Category Archives: Dev Log – General

Working on GUI, Loot, sound effects and a Loincloth

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This week I worked on the GUI and loot, I made an inventory screen with a rudimentary paper doll of the character to figure out how this would handle. I also wanted to be able to find items in the game world and move them from and to the inventory.

Talking to one of my NPCs

I decided I wanted to make all items take up one square both for simplicity, but also because playing the “move and rotate to fit all items” game was not interesting to me. I don’t want to waste time trying to figure out how many items I can carry via a grid placement puzzle.

Making an ARPG is already complicated, why complicate things I have no interest in, right?

Moving objects from a chest to the inventory

I adjusted my paper doll slots a bit as well

Well..

I was already using two Canvases in Unity to handle the GUI in one (Overlay mode) and Hit point display, mob/NPC name display with the other (World Space Canvas), so I wanted items to be in the 3d world, but I really didn’t have an interest in scattering everything on the ground regardless of the item. So I decided to make a 3D UI element that would carry the items found in a chest or corpse for example. Now all I had to do was to use my inventory code to move things around, right?

Well no, you have to be able to Raycast on both Canvases, sort through the results and have shared space for the object if you want this to be seamless and not having to create/destroy objects all the time. I made it work, you can seamlessly move items from one type of a container to another and it’s smooth and works regardless of resolution.

So my script handles raycasting on both Canvases, sorting through the results using Lists, recognizing the item type (using Tags) and what to do with it based on that.

I added a model for the Portals, I got this off the Asset Store along with a few others which you can find here: Elements of the Environment

Going through a portal

I also added sounds for the portal and item pick-up and placement, as well as the chest and such. They are all currently placeholders, but the game becomes 50% more satisfying.

This all led me to update the Quest log window a bit as well as the main UI bar.

Sweet GUI updates on the Quest log

Then I decided to make my main character match my Script more, removed the clothing and left him with a loincloth, which I also reflected in the paper-doll.
Finally I made the loincloth into actual cloth in the game itself.

Loincloths

We are live on Greenlight

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Getting unto Steam without a publisher means going through the Greenlight process. Greenlight is a system in which players vote on games that they want to see on Steam.

You can vote for the game here (you will need a Steam account)
Every couple of weeks people from Valve go through the submission queue and approve various titles.

One of the titles I’m working on – ‘Crusoe‘ – was Greenlit in a month basically, but one of my previous titles – ‘Insection‘ – was in the queue for a year before it was Greenlit, by then the team had disbanded and we couldn’t follow through.


So my approach with Swearsoft titles is to get them onto Steam as soon as possible, get the Greenlight by updating the page as often as possible and secure a position on Steam, before I commit my full resources on a game.

Imagine spending a year or even two on a project and then waiting for Steam and the community to vote on your game for an indeterminate amount of time. I would rather work on my games than have that kind of stress.

Of course this isn’t without problems, gamers feel that they can bash games on Greenlight and that developers have to accept their role as punching bags.

They might say rude things, uninformed things or nice things, but the reality is that no one will like every game and not everyone has to.

They might say that a game is too early to put on Greenlight – as if they are the developers putting their lively hood on the line…

I can understand that they don’t know how difficult it is to make a game on it’s own, never mind make a business out of it, In my mind making sure you are going to be available on the biggest games platform is kind of important (and engaging with people that want to harm you is not).