Hi everybody! I decided to create a devlog so that I commit myself to updating the game as often as possible. A previous game jam that I was in encouraged devlogs and although I did not have time participate in that jam, I enjoyed reading the thought processes that went into other people's devlogs. I am pretty new to game development, so I am learning all of this as I go. Afterwards it will be cool to see the progress I've made! And hopefully, other people may find my journey useful (to at least avoid the pitfalls that I am bound to fall into, haha).

The Yellow Moon Inn is (hopefully going to be) a top-down RPG where you (the player) run a tavern in a fantasy setting. Unfortunately, you shortsightedly chose a not-so-safe location for your tavern. Consequently, the people that visit you range from parties of adventurers that may trade with you and assist you, to hordes of enemies seeking to raid your spoils in turn-based combat. It is up to you to defend your tavern and improve its reputation!

About Me:

I'm Aaron - you can call me Aaron/Agggron/whatever you'd like! I'm 22 (graduated two years ago), and I am currently a biochemist looking to get into computer science. I always thought game development was really cool but never got around to trying it until recently!

My favorite games are RPGs - I grew up on (of course) Pokémon and MMOs such as Runescape/Guild Wars. Some of my personal favorite RPGs are by indie development company Spiderweb Software, especially their Exile series (now being remastered as Avernum!). I love their retro-style enormous open-world exploration and immersion into the game universe. I am also (now) a big fan of board games, and the idea for this game jam comes from one of my favorite board games - The Red Dragon Inn - where you play as a party of D&D adventurers who visit the tavern (and drink each other under the table/gamble people's gold away). I wanted a similar atmosphere for this game, but here I'm flipping the script and presenting it from the viewpoint of the innkeeper/tavern owner! And of course adding my own RPG elements for game progression. I'm excited for it!

Goals:

Here on itch.io, I have done a few small-scale game jams but this would be my first time tackling a (hopefully) larger-scale project. The main thing that I would like to accomplish is a working (polished if possible) turn-based combat system integrated with the "open world" (of course, for this game jam the world is just the one room, which is actually perfect for limiting me in scope). For this game jam I was going to start with Pokémon/FF-style combat. Maybe in the future (but probably not for this game jam) I would move onto tile-based combat similar to Fire Emblem/Spiderweb games. Also, the games that I've made so far have been more action-like so I've never had experience working with UI screens for inventory, skills, etc. All of this I hope to implement in this game! I'll track as much of my thoughts as I can for this development - they might be basic, but hey, it could help me/others out in the future!

Platform:

I will be using Unity for this game jam. It's what I first started looking into, and all of my previous games have been using Unity. Actually, there have been recent updates in their 2D tilemapping capabilities - I've never used them before but will try them out for this! I am very much not an artist, so right now I plan to use free RPG maker tiles/sprites (and import them into Unity), and if I have time I will try to polish/create them myself. But most important to me right now is to get the gameplay up and running! :)

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I think that about covers my background, and of course if there are any questions/feedback I'd love to hear them! I (hopefully) am on the Discord channel frequently enough when I'm not at work.

Day 1:

I wanted to start by being able to create character movement on a 2D map. To this end, I wanted to restrict character movement to unit intervals. I basically have a placeholder player that follows keyboard input to move left, right, up, and down. Instead of just setting the transform of the object to the new position, I had it move towards that position (and made it so that during the movement, you are unable to move anywhere else!).

https://giphy.com/embed/3o6nV1Fvd6qXocPhV6

Next step is to create the map of the room!

This is very cool! Love the moving WIP shot, too. Best of luck! You're working so hard already!

