Changing Camera's Smooth Follow Target

     For all of Unity's great features, this drawback is a surprising one. I couldn't for the life of me to get SmoothFlow2D to change it's target the way a Component should. This means the camera will have to always be on the player character in that scene. There are ways around this and they can get pretty complicated. For the sake of time I needed a quick solution. As I started writing this post an idea came to me. Have the camera focus on an invisible object that happens to be on the player, then when I want focus to change, move the object somewhere else!

     I wanted the camera to focus on whomever was talking. The results will look the same with this method so problem solved! I really wish Unity's camera worked the way I wanted it to, but I guess this proves that there's always a way if you smash your head into it long enough. It feels like I leveled up my problem solving skills or something because Yotes from a year ago would have either researched how to get SmoothFollow to work for a week or take spend days on making a new camera following script.

Unicorn Chatterbox Lines

     I rejoice as this part is finally finished. Text scrolls across the screen one letter at a time and moves to the next line when the collider reaches the edge. The games main GUI hides when text boxes come up and I placed a giant blocker collider behind the background sprite that prevents the buttons from working if you tap where they once were.

     Next steps are pretty big. I need a way to keep track of pages for when NPCs yammer on for longer than one box can handle. I have to make little icons to let the player know what's going on, have colliders to detect player touch to continue to the next page, and I need to have the camera position itself in a way that puts the speaking pony slightly above the middle of the screen.

     After all that I'll be in pretty good shape! Almost done with this thing once and for all!

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...

Arranging App Icons Atop Yotes Games

     You might have noticed how often I switch up how the app icons on the blog appear by now. I think I've finally settled on a good way to handle their ordering. Their original purpose was to display the apps I had in the pipeline. Now it's more of a list of the apps I've made so far. Right now I'm thinking that it's a good idea to keep it at an even 8. It represents the 8 games I made in college that got my career started. As time goes on I'll keep my 7 most popular apps listed here in order of release and save the last slot for the current work in progress.

     Either that or I'll have an odd number of apps more tightly packed together with the WIP in the middle. nine apps on display total? The biggest ones closest to the middle? We'll see how it all looks when I have more games under my belt to show. I'm far from done messing with these things.