I drew each one and its upgrades on paper to nail down the looks I'm going for.

     I've been at it for a few days in a row so I decided to change things up a bit to keep me sharp. Today I'll be coding the spell switcher and have Clover animate based on which spell is currently selected, after that it's a matter of adding in the projectile and coding how each spell works.

If you haven't been already, you can follow me on Twitter and Facebook where I usually post sprites I finish as soon as their done just because I feel so proud sometimes.

Minimizing The Unity Scene Count

     I want to use as few different scenes as possible. In TriGrid I made the mistake of having each level have it's own scene. Whenever I changed something not involving prefabs, I ended up having to reopen and edit all 60+ of them. I've been reading up on single scene development for RPGs made in Unity while drafting ideas for making it work.

    I considered having the background image behave like sprites and have it's own animation set (to swap the image for a new room) while the wall colliders could be prefabs. But that;s when I considered how much more efficient it would be to just have the background sprite, its colliders, and it's stationary objects be in one big prefab like the pause menu. That way I can have the whole thing quickly pop up after the loading scene closes.

Scenes look like this before loading now.

     Having the game set like this can make adjustments easier to do and room code management easier to make. Doing this is giving me the happy feeling of making the game more feasible and possible. It'll also make level debugging a matter of swapping prefabs and respawning Clover.