Day 3:

Okay, so today I definitely learned a LOT about the Unity Physics engine (and what NOT to do during it, haha). This is regarding me trying to deal with collisions of the player with wall tiles, so here's a summary of what went down:

As I said yesterday, I was trying for the longest time to get my player rigidbodies to work. In the end, turns out kinematic rigidbodies don't actually respond to collisions (as note, I'm pretty sure dynamic rigidbodies CAN detect a collision with kinematic ones). I had been wanting to use a kinematic rigidbody for the player because I didn't really want to use the Physics engine - I didn't want the player to be pushed via force, but rather be clamped to move a certain distance in set intervals. I tinkered around with the Unity CharacterController but it seems built for 3D. Finally, I eventually settled to try to expand on my previous movement script: setting transform.position directly, BUT checking beforehand if the tile space that I want to move to is already occupied by one of the wall tiles (or other tile that doesn't allow player movement). Here I end up going on a wild goose chase to find the right function to detect a collision of a point with the tile collider - I try Physics.OverlapSphere, Collider.Bounds.Contains, etc. before finally finding Collider2D.OverlapPoint, which was right under my nose the whole time. Whew, it works now, but quite a ride now!

With that roadblock out of the way, it was time to populate my room! This was the fun part - I created multiple layers of tiles and added furniture and other decorations for the tavern. The room will be quite homely - there will hopefully be a few NPCs that stay for a prolonged time in some of the stools/chair that the player can interact with, but all of the combat encounters will take place in a separate combat scene. You can take a look at the current tavern below:

There are many other components that need to be worked on, but with the workweek coming up I have to decide what is feasible in small chunks. Some of the things I could work on relatively soon are getting the character sprite/animation, adding dialogue boxes when the player interacts with an object, and eventually try to get the turn-based combat system set up!

Day 5:

My next short-term goal is to create the text-screen UI that appears whenever the player starts dialogue, or when the player interacts with an object in the game world. After watching different Youtube videos on how to approach this, I settled on creating a custom C# class (here, Dialogue), that contains information for each text pop-up -> right now just the speaker, and the actual text that will be displayed. Then using Unity's UI system, I utilize a DialogueManager script that takes in a custom Dialogue class and uses the information from this class to populate my text onto the UI elements. To handle multiple panels of text, I hold text blocks of elements in a C# Queue that I can pop off sequentially (an array would probably work just as well, but a queue doesn't have to worry about indexing). And to have the text appear letter by letter, I used a coroutine that adds in one letter to the text panel for every frame. I actually read a recent Gamasutra blog on text reveals that points out this method's flaws and says that it is a naive approach (and suggests how to improve this), but for now it works and I have time later I can try to polish it up following the Gamasutra's article's suggestions.

My current dialogue/encounter pop-up system looks like this:

So right now there's an awkward white box in the upper right corner saying START DIALOGUE for me to reveal the text panel. Tomorrow I want to actually integrate this into the current player movement - that is, when the player is facing an interactable object and presses SPACE, the text panel will appear.

Day 8:

Today I set up the bare bones skeleton of a turn-based combat system. I set up a separate scene that can currently be navigated from the overworld via a button. Then, I have the combat game loop running as a coroutine that keeps track of all combat states. Thanks to Jamarin for the inspiration in setting up a working environment first, before trying to implement each feature individually. In RPGs especially there tends to be many layers in the inventory screens, combat screens, etc., and rather than get bogged down too much in all of that at the beginning, I would rather just make sure I can get the minimum game loop up and running. So right now the one Attack button seems to be functional with actually changing the combat state. Next up is integrating this combat state system with player and enemy health!

Day 9:

I incorporated player and enemy health into the combat system, animating it with a slider. One thing to note for the animation is that since my slider is using integer values for the health, the speed that the health drops in the slider must be set reasonably high for any change to occur (at least, using the Mathf.MoveTowards function). If you don't have a high enough speed, the rounding stalls the health animation from ever dropping, and sometimes you get random drops of 1 health increments.

With the  main combat loop settled, it's time to iron out the full combat mechanics of the game! Then I can get around to implementing these mechanics into the combat system. What I am thinking right now is, that although the main character herself is not prized as a physical specimen, she has extensive knowledge brewing alcoholic potions and liquors. These consumables can have a variety of effects: ranging from buffing her combat statistics, healing herself (and possible party members if I have time to implement this), or setting up elemental damage combos on the enemy. But, with a limited stock of booze, she has to decide when it is most advantageous to use her consumables. And she must watch her alcohol content, or that may harm her combat abilities...

