DIRYOW? Day Seven -- 11 January 2017
Oof. Days 5 and 6 were rough, and I switched back and forth between five different tasks and accomplished a lot of nothing with all of them. The one good thing that came out of it is some high-level insight into how I want the story to go -- I started this project mainly to explore the game mechanics, but now the story is finally to the point where I want to tell it on its own merits, and hopefully that'll express itself in the form of an easier time writing.
I did recover and manage to put keystrokes on computer today in the form of building the RPG side of the engine -- after a good long think, I decided that Makinom was overkill for a game as simple as this (very limited stats/equipment, no procedural generation, no random enemies/NPCs) and switched Tiled and Tiled2Unity for maps and my own simple engine to move the player around and interact in them. And here it is:
spoiler alert you were a purple circle the whole time
Tiled/Tiled2Unity handle the collision more or less automatically, so except for a few stumbles on my way up the Unity learning curve, movement was simple to implement. Map loading/unloading was slightly more complicated, since I wanted it to be dynamic and asynchronous (mostly for the principle of the thing; I could probably fit the entire game in memory no problem), but AssetBundles make that possible without having to shoehorn a prototyping/testing solution into production code. The dialogue engine isn't quite finished yet, but the integration with YarnSpinner looks like it'll be painless; once that's done, all that's left is modifying its persistent data storage to include the other game settings and writing the whole thing into a file to implement game saving, and this side of the engine will be complete.