DAY 6 - DESIGN AND PROTOTYPE PHASE
So yesterday I spent a huge chunk of the day working on this project, about 9hrs and 22min, the most I've been able to dedicate to the project in one sitting. I continued working with my flowchart, finetuning and identifying the programming logic necessary to make this game. I also spent some time researching what would be a good option for handling large amounts of text. I think the best thing I can do is use some arrays to hold my values for now.
Then I began to set-up the prototype for the game, first in Unity. The bulk of the time was spent on this. I ran into an issue in Unity that had me spend almost 4 hours trying to find a solution with none in sight. The issue at hand was the basis of the point & click system.
When the player's mouse cursor hovers over an object area, there should be some effect, followed by clicking on the object. Well, the manual's instruction on the onMouseOver function and the onPointerEnter function seems to be off, because despite following the instructions correctly, I could not get it to work. Googling the issue found a lot of people struggling FOR YEARS with the same issue, with very few fixes in sight. Some people found results, but I was unable to implement those results. There's a video I've added into my Watch Later list on YouTube that may provide the solution I'm looking for. I really need to find a better way of handling deadlocks, because they are usually timesinks for me. I think that after the first hour, if the solution was not coming up for me, I should have just bit the bullet, sat down, and spend some 20-30 min watching some videos on how to get it work. Instead, it was nearly at the end of 4 hours that I almost decided to do it, but then stopped because I had already spent waaaay to much time. I then pivoted.
I went to GameMaker Studio 2 and in less than 20 min had the basis of the point & click system up and running. I can hover over objects and they change color, I can click and it takes me to the next room. Last task I left unfinished for the evening was printing to screen some information related to an item and an enemy. That is my next task for today, and then locking down the prototype. For next week, I then begin to build the code, art and game.