Day 29(/30): It’s the same night so long as you report in before you go to bed, yeah?
The stationary worker is complete! I have also made a Really Ugly HUD!
As you can see above, there’s a worker who stays put until they catch sight of the player, and then runs off into the sunset (actually, toward the nearest exit, which it decided was on the other side of the map). As I had planned on in the last post, I swapped the placeholder mesh with the guard mesh so I could test animation functionality--as you can see from the gif, all is good on that front.
The Really Ugly HUD is also very simple. The user will be able to put in a goal debt (their own personal student loan debt, for example), and the bar will rise with the damage that they do until they meet their goal. There are actually four tiers of goals to meet after their own debt for players who like a challenge. The Really Ughly HUD is really ugly! I hate it! But it’s purely there for functionality’s sake for the moment as I honestly have no idea what the final design should be.
So with those last two pieces, I really feel like it’s time to get back to the art side of things. I want to fine tune the object destruction, but to do that I really do need to have an attack animation for the player.
Given how long it takes to create animation sets, I can’t imagine I’ll have time to post an update before the end of Devtober, so I figure now is the best time to give my final reflections and talk about next steps.
Obviously, I didn’t meet my goal of devlogging every day, and that is a bummer. Looking back though, I’m not sure how worthwhile it would have been to log every day. There were a lot of times where all I did was just fail at scripting something, and while I think it’s important and valuable for people to see that game development is a bumpy road with many setbacks, I’m not sure how entertaining a week’s worth of logs would be if they looked like this:
Day 1:
Tried to program an AI--Failed
Day 2:
How the heck do I keep failing with this AI?
Day 3:
I don’t remember what variables are anymore. What is a computer? I am a sheep herder.
Day 4:
Baaa
Day 5:
Oh god why was I so stupid? Got the AI working, here’s how I did it [functional logging]
Day 6:
JK Baaaaaa
Day 7:
Starting work on a dynamic level loader…
Or maybe it would be, I don’t know.
Log failing aside, I think I’ve spent more time developing in Unity this month than I did in the previous nine. It feels good to be back in the saddle, and I do find myself remembering more and more as time goes by. In addition to DSAL, I was also involved with a weekend game jam and was given a small VR project to develop at work, so October me really has started to feel like a developer again. I want to keep this going, and I’m cautiously optimistic that I may still yet be able to reach my goal of an early 2021 release.
So what now?
I’m going to continue developing DSAL, and I think I’ll actually make a page for it here on itch and make a proper devlog going forward. There are a few pieces I want to put together first (a logo, primarily), but I think that’s going to be the biggest step in keeping me accountable.
For DSAL itself, it’s art time. After I finish the animation sets for the player and fine tune the destruction, I’m going to work on the office worker meshes, animations, and texture variants. That’ll very likely get me through November!
Once I get the page up for the game, I’ll post a link here in case anyone wants to follow along with the development.
It’s been a fun ride, Devtober, I’ll see you next year!
Completed:
- Stationary worker BT
- Worker placeholder animations
- Property damage HUD
Up Next:
- Make an itch.io page for DSAL
- Animate the player
- Create and animate office workers