Month: October 2021

Happy Halloween! This is the first of many animation updates. This week I have a small video of what I’ve done with the title screen. I have the daughter animated so far but there is still more that I need to do.

Next I want to add some particle effects to the background to really give the title screen motion. I have a few ideas in mind but I have to see how they look in action. Once I’m done here I need to decided if I want to start animating NPCs first or the older versions of the daughter.

Super short update but I’ll talk to you guys next week. Have a good day!

And here we are with another minor update. This week was spent mostly replacing icons I didn’t feel fit the game. I have now completed that task! Check out the video below to see all the new icons. Half the items you see are just place holders btw.

 

With those completed, I’ll be moving on to animating all the art/characters now. I’m going to be honest, this will take a while. There’s over 14 characters I have to animate and I still don’t have all the planned characters available so I won’t be fully complete once I’m done here.

I might have to skip some minor updates until I’m fully complete since most of the characters aren’t ready to be shown. Hum…we’ll see, time will tell. I have more events happening behind the scenes so maybe I’ll update with that when the times right.

Hum…..decisions, decisions.

I’m back again for another minor report. Picking up from last week, my goals were to complete the transition animation from one week to the next, redesign some icons and work on character animation. I managed to get through at least half of those goals.

First off, here is a video of the transition animation from one week to the next. (with sound!)

Most of the important events and values will change depending on the current date. For example, the seasons and year will change after the week reaches a certain threshold. Upcoming events will remove themselves from the list once their week has passed. Body related values will increase as the weeks and years go by. Since I only have to keep track of the week or year it is easy to maintain all these unrelated values.

Now that I can play through the game for one week I’m going to go back and work on all the things I’ve skipped. But before that, I’m redesigning some icon I felt didn’t fit the theme. Here is what I have so far. You can see the old icon designs here.

I’m about 40% done with the icon redesigns. Once they’re complete I’ll start animating characters as well as the title screen. Besides the animation the main focus will really be the exploration and battle system. Once that’s all done I can move on with more general game development.

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading! Lets all have a great and productive week!

 

There has been some unexpected changes the last week. Please read Moving Forward 3 – Holiday Hustle for more information. Nevertheless, the show goes on, lets go over what I got done this week.

My goal was to complete the intro this week. Well, I am partially done. There are two things that happen when a week ends in Guardian’s Guide. The first is a time transition animation from one week into the next. This is not complete yet. The next is a chart breaking down all the values that changed from one week to the next. This is complete, see below.

Well it’s not completely complete but all the values work as intended. I still need to add scripts connecting it with the rest of the game.

I intentionally focused on the chart last week because it was the most difficult to built and I was still unsure exactly how I wanted it to look and the information I wanted to include. I think I’m comfortable with what I have now. There is a small chance I might adjust it in the future but I doubt it.

For the next week I’ll attempt to get that transition animation complete along with any other detail I missed. After that I’ll work on art, character animation and fine tune the “game week” loop.

This will be a slow holiday period for updates but stick with me. I have some great things plan for the game and many, many things I haven’t shown yet. Until the next update, be well friends.

It’s the week end, so lets discuss what I’ve done so far. Last week I set out the goals of making input keys rebindable by users, recreating some icons and completing the intro portion of the game. Unfortunately, I only got 1 out of the 3 goals completed. Let me explain my pain.

So as it turns out, unity’s original input system doesn’t have the ability to (easily) allow for key rebinding. Ok, so I switched to unity’s new input system which does allow for key rebinding. Except I couldn’t get the damn thing to work properly with the framework. How frustrating to waste an entire day researching methods just to get a basic feature every modern game has. I was left with two options, continue to use unity’s new input system and struggle to put together a basic rebind system or use a separate, but well established input asset that just works out of the box.

Both keyboard and controller rebinding works flawlessly.

I chose to save time and got the asset. Finally, things just worked again and in little time I was able to get a functional input and rebind solution up and running. At this point it was already half week and I was running into other small problems as I was wrestling the input system. I realized I hadn’t put together a solution for resolution and window size. Since the entire game is in 2d at a fixed ratio of 16 by 9, any screen resolution that is not 16 by 9 will see more information I didn’t intend thanks to the 3d nature of unity’s camera.

Check out the immediate top and bottom of the game screen to see objects (the daughter’s legs on the bottom and particle effects at the top) sticking out of the intended viewable screen.

Oh boy, another problem I get to beat myself over the head about. I thought of quite a few solutions, originally I was going to force all screens without 16 by 9 resolution to be in windowed mode instead of full screen. This would have worked but I realized a player could just press Alt+Enter to go into full screen, and I was still bothered by the fact that objects were visible outside the 16 by 9 ratio. So I decided on a much more simpler approach. I just covered the gaps with all black images. With this primitive method, any resolution can be windowed or full screen and only what I intended will be visible to the player. It’s not elegant, but it works.

With that decided, I had to create the setting menu from scratch since the framework (or unity for that matter) doesn’t offer a pre-made solution out of the box. Yeah, that was fun and not time consuming at all.

Despite how simple it looks there are a lot of things going on in the background. Good news is the resolution change works quickly and smoothly.

Finally, after going back and forward testing the resolution changes I now have a working resolution control that will work on any screen offering you the best image for your screen size. As far as the other options go, I’ve tested decreasing the image quality and it didn’t do anything of worth, so I didn’t include it. There are no real 3d elements in this game so I didn’t include a lot of other options like depth of field, bloom, and POV. But I did include options to disable effects such as character animation and particle effects during exploration and battles. This should help people with weaker systems run the game better. I’ll probably add more options at some point down the line but this list should cover the most important ones at the moment.

Now that all of that is done, I can finally get back to the two goals from last week. Recreating the icons and completing the intro. What an annoying week this was. I did not like it. 1/10 week, I fart in it’s general direction.

I will have this damn intro complete next week. Believe it!