Autumn Vale

Development log for Autumn Vale - a game inspired by Harvest Moon and The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker.

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Necromancy

I’m back after an extended absence and resuming work on Autumn Vale.  "Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.”

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UE4′s editor was being a complete weeny this morning so I played around with Blender to come up with a new way of creating assets.  New rock is on the left while the two other rocks in the editor shot are just poorly deformed cubes.  New method consists of spitting out those deformed cubes as particles on the faces of a base mesh, dragging through the animation timeline to look through all the free (zero time/effort) unique rock shapes generated, shrink wrapping a group of particles I like and decimating the result to fix shrink wrap artifacts and recover some sharp features.  The three purple-background in-blender shots are a few example shapes I thought were neat that appeared by simply moving around the animation timeline.

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Pepper powered transportation.

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Bell Pepper kind of looking like apples instead. 

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A wheelbarrow was made.

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Made some props this morning. Barrels and a retaining wall.

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I’m back in UE4 after experimenting with Unity briefly.  I’m working on an ‘inner glow’ material effect for lanterns/gas lamps which is a simple fresnel shader with an alpha mask to separate the diffuse for the lantern body from the ‘glass’ which is replaced with emissive color calculated with the fresnel effect. 

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I’ve been absent for a little bit. I got back to devvin’ and discovered that I was having some trouble getting back as I had prototyped a lot of functionality with blueprints and I don’t find them particularly easy to grok. So, I’ve done a couple things today:   - Changed how items are designed so that I no longer have a unique blueprint derived from a base item blueprint for each individual item (no Carrot blueprint, Turnip blueprint, etc.) Items are now just created from an Item class and, if there’s something special about that particular item (Ham Sandwich being Food, for instance) then it uses a Food class which derives from Item.  This is a pretty basic design mistake that was resolved and wasn’t immediately obvious to me when I was lost in trying to make sense of the blueprint system. I would have done things much differently from the beginning if I was just working straight in C++. Everything is much cleaner now and my asset folder isn’t an absolute disaster.   - Replaced a lot of blueprints with equivalent C++ classes instead. I have a much easier time of understanding code at a glance than I do of trying to follow node graphs. I’m also more confident that I know how my code is interacting with other parts while I often would just throw a Hail Mary and hope for the best in the blueprint system. The attached image is an example of a chunk of a blueprint replaced with the C++ equivalent. Don’t get me wrong, the blueprint system has been fantastic for quickly wiring up behavior for the UI and hooking UI events to game code which I’ve written in C++. But, I think the problem was that I was leaning too heavily on the blueprint system, which I knew next to nothing about, and was too busy just trying to get my node soup to work to really worry about the bigger picture in properly designing things so that I wouldn’t be presented with a huge headache in the future if I wanted to make any significant change. 

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Mattock added. Blade/Pick part looks a little on the small side. No textures/materials in-game until I’m ready to finalize the models; I just need placeholders for now. 

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Quickly put together first tool asset - a basic gardening hoe!

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Hotkey bar now updates itself to match the contents of the first row of the player’s inventory.  A few display bugs were fixed with the individual slots and the way items were looked up in the inventory to display has been improved. 

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Inventory and UI behavior getting closer to how I want it to be. Items can be stacked in the inventory now; splitting the stacks needs to be worked on next.