Status Report #44

     Things have been nutty all week and I'm still miles away from my work desk! Last week I finished up the text box in 2 days (instead of a week like I planned for) and spread out the posts this week to keep the site alive while I was away! I'll return home on Monday so there's still a couple of out of sync posts yet to go live. Even though I'm not working this week I need made an effort to post up to date downloads info below!

Here's a nice vacation week status report!

(Update: If you're seeing this, I was unable to get internet access where I am right now so there are no downloads charts this week. This is a backup post being put up on a timer. I'll update this on Tuesday with the charts up to that date.)

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.

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!