Day 11:

At this point I am stepping into unchartered territory! Previously I had at least basic experience with what I was working on, with the exception of the 2D tilemapping - but that was more of using a tool and was relatively simple to follow. Today though, I delved into learning about ScriptableObjects for use in the game's inventory system. Having recently started in computer science, I am just beginning to get experience with organizing data architecture, which is what using ScriptableObjects is all about. So there is a lot for me to take in, though I am finding Unity's videos on Live Training on Scriptable Objects as well as using ScriptableObjects in a Text Adventure both very helpful resources. Overall, all of the architecture can get overwhelming for me, but I have to start somewhere, right? :P So here I am trying to set up base classes for InventoryItems, and displaying them on the UI Canvas.

Seems okay for now. I know I have a lot more to learn here though, such as linking the instantiated inventory items to display in a Layout Group (which I haven't used before, but apparently helps in dynamically resizing based on the number of items in the group). And of course user input such as hovering over the item to display a description, and being able to add/remove items from the inventory. It is kinda scary not knowing how much time all of this is going to take and if I can actually do this all in time, but hey, if nothing else, I have already learned quite a bit up to this point!

Day 13:

I feel like I have a decent architecture set up for the inventory screen now! I decided to refactor everything, using what I learned from ScriptableObjects to make a new ScriptableObject class called PlayerData - which stores all critical game information about the player (level, stats, and inventory items - each item of which is its own ScriptableObject). Using this system, I linked the UI to all of this player information. The upper left box (player data) and lower left box (player inventory) kind of just display the information. More complicated is the right box (selected inventory item) which displays all of the item information for the item selected in the inventory panel. Now that I'm typing it out it seems really simple but hey, I'm proud that I got it working cleanly!

My next goal is to add functionality for the Use Item and Discard Item buttons - this will need to communicate with and alter the player data/inventory (e.g. to heal the player, or to remove an item from the inventory altogether).

Day 15:

No screenshot for today unfortunately! I am currently taking internationalfish's advice and trying out the use of dictionaries to store inventory information. My first attempts are kind of tricky since I can't actually see the contents of the dictionary in the editor. Hopefully this weekend I will have time to look at Custom Editor Scripting to manually visualize the dictionary contents. :)

Day 16:

I am actually going home this weekend to spend time with family (Happy Chinese New Year!). So for the next few days if I have time I will provide updates for my current progress, but otherwise I hope to get back on track early next week!

I have taken a look at all of the other ongoing games-in-progress for the jam and they are all inspiring! This weekend would also be a good time to evaluate how far I've come, how far I still need to go, and update my scope appropriately.

Day 22:

Successfully integrated the item system into combat! I had the skeleton combat loop from the early weeks of the project, and I now revamped the UI, with selectable menus for attacking and using items. Thankfully I had done the work for displaying inventory items and having the selected item featured - the UI here is very much similar to the UI in the player stat/inventory screen. Some modifications are just what text fields need to be updated, and I got around that by having an enumeration for what screen the code is currently in - if in the inventory screen, the code would display certain text, and in the combat screen other text would be displayed. Somewhat hacky but allows me to reuse a lot of the code!

There is still a little bit more to do with the combat: ending the combat with winning/losing, and being able to gain experience and items/gold to loot. Currently I have an escape button (Return to Overworld) to switch scenes, but next up is having that occur naturally in-game!

Day 24:

All of the combat and inventory are now functional! Items can be made and seen in the inventory, and used in battle. Combat also ends appropriately, and has win/lose conditions, including granting experience and items/gold to the player if they win in combat! Technically at this point I could play through the game levelling up our gutsy granny, alternating between combat and creating new items with the loot. But I would fighting the same old test enemy over and over - akin to staying in tutorial mode. With my Excel design document by my side, it is now time to create the differing types of enemies and expand on our withered innkeeper's liquor selection!

Day 26:

Quick update before I head to work: combat system is finished more or less! Might need to tweak some values for game balance since as of now some items are instant KOs haha. We'll see what I can wrap up tonight, might not have time for much. I hope to have a more detailed post-jam write-up. It's been a pleasure updating this. :)